There’s a silver lining to being ill

IT WAS a great plan. I decided to take a ‘holiday’ at home last week, to have clear time to work hard on my new book.

With no column to write, I’d rise early, write well and achieve about 6,000 words.

What happened? I fell ill, spent the week in bed, wrote nothing at all.

As I lay there, I reflected how the past rolls with us, always, and can’t be shaken off.

As a baby, in what was then the coldest winter of the century — 1946/7 — I contracted bronchitis and worried my poor parents sick, coughing out my lungs in a room warmed night and day by a smoky coal fire.

That affliction has been with me ever since; it hospitalised me just before the millennium and pops up every so often to make me feel rough.

But here’s good news! I’m a great believer in silver linings and found some, despite the awful pain in my head every time I cough.

First, when my husband rang the GP at 8.30am, he was amazed to be offered an appointment that morning. How lucky we are to live outside the city. The new young GP was lovely; she happily dispensed antibiotics and steroids and sent me on my way without asking me (as they usually do) how much alcohol I drink each week…

Then, forced to stay in bed, I found myself thinking so creatively about my new book it was more productive than had I been writing it. I scribbled notes, realised two chapters had to be switched, grew excited, looked out of the window, ‘saw’ ideas in the view, watched a buzzard, felt strangely happy.

And what about the reading time? I caught up with two spiritual writers new to me, a Frenchman called Christian Bobin and an Englishman (see today’s quotation), Ian Adams. Such a delight. I polished off another fat novel by the magnificent Dorothy Whipple and a thriller by Nicci French.

I slept a lot, cuddled our new little dog — and accepted that sometimes illness is a necessary way of making you stop.