February: Incapacity Allowances

I never thought the old man would have so much snot inside him... Nor would I ever have thought that the Omacron variant would linger for more than a fortnight. Since its arrival one night when I just couldn't get warm, it has left me tired, depressed and truculent. I resent being ill, or at least unwell. It's like a slur on my character. Life is far too short to loiter in bed, even though the temptation to curl up like an embryo under the duvet has been very strong.

It was quite another matter as a child, when I would welcome every passing illness as a precious day or two off school: some legitimate quiet time alone under all my many blankets and fusty old eiderdown, and a chance to catch up on some reading or invent a few more cricket series. I was a sickly child, but a good invalid. Apart from a severe dose of measles, I didn't give my mother much to worry about; I just got on with the business of recuperation. I don't remember any medication other than rosehip syrup for tricky coughs and, if I were very good (and/or my grandparents were staying with us), a bottle of every invalid's super-strength superhero, Luke O'zade. The amber fizzy liquid came in an amber-coloured bottle, which was sometimes swaddled in amber-coloured cellophane. It tasted like it was doing you good, because glucose was a major ingredient and it wasn't quite as sweet as Fanta or Coke. I suspect it would have been equally effective and certainly a lot cheaper to have eaten instead a spoonful of sugar or two.

Actually, I wasn't much sicklier than the average child at our school. Given two thousand or so pupils in fairly close proximity, germs must have circulated ceaselessly. I never had the layer of muscle and body-fat that seemed to protect the rugby fraternity. Given the lack of nourishment we were served up in our family, the miracle is that I didn't succumb more often. There can't have been many valuable nutrients in a bowl of rehydrated chicken noodle soup.

With adulthood, I discovered nutrition and started to take responsibility for my well-being. I like to think that I'm probably healthier now than the former rugby fraternity, who've probably gone to seed and fat. A bout of flu is all that I've suffered in the last ten or fifteen years. Hence my indignation at being laid low by the virus. I had begun to think that I was inviolate or that this part of France had special properties to keep the germs far hence. Apparently not. It's in the air and doing the rounds. After many months of hardly knowing anyone among the statistics, I've now heard of all kinds of friends and acquaintances who've had a dose. Our Dutch neighbours up the road went down with it at the same time; two adults and all three children.

It's not nice, I can say that. After that initial sensation of shivering, a headache, a sore throat and a loss of appetite followed. By the second day, I re-discovered my appetite and took that as a cue to get up and get back to life. Probably my biggest mistake. Since then, I've heard the siren-calls of the invalidity bed and succumbed on a few more occasions. There are times when the thought of curling up under a warm duvet is so seductive that you'd find the strength somehow to wade through a pond of treacle to get there.

The most striking aspect of this neo-flu has been the sheer tiredness. I'm usually such a busy beaver that it has been a shock to the system to discover how little I can do. It's all that I can manage to walk the dog. Waves of exhaustion wash over me after the merest exertion; I find myself nodding off at inopportune moments and craving my bed at nine o'clock in the evening. This lack of energy hasn't been helped by a persistent cough. Coughing wears you out and saps your last reserves of energy.

The malady also underlines how repetitive the days can be. Each morning you wake up, hoping for a change in your personal weather, only to discover that you're still coughing and you're still feeling post-apocalyptic: that nasty taste in your mouth and a head that feels like you've been washed up and wrung out during a long night of fever. It's like your own protracted Groundhog Day.

One advantage, however, of feeling so enervated is the legitimacy it confers on postponement and avoidance. Being unwell is a perfect built-in excuse for not doing all those jobs that you could be doing: de-frosting the freezer compartment of the fridge; freshening up the kitchen with a lick of paint; germinating seeds to plant in the vegetable patch; cutting back the sumac before it takes over the garden; rationalising my CDs; cataloguing our films. And so on. They must wait another day. Or week. Or month.

Already into my third week of incapacity, I'm just beginning to sense a light at the end of the tunnel. At least, for all the intimations of mortality and a chastening lesson in what you are and definitely are not capable of under duress, it hasn't been life-threatening. I didn't need a vaccination and I'll have acquired home-made immunity against most future variants. I didn't take any medication and simply relied on plenty of honey, extra vitamins and regular inhalations of essential oils as prescribed by my resident apothecary, The Good Wife of Camp Street. It's certainly not like the plague that carries off the only son of Will Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway in Maggie O'Farrell's compelling novel, Hamnet. Life as a 21^st century invalid is a lot more cushy than that of a patient back in the 16^th century.

Gradually, the cough grows looser and less spasmodic, the days grow a little longer and the first daffodils underneath the Clerodendron tree appear to be imminent. Up the road, the young man from up river has been pulling out the foundations of his new house with a big yellow Komatsu. There are mounds of red clay on the plot of land. By the look of it, the family won't be plagued by all the rocks in this plot, a mere four or five hundred metres along the crest. The commune is growing, the landscape is changing. When I've got the energy, I must engage him in conversation and find out what materials he's using to construct the house. Concrete blocks, I would imagine. Or wood, perhaps. Straw bales? Hhhrrmphh! A fat load of use in the Great Scheme of Things it was to have been a pioneer. Back in the distant past when I was far too busy to be unwell.