I’ve had this recurring fantasy over the past 16 months, since Wren was born. That maybe I’d get sick, just for a day, nothing major, just enough to spend the entire day in bed, watching feel-good movies or no-good tv.

Well, that day arrived and let me tell you something… reality doesn’t taste nearly as good as the fantasy. Reality is a shit sandwich. I caught a stomach bug on Thursday morning, courtesy of Wren, courtesy of any of the millions of microbes living on tubes and buses and playground swings and door knobs. A nasty, relentless, dirty son-of-a. And I did indeed get to lie in bed all day, watching crap TV, but crap TV is no fun when the only thing you can stomach is a handful of ice chips and your lips are chapped from dehydration and you’re so weak that you can’t even go up a flight of stairs without sounding like an emphysema patient and you constantly feel like any minute now you’re going to run for the loo. It’s shit, pun quite literally intended, is what it is.

You guys, I puked on my shoes in front of half a dozen construction workers yesterday on the way to the ATM machine to get money to pay for the babysitter that was looking after my daughter while I lay in that fantasy bed of mine.

It’s been a rough few days but I feel like I may actually be up for eating something tonight for the first time in 72 hours. Small victory. I’ll take it. If I’d been efficient, I would have come up with a nablopomo contingency plan, perhaps a couple of pre-written posts ready to publish, but as you may have noticed by my absence, there was no contingency plan. So I pulled a sickie. I pulled two sickies. And I can’t tell you how tempted I am to pull a third so instead, I give you this placemat post until I’m back to my old self.

There are so many words that could be said, so many words that need to be said. They’re boiling under the surface like a school of hungry piranhas. It’s a feeding frenzy out there and I need that water to simmer right down before I can even attempt to make any sense of what has happened today and what continues to happen, on a loop, on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the news, conversations at the local café, comments overheard on the street.

When I was 8 years old, I wrote a letter to my grandparents. I wrote without punctuation, breathless, with hardly any conjunctions, matter-of-factly sticking one sentence after another like mismatched legos.

Dear Grand-ma and Grand-pa,

HI. The 9 november 1983 I got my bulletin. I got As, Bs and one C in gym. That day my teacher hade to leave because she was going to have a baby. So we sang a song to her. But I do not remember it. In the bus me and all the girls in my classe cryd because we loved her so much. Her name was HÉLÈNE DROLET. Win we left from scool we gave her a kiss and she had a big tear in each eye. That was so sad. Well less go on to some thing ells.

I know there are many kids out there today with a big tear in each eye. And it’s to them that I want to write, it’s for them that I need more time. I wonder if that 8-year-old girl can teach me a thing or two? Will she give me the pearls, one at a time, and let me string them together until I can make sense of this madness?

I’m sitting here thinking that it’s impossible for Trump to win today’s presidential election. Not a chance. I mean, let’s face it, the guy’s a buffoon. But then, I thought the same thing about Brexit four months ago. I remember feeling shocked, absolutely stunned at the news that early morning back in June. I didn’t realise that I was living in a bubble. A London bubble, surrounded by open-minded, multicultural, non-divisive people. A beacon of light. I just assumed that the rest of England felt the same way.

For those of you old enough to remember the Superman earthquake scene, when the San Andreas Fault cracked wide open, like the teeth of an alligator, and swallowed Lois Lane and her little red car whole? That’s kind of what Brexit felt like. A giant divisive crack in the earth’s core between those who voted to remain and those who voted to leave.

I’m not a political writer. Never have been. Politics were my dad’s domain and he used to get red in the face ranting about them so perhaps that turned me off of the whole thing. Not to mention that I can read bullshit fluently, I can spot it from a thousand miles and the amount of bullshit being produced in political circles is more than I can stomach.

But I do know what it feels like to wake up with a punch in the gut. To feel like we turned the clock back on 40 years of history. I’m all for patriotism, for feeling a sense of pride in one’s country (hell, I’ll always be Canadian in my heart, I love my country) but I’m also a citizen of the world and with all the war and the terrorism and the bullying and the hate, I had hoped, perhaps idealistically, that we had learned our lessons, that we were becoming more global, that maybe we were evolving as a species. But man, some days you guys, I feel like we’re just heading right back to the dark ages.

Still, there is always hope. So good luck today, American friends. May love and kindness and compassion guide you at the polls on this historical day. I truly hope that you don’t wake up tomorrow morning feeling like you’ve been punched in the gut by a hamster-headed sexist (which is neither a loving, nor kind, nor compassionate statement but it is the least profane one that I’ve got at the moment.)

Go on, America! Do us proud.