We toss and turn in the pressing blackness and wonder: what if?

THERE is a special quality to the early morning light in the south of France – long known by artists who’ve captured its lustre in ways both successful and unsuccessful.

Even seen from the almost floor length windows of a hospital room after a restless night, its strange sheen and shimmer is still mesmerising.

Perhaps it’s the foreign ritual of the shutters opening and the hit of sun already powerful, even though the clock on the wall says 7am as it did this morning as I enjoyed first light.

Or perhaps it’s the promise of the unknown; for such light is rarely seen, unless on holiday, where for far too brief a time it touches pale bodies; shiveringly delightful in its strange unfamiliarity.

It may be some time before most of you will thrill to the feel of tiles or wood again as you slip from a bed dressed only in a single sheet, knowing that, almost without fail, the sun will beam on your upturned face.

If rain comes it will be fast and tropical – a novelty not a daily expected event of depressing grimness laughingly called summer.

Perhaps the sea can be glimpsed throwing back diamond sparkles, softly swoosh swooshing as it curls up the beach, inviting “come now, come now”.

Maybe you can smell its iodine tang mixed with other tantalising scents not quite grasped, but known in the corners of the mind from past lives, past ancestors.

Even those of us who live here never cease to thrill to the pulse of a French summer; watching and waiting for it in each unfolding bud and new leaf.

But after almost three months in this place, I can only use memory as my guide to my own garden and its progression.

My awakening these mornings comes with a rap on the door followed by an immediate entry and a painfully hearty “bonjour Madame Cook”.

The temperature taking comes next, followed by the nurse, who click clacks my various pills into their container.

Sometimes I’m yanked up the bed from my crumpled night time slide or I wiggle myself to its side as an aide helps me stand, holding my crutch.

In those first hesitant steps towards the bathroom from which I can plot my day – stable or unstable – and, of course the treacherous breathing.

Breakfast follows and later I’m washed and hair brushed. I cannot look straight on in the mirror for fear of seeing my parting grow yet wider as my hair further breaks off. Stress and medication, they tell me.

We’ve grown accustomed to each other now, the aides and I. I no longer see them – some of them – as spiteful, malevolent, cold eyed beings who care nought for me.

Instead, I see them as they are – tired, overworked individuals burdened by their own problems but with one aim, to get their patients mobile again. It is their job and my purpose.

Their firmness comes from knowledge; their abruptness from time pressing. And they glimpse me as I am, on the good days – someone more than a querulous creature frightened of everything… and fearful.

They see and genuinely praise my attempts at moving forward, literally, and accept as real, not caprice, the days when heat and lungs frustrate my best intentions.

Ah, the heat. Few days have been below the mid-20s.

Often the temps hover between 29 and 31 and now we face the horrifying prospect of at least three days at 39.

I’m trying hard to keep calm, for I also face several examinations, including a head scan, in different hospitals or clinics during the worst of this heatwave.

It is not just the possible outcome that keeps sleep from me these lonely nights but the knowledge that stress, heatwave and mask, will leave me gasping for breath as any flipped fish on the river bank.

Stop thinking. Stop thinking. This is my new mantra. It isn’t working.

How many of us, I wonder, are there, lying in hospital beds repeating the same words as night-time comes creeping in throwing all into shadows which threaten and worry?

How many of us lying in the pressing blackness, skittering back and forth over our lives; the sweetness and the regrets we claim never to waste time on?

How many different turns do we take and wonder “what if?”

Far, far more than there were before the start of the pandemic, that we can be sure. Oh God, put that to one side for now.

And so, the night turns and nothing shoos away the worry spiders as they scuttle round and round in the nightly dance. And we try hard to sleep, turning and squirming even as eyes grit over. And rarely do as the hours grind by.

Then, at the bottom of the blind, a frill of light grows brighter and new fresh air fluffs the muslin curtains.

With the controller to all, I raise the electric shutter and bit by bit that clear, cleansing southern French light brings in the new day.

I look at the clock. It is 7am and for a while at least all worries hide from its purity.