Sonic boom over Hundon

 My lunchtime telecon today was disturbed by a loud bang. I thought it was a door slamming, or possibly someone shooting on the hill, but it turned out to be a sonic boom. A private plane en route from Germany to Birmingham lost radio contact with air control, so two RAF Typhoons were launched with orders to intercept and bring it down if it threatened harm. They were given clearance to fly at Mach 1.6, and as their route took them over Cambridge to intercept, the sonic boom was heard across the whole area of Cambridgeshire, West Suffolk and Essex. The plane was forced to divert and land at Stansted - the routine place for highjacked aircraft, but it this case I believe it was just a radio failure. 

Work is getting more busy with more and more telecons and writing assignments as we prepare for our next clinical trial. I sometimes think it's as well I still have a job, for I'd be walking round the carpet in circles if I had nothing to do. But at a personal level, my pruritus remains as intense as ever, if not more so. I am sleeping poorly, unless I take some knockout pills, and in the day I have to keep gripping my hands to control myself from scratching. Someone has suggested that it's worse in the cold weather, and it is certainly cold enough at the moment. We have no heating in the bedrooms and the window is kept open, so I'm glad to dive under the covers. Unfortunately I still get up every hour or two from discomfort and the need to wee, so I end up shivering every couple of hours anyway just to keep everything ticking over. 

The cold is nothing to what we had as children though. I had a bed by the window, it was north facing and I remember the clouds of our steamy breath hanging in the air. The panes regularly freezing over on the inside where the condensation froze in wonderful patterns of hard crystals. If the condensation had puddled on the window-sill, it too froze to hard glass pools. I generally had a hot water bottle, but I woke in the morning cuddling a cold clammy mass of rubber. I huddled with knees to my chin, reluctant to stretch out to the icy sheets at the foot of the bed. I would pull my clothes in beside me to warm and wriggle into them under the sheets, trying all the while not to expose more than the top of my head.  I guess I'm lucky I didn't suffer from such severe pruritus in those days.