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.

 

January: Safe Delivery

My seven-week stint of solitary confinement ended on the 29^th December. Just in time to celebrate the New Year, only the three of us couldn't be fagged to stay up till midnight. Better to see out the old year by slipping off to bed, the best place in the world, for a half hour's read before sleep transported us all into 2022.

After a couple of days of worrying about whether the refugees would pass their PCR tests in Oxford and thus be able to board the ferry that night at Portsmouth, I relaxed once I heard by text that they'd arrived at Caen and got through customs. After queuing for two hours behind an endless line of British cars, they flashed their French passports and were ushered through without reference to the whole-foods and the Bombay mix from England in the boot of the car.

French roads are a doddle in comparison to those of England. Even so, I never count my chickens and so, being incurably superstitious, I didn't say a word to Daphne about the imminent return of her two missing mistresses. Nevertheless, she was there by the front door, standing expectantly for at least 20 minutes before they turned up an hour before schedule. I was preparing the evening meal and hadn't even heard the car. But Daphne had sensed that something was astir. Their intuition is extraordinary, even more finely tuned than the Good Wife's.

Once the reunion with spouse and child had settled down, we unloaded a car full of dirty clothes, Christmas presents and almost forgotten purchases from my father's flat: the mounted Swoppet cowboys and Union soldiers, for example, bought on eBay during lockdown, and a selection of signed posters in Jack Hurley's wonderful 'Rubbish Seaside' series, a sardonic pastiche of British railway posters of the inter-war years that sheds a murky light on the anti-social and dystopian delights of seaside towns. My personal favourite is Blackpool with its one-word slogan, 'Don't'. I read about him and his work in The Guardian and found that his prints were remarkably affordable, so I ordered a few because they appeal so strongly to my own grim sense of humour. The trouble is... where the hell do I put them? Our walls are already crowded with the art work of family and friends.

The three horsemen of Britains Ltd. remain in their boxes for now, unable to 'swop and swivel' until I work out what to do with them. I take them out from time to time to marvel at the detail that enthralled me as a child. The Union soldiers are now incorporated with my Indian village in a tableau vivant of Wounded Knee on the shelf above my desk, the five of them poised to massacre their enemy. It serves as a memento mori, just in case I should ever forget a key lesson of history, that the history of mankind is beastly.

The protracted absence of my housemates taught me a number of lessons. Although I got along quite well and very productively on my own, there's certainly no substitute for the company of loved-ones – even if we do disagree on which film to watch of an evening, and cooking becomes more of an event, and I don't feel able to play music all day long.

It taught me, too, that we can probably count on friends more than we can our own families. It's quite clear to me now that neither of my sisters would have sheltered a Jewish fugitive during the war. It's possible my brother might have – if you could only get hold of him. My father offered the sofa-bed in his sitting room, but there wouldn't have been much future in the arrangement had the girls failed their tests on their way south and found themselves homeless for however long it might have taken to get back home.

The fear, panic and consternation created by the very idea of a visit from the tested-but-unvaccinated was terrible to discover, and underlined how politicians and the media have combined to propagate a state of mass hysteria and mass hypnosis. Both sisters get their news and views from breakfast television and scurrilous rags like the Mail and seem immune to any kind of rational thinking. If our father died, the younger of the two suggested, I would have his death on my conscience for allowing two fully grown consenting adults to visit a fully grown consenting father-in-law and grandfather – even though she regularly accompanies him to the pub across the road for a spot of lunch. After putting in place some ludicrous protocol for the visit involving opened windows and masks, the older of the two did actually pop round to see them, embraced them both warmly and spent a happy unmasked hour or two before they hit the road for Portsmouth docks.

With all the Grade A+ serious stuff with which to concern ourselves in today's disappearing world, the British public has now got its collective knickers in a thorough twist about Boritz and his drinks parties. Yes, the man is an overgrown buffoon who personifies all that's wrong with the British class system, but in the annals of political corruption such stupidity is about as small as the ludicrous Djokovic Affair that's currently gripped the tennis world. At least Boritz is sufficiently independent of spirit to handle the current wave of the virus with a degree of common sense. And one must ask the question: if Bortiz falls on his sword, who might take over? It's not a pretty thought.

Meanwhile in Vichy France, our micro-president is continuing to piss-off the Resistance, determined to hound those he probably blames for pre-ordering (I'm told) seven doses of 'Medicated Goo' for every adult Frenchman and woman. In his comportment, he reminds me more every day of the classic neatly turned-out, bespectacled Gestapo officer, the one whom you suspect of dreaming up the most vile of tortures. Now that he's got the passe vaccinale through parliament to replace the passe sanitaire that he'd previously said would never be countenanced, I'm preparing to go deeper underground for the long haul.

Thank God for Bombay Mix. My snack of choice will build up my strength for the weeks ahead and all those jobs I've been neglecting while I've been busy editing my mother's memoirs. Jobs, schmobs! 'Teignmouth: The Fun Stops Here', in the words of Jack Hurley's poster. That's a point... I need to find some frames. And then work out where to put them (if, that is, the revenant is willing).

 

December: Suits You, Sir

For the last three weeks, I've been on my lonesome ownsome. If nothing else, it gives me the chance to finish the balsamic dressing I picked up erroneously in Lidl during the last Italian week. I wasn't wearing my glasses, so I hadn't noticed that the concoction was spiced with some kind of raspberry essence. The Good Wife, she of the hyper-sensitive nose that befits an aromatherapist, spotted it at once. Neither she nor The Daughter would let it anywhere near their delicate palates, but I don't mind it if diluted with virgin olive oil. So I feel that I'm using my time alone productively.

To continue the saga of the fallen mother-in-law, she has now been transferred to a cottage hospital in Keswick, so at least the absent women folks are allowed to visit her – every other day – but no one knows when she can return home. I'm far from confident that my kin can get back in time for Christmas.

Being a man on his own, inevitably one receives invitations from kind friends to come and stay or come and dine. Women, and particularly women of an older generation, seem to think that within days I'll be living like some hapless Dickensian character in domestic chaos with only bread and water for sustenance. My mother-in-law enquires frequently about my well-being, even conveying her thanks for allowing 'the girls' to go. I do try to be reasonable.

In truth, I'm much more comfortable with 'pink jobs' than 'blue jobs'. The house may fall down around me and my desk is a mess, but I make the bed, cook regular nourishing meals, do the washing up promptly and keep on top of the laundry. Nevertheless, I've already dined with old friends and spent a weekend away near Bergerac with newer friends, being shown around a part of the Dordogne valley that was hitherto fairly unknown to me.

Of course, I miss my co-habitants a lot, but am quite content on my own. I look upon periodic terms of solitude as a necessary part of life's rich tapestry. And anyway, how can one be truly alone when a dog and two cats depend on you for their survival? Being alone gives you a chance to 'get on' and 'catch up': two of the forces that drive me to keep my head down and stay on the treadmill of life. More importantly, perhaps, you can please yourself: follow your own rhythms and pursue your own activities without reference to anyone else.

So, the alarm goes off and I rise promptly at six ten – those ten extra minutes being a life-saver – in order to feed and water the animals, stoke the fire, soak my morning coffee in the way that my friend Winston taught me and make my hot lemon to take back to bed with Daphne. I catch up with some promos on my MP3 player while reading and/or writing my journal. Then I get up, perform my perfunctory ablutions and either have my breakfast or take the dog out for a walk or cycle ride, depending on the state of the weather. Once installed at my desk, I check the sports news and work on whatever project, musical or literary, is uppermost on my to-do list. The afternoons are generally given to dog-walking, yoga and cooking. I tend to make meals big enough for three days, so I spend less time in the kitchen and don't have to worry about spicing life with variety. I eat earlier than I do otherwise because it seems to agree more with the rigours of my digestion.

Evenings, I watch something live or recorded on the box. I've been making my way through Ken Burns' masterful 12-part history of jazz on disc for the second time, and I've watched all but one of the winter walks: half an hour of meditative commentary and stunning scenery. I retire to my bed early to read and catch up with promos once more on my MP3 player. Daphne joins me for an hour or so – until the moment when I take my glasses off. This is her cue to jump off and head for her basket. I tuck her in, close the shutter over the front door, turn the light off, wish the residents a happy and peaceful night and return to my bed and my appointment with sweet, restorative Lethe.  

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say. Solitude has its pros and cons. On one hand, I can listen to music all around the clock, including some of those more 'difficult' items by the likes of Sun Ra's Arkestra, which might otherwise induce a look or a comment (even if very rare, it has to be said, as my co-habitants are remarkably tolerant creatures, understanding that I'm easier to live with if not deprived of my balm for the soul).

On the other hand, I have too much time and opportunity to stare into the heart of darkness at the core of human existence. Joseph Conrad understood that we need 'rivets' – the kind of mindless tasks that offer an alternative to immersing oneself in this all-consuming darkness. Too much reading and contemplation makes Mark a worried boy. Increasingly, I am smelling something rotten in the state of Denmark. Looking out at the collective madness that has gripped this world, I see a perfect storm of conditions that gave rise to Nazi Germany: collective fear fuelled by media frenzy; removal of dissenting voices; measures and legislation designed to curtail hard-won civil liberties; rising inflation; the threat of financial collapse.

I received an interesting e-mail linked to the alternative health review that we subscribe to. It outlined the eight criteria to identify psychological torture at the time of the Korean War. At the risk of censure, I'll use the masculine pronoun etc. for the sake of brevity. Isolation: to deprive the victim of social support to render him dependent on authority; censure or eliminate any information contrary to that provided by authority, and force introspection; reduce any capacity for mental or physical resistance; cultivate anxiety, stress and hopelessness by flooding the victim with worrying information, and threaten even more isolation if he contemplates resistance; offer the occasional reward or incentive in return for conformity and submission; 'prove' the futility of resistance in the face of a more powerful authority; debase the victim to a level of animal survival by withholding all non-essential pleasures; reinforce submission as a habit with useless and illogical directives. Ring any bells?

I've said enough. Any more and some Google-sponsored algorithm will scan these words, spot a dissenter and take down this blog and re-write my Wikipedia page (if I only had one). Anyway, I'd better get back to hammering rivets into the rusting hull. Time to make another vat of butternut squash soup. I'll sit at the supper table with a nice steaming bowlful, while humming along to Duke Ellington's 'In My Solitude'. Suits me, for the moment. Just so long as the moment's not too long.