Not the best of starts

At some point between Christmas and New Year, the dreaded Coronavirus finally caught up with Commando and he, being a sharing kind of man, kindly passed it on to me. Thankfully, for all concerned, it was not nearly as bad as expected. Yes, it was worse than the cold I had a few weeks earlier, although with less snottiness, hacking, and coughing. The main feature appears to have been tiredness, a woolly head incapable of concentrating for any length of time and a few olfactory anomalies that have made eating an interesting venture.

Perhaps we were lucky to have caught the virus at such a late stage in the proceedings. Much like the H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish Flu, the COVID-19 virus and its many variants appear to be growing less and less deadly. Maybe being vaccinated meant we were not as sick as we might have been. I certainly didn’t feel anywhere near as ill as I remember being when I caught the Hong Kong Flu in 1969. There was no hallucinating. The picture rails didn’t warp and weave as if I viewed them through rippled water, and my hands didn’t shrink and grow as if I’d been eating the caterpillar’s potions like Alice in Wonderland.

That experience of the flu informed my description of Mary’s brush with the Spanish Flu in Plagued.

‘Mary opened her eyes. Her head ached. The picture rail swayed and tilted at odd angles, as if she were on a boat. It made her feel sick, so she closed her eyes again. An icy draft ruffled her hair. She was cold. Her teeth began to chatter. She turned her head slightly and opened her eyes again. The window was wide open, and the curtains billowed into the room. She raised her arm to pull the covers up. Steam rose from her skin and she looked in wonder at her pale hand. It was so large it took up the whole room. As she stared at it, it seemed to grow smaller and smaller, moving away from her on a long, thin arm. How had her arms got so long? She tried to sit up, but her head was too heavy. Her long, snake-like arm fell and she could feel the quilted counterpane beneath her tiny little fingers.’

My experience of COVID-19 has been more like a series of jumbled fever dreams, followed by a fuzzy brain and an enduring tiredness. All I have done for over a week now is laze about and read. As starts to the year go, I suppose it could have been far worse. My To Be Read pile is certainly a little smaller. My brain has been too woolly for editing my own work, though, or writing anything new. The plot of my next book is more nebulous than ever. Even this short blog post has made me tired, so I will leave you now and come back later when the fog has lifted a little more.

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