I am always relieved when the 12th of March has passed without incident as this blog from 2005 explains.

Today is the 11th of March .It is not the Ides of March.
In March the Ides, for some reason best known to the Romans, falls on the 15th.
My youngest daughter, Deirdre, sent me a text message this morning saying “Beware the Ides of March” .
She sent it because she knows me well, and knows this is the sort of thing that will have me running to dictionaries and Shakespeare anthologies in a positive lather of enjoyment finding out as much as possible about said Ides and everything to do with it.(As indeed I just did)

In fact I , unlike Julius Caesar , do not fear the 15th of March. The day I fear is tomorrow, the 12th of March, and thereby (as you have probably just guessed) hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, on March 12th 2001 to be precise, the same daughter Deirdre asked me to pick her up in school early and bring her out to the hospital where she had an appointment to get her dental brace checked. I duly left her out at the hospital at the appropriate time and decided to wait for her in the car and listen to the radio until she finished.
It was a sunny spring day and as I sat in the stuffy car I felt a headache coming on. Not a particularly bad one but a stinger none the less.
What amazed me then, was that my body started to panic. It was almost as if I was observing what was happening from outside myself. My heart started to pound, I came out in a cold sweat, I started to shake, to gasp for breath, all the symptoms of a panic attack , something I had experienced once before.

Fortunately while my body was having this attack my brain was still feeling calm. This told me that I was sitting in the sun, in a car with the windows up, I should get out and get some air.
I did and immediately began to calm down, and the headache started to fade.

After a while Deirdre came back and I started to drive her home.
On the way I started to tell her about my strange headache/panic attack.
“How long is it now since your Brain Haemorrhage “ she said. I started to think,” well it was about this time of the year…..”
Then I nearly had a second attack but, this time it would have been justified.
The 12th of March is the day before my birthday, not a day I would ever mistake for another.
It had been on the 12th of March 1991 when I had had the haemorrhage.

What’s more it had been at about 3.00 in the afternoon, as it had been when I had been waiting in the hospital car park.

That meant that it had been exactly 10 years ago to the year, day and hour since I had had the haemorrhage which had seen me rushed to hospital to Cork by ambulance, and, from which it had taken me about 5 years to recover completely.
Could it possibly be that some strange time clock in my body had recognised this macabre anniversary and was telling me about it?
As I said I had only once before experienced an attack like the one I had just had in the car. That had happened a few weeks after the initial haemorrhage when I had my first headache since the attack and it had been spookily similar to the one I had just had in the car.
I guessed at that time that my body , rather than my mind, was deciding that I was going to have another bleed and had gone into panic mode. On that occasion also, a walk in the fresh air had calmed me down and got rid of the headache.

It does make you wonder though . Have we got a separate body memory of past traumas? Does this body clock recognise the Gregorian calendar and British Standard Time ? Or was it all just a strange coincidence?

For my part I’m just not sure ,but, I still beware of tomorrow;
the 12th of March.