I was Paddy Last to get Covid but get it I did... as soon as my holiday began

Ipresume the Germans have a word for ‘I told you so’, and this is probably as good a time as any to learn it. Just before I hightailed it from this page for a few weeks’ holidays, I idly claimed that I reckoned I might be immune to Covid since, although it had darkened my doors many times, I had yet to succumb. Needless to say, no sooner had the ink dried on my bullish boast than I caught the virus — with the result that I spent the first few days of my precious annual leave on holiday in my bedroom.

Coming so late to the Covid party, I appreciate that there is no longer much currency in the whole My Covid Story story — but since it’s the first time I’ve had one to call my own, you’ll just have to put up with it. Besides, I’m fairly sure I caught it from a trans woman at a gig in the Bernard Shaw which I need to commit to paper as probably the most 21st century sentence I’ve ever written.

She was dancing, you see, really throwing herself around the floor, and her nipple slipped its moorings without her noticing and I pointed it out to her so she wouldn’t be mortified and as a result she appropriated me as her new best friend and bought me baby Guinness and between the jigs and the reels — quite literally, in this case — I probably had closer physical contact with her than I’ve had with any human being apart from my children for the guts of three years. In the taxi home, The Boy observed that my new bestie had been very hoarse. Three days later the throat was scalded off me and that was that.

My first few days in splendid isolation weren’t too bad, since they fell over the tail end of the last heatwave and I spent them on my sun lounger at the end of my garden.

As the Official Cook, Washer, Fetcher and Carrier on the three previous occasions that Covid has come calling to our house, there was obviously a high chance that I would starve to death once my own time of abject helplessness arrived, but after an alarming offering of smoked salmon and half a jar of beetroot the first day, we settled on a system where people would leave bits of salads on the patio table and I would assemble my own meals while they went about their business.

When the weather changed, it became more challenging. The sore throat had morphed into a mild cold with a level of tiredness I don’t normally experience with colds but the real hardship was the boredom. Confined to my bedroom for three days, I watched a lot of television, ordered my first Chinese takeaway in a decade (the whole starving to death thing), booked a holiday in Shetland (which I obviously cancelled as soon as quarantine ended and sanity returned), made a blouse and two hairbands and spent several hours staring at myself in the mirror while I tried to decide if I’m a hairband sort of person.

Needless to say, the hairband experiment was a gateway to several other hair styles. I fashioned a high bun for the first time since I was in school. I curled my hair with three different types of tongs. I painted my toenails three times. I worried my phone would think I was dead, since my usually robust daily tally of steps suddenly dwindled to nothing. At one point, I considered leaving it outside my door so somebody could take it for a walk, just to run up a few steps on my behalf, but that way lies madness and the presence of Sumburgh Airport on Shetland in the weather app on the phone was already evidence enough of that for one pandemic.

I have some free weights in my bedroom but they were no substitution for generally flinging myself around the place. After seven days of tedium, officially sanctioned by the HSE to leave my fever pit (in spite of — and I’ve heard this from everybody this time round — two clear lines still showing up on antigen tests for many days afterwards), I took my heavy kettle bell from the garden shed and on the second swing, completely crocked my back. I don’t know whether it was the Covid or the rustiness, but it meant that my phone wasn’t so much shocked by my inexplicable resurrection as eased gingerly into it.

As to the rest of me, I am brimming with antibodies, ready to face the world again. Albeit in a disappointingly non-bulletproof, officially cough-softened sort of way.