I’ve had almost every illness

Conditions are right for hypochondria, and I’ll be inwardly engaged in it. The curse of a vivid imagination is that any random twinge can be magnified when getting really sick is on the cards, and coronavirus symptoms are suitably imprecise.

One of my grandmothers set an example. She spent years in bed, eluding all housework, though to be fair she had Parkinson’s. I remember as a small child giving her a bunch of violets. She seemed tiny and skeletal in her wheelchair, and her hand quivered violently as she grasped them.

Evading housework absolved her of all responsibility, and so she languished.

She crocheted at one point, then did absolutely nothing, my aunt recalled, even when she had three children. What a perfect escape, with romance novels at hand, or gazing at the unchanging view from her window. She was like the Victorian women who took to their chaiselongues with a permanent headache and a jar of smelling salts. What a clever way to deal with an unpleasant husband.

Previous generations had more leeway to be imaginative about their ailments since so little was scientifically known, the rest being guesswork pronounced as if authoritative. The downside was that doctors felt free to experiment. That grandmother, for example, had all her perfect teeth pulled out because some idiot thought it would help with the Parkinson’s. They put too much faith in dabblers back then. Any man in a suit was an expert.

My first steps towards hypochondria came from a fat household medical book my other grandmother used as a doorstop. It had many perfectly vile pink, brown and blue pictures of innards and ailments, and the marbled endpapers alone made me feel sick.

You name it, I’ve had it: malaria, consumption, scarlet fever, cholera, dengue fever, as well as measles, chickenpox and mumps. I worked on the rest. There were illustrations of scary, bare sick rooms, and nurses with their hair tucked under white scarves like factory workers in old Soviet magazines. They were, of course, just going to be your mother in real life, because the fat brick of a book was for families to diagnose their own illnesses and treat them. Surprisingly, many people survived despite such reference books.

Unsurprisingly, nobody was ever interested in my glaringly obvious (to me) consumptive coughs and rashes. They had hypochondria of their own, bigger and even better, and even the odd real ailment to complain of. That grandmother, too, took to her bed regularly with the blinds down, not to be disturbed.

I think about my grandfathers sometimes, and what they survived as gunners on the Somme a century ago, a worse experience than I can imagine. Then all my grandparents survived the flu pandemic that killed millions all over the world. Why them, of all people?

You’d expect that afterwards the grandfathers would want to live highly energised lives, ripe for adventure, but they seem to have settled for semiidleness as a way of life, one dabbling in farming by neglect, the other as a semi-subsistence market gardener. Maybe the war and the pandemic made them think hard about whether they could be bothered with ambition, and decide they couldn’t. They were content just to be alive, I guess.

I finally got a thermometer this week, and my temperature is perfectly normal, however often I take it. I have no cough, and no sniffle. I take the odd Panadol in case I’ve missed something, but so far I’m actually OK, which is a relief.

Languishing probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and real sickness really sucks.