Sweating over swab

It’s a fact that whenever anything good or bad or merely interesting happens to me the writer in me thinks: “Well, at least I’ll be able to write about this sometime.” In other words, nothing is ever wasted; in further words, almost as soon as the bad or good or interesting thing has happened I’m trying to decide where the line in the poem I’ll be writing about it might end and where the new verse might start.

So the other week my wife and I went for a Covid-19 test, simply because somebody we knew had got it and we wanted to make sure we were OK. To start with, I thought we’d send off for a couple of kits and get it done at home but then the writer in me said I should go and experience it. I went online and booked a test for that afternoon in a car park in Barnsley. I asked somebody who’d had it done what it was like and he said it was “unpleasant but not painful”, which is a bit like when a doctor says “this might be a little uncomfortable” and you know it’s going to hurt like flipping heck.

It was during that very hot spell we had and when thousands of other people were stupidly flocking to beaches to spread the disease further we were driving to a car park with the windows up. The scene was odd, almost dystopian. The car park was almost empty and there were just two cars ahead of us in the queue. Under a marquee, two soldiers in camouflage waited and when it was our turn they beckoned us in. A soldier, a woman in a mask and with her hair tied back, held up a piece of laminated paper with a number on it that I had to ring. This was the oddest part of the whole process in a way, ringing a person who was standing just a couple of yards away. I rang and she answered. We exchanged pleasantries, weirdly, about the weather. Then she held up two testing kits and told us what to do, and then we had to wind the back window down and she dropped them in the car.

We then drove to an even more deserted part of the deserted car park and did the tests, which involved

(there’s no delicate way to say this) sticking a swab into your throat so that you could tickle your tonsils and then sticking the same swab up your nose. It felt like a very odd thing to be doing in a car park on a hot Thursday afternoon. As the man said, unpleasant but not painful. The main thing was that I wanted to get it right because I didn’t want to have to do it again.

Then the hardest bit for me was breaking the stick of the swab and putting it in the plastic tube; it took me ages and the sweat dripped off my nose and I was careful not to let it drip into the tube. Even as I was trying to break the stick I thought: this’ll be good for a poem. Or a column.

Oh, and you’ll be pleased to hear (as we were) that our tests came back negative!

the years. Sittenfeld is a determined, rather than lively writer. Some of what she has to say about politics and feminism is interesting, but it’s a strangely humourless life she presents and there is a sorry absence of irony.

The novel is on Hillary’s side. I just wish there was more interest – more fun – in the life Sittenfeld has concocted for her.

Reading James Naughtie’s recent account of meetings with Hillary Clinton made her seem not only intelligent (as we’ve always been told she is) but rather more interesting than the common perception of her. Sittenfeld gives us nothing that isn’t in that public perception.

Sad to say, the occasional moments when Bill re-enters the narrative are quite welcome.

But the truth surely is that it was marriage to Bill that gave drama to Hillary’s life. Which is why a biography has more to offer than this dull exercise in make-believe.