After more than two years, luck runs out
GUESS who got careless? Guess who got Covid? I’m writing to you from inside a fug of paracetamol and hot lemon drinks, from an isolation room inside my own house.
The door is firmly closed, but the window is open and I can hear a symphony of birdsong.
I can hear lions roaring from the zoo down the road and steam trains whistling in the distance on the Kingswear line.
The sun is shining over a springbright Paignton, and the flowers in my garden are bursting out of their winter sleep and washing the whole place with colour.
My chums will be playing football tonight, and running on the coast path tomorrow in celebration of the first weekly run since the clocks went forward, but they will have to do it all without me.
I can’t go anywhere for the moment, because my lateral flow test had not one, but two, little red lines on it the other day.
So here I stay until I go back down to one line again, until I stop being a danger to the rest of my family and friends. After more than two years of dodging the coronavirus bullet and getting all cocky about whether it was actually all that much of a danger at all, it slapped me across the face like the big fish in the Monty Python sketch. Take that, it said, and sent me to bed, from where I can’t infect anyone else.
I had been out, to football matches and concerts, and probably hadn’t taken as much care as I should have over masks and social distancing advice.
It’s all a lot of fuss about nothing, isn’t it? And then, whack, the fish across the face, and all my plans for the week in the spring sunshine went out of the open window.
Mrs H – whose own plans for the week have taken a bit of a drubbing thanks to me – is delivering regular square meals and cups of coffee to the door, leaving them on trays on the laundry basket and then retreating before I open the door to get them.
My thoughtful neighbour has sent me magazines, which is very kind of him.
Everything I touch is being wiped down immediately with antiseptic. I’m not fussing the dog or the cat, because it’s not really practical to give them a proper rub down with an antiseptic wipe afterwards.
I’m watching the cycling on TV, but I can’t go out on my bike right now.
I’ve been lucky with the actual virus so far, though. It has been no worse than a dose of the flu or even a thumping winter cold.
For two days I had a pounding headache, which started over my eyebrows and then gathered itself neatly over the top and down the back of my head.
I’m coughing a lot, and every now and then the fluid in my ears goes “fssss-fssss-fssss” and makes me wobble a bit if I’m standing up.
I’m awake a lot in the night with a dull pain in my lower back, but that’s about it so far.
Others have had it much worse, and I’m grateful I appear so far to have got off lightly.
I wonder how long we’re going to have to go on living with this virus in our midst.
Is it here for ever now, constantly mutating like the clever little dot it is, and working out ways to outsmart our latest vaccines?
Wear a mask and keep your distance, readers. As the doctors and scientists say, this is not over yet.
Wear a mask and keep your distance, readers. As the doctors say, this is not over yet