My Saturday

Michaelrosen

Post-covid, children’s author Michael Rosen is enjoying life at home

The children’s author and poet, 74, who spent three months in hospital with Covid-19, is relishing being back at home where he watches football, writes and spends time with his family

8.30am I start on my postcovid routine of medication.

I’ve virtually lost all the hearing in my left ear, so one of the first things I do is clip my hearing aid on. I was in intensive care for 48 days – it started like flu and then I got increasingly breathless. A GP friend said we had to go to A&E. When you’re in hospital that long, coming home is like a liberation. 9am We sit on our balcony at the front of our house [in north London], where my wife Emmalouise [a radio producer] has planted herbs, then I have breakfast – oats, grape nuts, sultanas, cranberries, raspberries and blueberries with water, and lemon tea. 10am I check the football gossip on the BBC website. I’ve been watching all the lockdown football – Arsenal winning the FA Cup was a moment of complete joy. 11am I’m writing up all my experiences: how I was before, the long period in hospital, and then coming home. Being with the family, Emma-louise and our daughters, Emile, 15, and Elsie, 19, is very important to me. Every day they were ringing the hospital because I could have gone at any moment. The doctors tried to bring me round by playing my favourite music, The Rolling Stones and Talking Heads. 1pm Lunch could be leftovers from a takeaway from Midori, a Japanese restaurant in Muswell Hill, which does incredible dumplings and sushi. 3pm Energy hasn’t been the problem, but the sight in my left eye is like looking through a steamed-over mirror. I try to walk every day.

I might go to W Martyn in Muswell Hill, a lovely place that sells dried fruit, exotic chocolates and roasts coffee. 7pm I often have lentil and tomato soup for dinner, with a poppy-seed bagel, although I had a tracheostomy, so have to be careful I don’t get things stuck in my throat. Then I might do more writing. I have a series of books with the illustrator Tony Ross, and since I’ve come home, I’ve written a new one for it, Rigatoni the Pasta Cat. 8pm We might watch a film. In the hospital there were no films, so in a way, it feels new. Midnight I do little mini stretches. And if you just concentrate on that, you find you’re asleep before you know it.

Macbeth United by Michael Rosen is out on Thursday (Scholastic, £6.99)

Michael and his wife Emma-louise

Talking Heads in Amsterdam in 1976