The metaphor in the President’s latest view about the self-perpetuating problem of the backlog has sent me into a sort of weird fever dream :

“Backlog and delay in the Family Court are not, therefore, static; like dough proofing on a baker’s shelf, they have the potential to feed on themselves and grow the longer cases are left without a final resolution.”

I’ve been imagining some some sort of sinister expanding gloop, slowly taking over…feeding off the pain of separated couples like that bubbling pink gloop in the sewers, feeding off the anger of New Yorkers in Ghostbusters, and somehow driving all the New Yorkers crazy as it grows and spread through everything, coming out of every tap…

I’ve been imagining vast soft, doughy, rounded yet sinister creatures, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man.

I’ve been pondering on the original ghostbusters, the four of them running around like headless chickens in their beaten up car, making things up as they go along, trying not to cross the streams for fear of a catastrophe, hopelessly overwhelmed by the non stop cries for help, trying to contain all the ghosts of an entire city in their run down fire station (and being actually a lot more misogynist than we’d like to remember) – and I feel like my working life is maybe some sort of strange parallel with a bad 80s movie.

Between household chores and preparations for Sunday lunch on this rarest of weekends that actually resembles a weekend, I’ve been trying subconsciously to unscramble the living metaphor that seems to have lodged itself in my head, taking up more and more space where my brain should be. In my dough-busters fever dream I’ve been trying to work out which Judge is the Keymaster, what Sigourney Weaver signifies, and how to appease Zuul – in the hope that if I can reverse the metaphor I might solve the backlog. But I can’t.

Maybe it’s just a metaphor after all. And I just need a break more than I thought.

Don’t we all?