At the end of days, my sanity returned to me...

On the fourth day, the electricity came back - yay! Fever is gone - hurrah! (I still feel very weak). Problems with documents, though, are interminable.

One evening, we used up the juice in the laptop watching The Man From La Mancha, a version of the classic story Don Quixote, about a man for whom reality becomes too much and he enters a fantasy world of his own making where he is Lord Don Quixote, chivalrous knight and formidable foe of evil. Managing to be both hilarious and deeply touching from one moment to the next, I loved it. I also learnt after all these years where the expression "tilting at windmills" comes from. The film ultimately asks the question - is it more insane to see the world as it really is, or as it ought to be? Who is the madman - the one who resigns himself to what is, or the one who lives in an alternative reality of his own making?

The vast bulk of the stories that man tells have their origin in man's knowledge that something better ought to be. We tell stories about the fight between good and evil, about heroes who bravely stand against unending evil and about final and ultimate battles where every wrong is at last put right. Every story is different, and has its own twist - but each story has familiar themes rising to the surface again and again. Why do we do this? Is it not because, deep down, we know?