Self Isolation
I'm ill. Yesterday I had a sore throat, a runny nose and a cough but I was basically fine until about 10 o'clock at night when I started shivering uncontrollably. My back hurt, my buttocks hurt, my skin hurt. I felt tenderised: the cold air never heating in the house, the chill bruising. I went to bed. I started to sweat, hot and cold, the sheets wringing wet by the morning, my skin clammy as on-the-turn poultry. I didn't sleep until five and woke again at nine. I lay on the sofa beneath my dressing gown, half asleep. In the background the commentary on a Jekyll DVD murmured, Steven Moffat, moffating, moffating, moffating. It was hard to swallow and my teeth felt like plastic.
At some point in the morning I tapped "I feel as sick as a pike" into Facebook in a pathetic bid for sympathy. Two hours later it had attracted a joke about the corona virus and someone asking about the provenance of the phrase "as sick as a pike"*. So I deleted it. I never learn. Social media is not the place for finer feeling. One thing seems clear though - my friends don't much like me.
Its flu. That's what it is. Just flu. Man flu, if you like, if that makes it easier to dismiss my humourless complaints about how dreadful I feel. I complain a lot, I know. It's not cool. I'm not that easy-going and I fear its only going to get worse over time. But I don't think its Corona virus. The media is panicking about the Corona virus: every story is about it: tourism is on its uppers, airlines are crashing and burning. Even banknotes are suspicious now - in the 80's they were packed with cocaine but today it's contagion. At the moment there 3 known cases in Northern Ireland. It doesn't take much to rock the local financial infrastructure. I say at the moment. At the moment the virus isn't classed as a pandemic but already people have stopped laughing at people in face masks. Further down the line, if it goes all Spanish-flu-in-1918, I don't want to look foolish. But equally, there are three people with it in the whole of Northern Ireland. Still...
People are self-isolating, when they're not panic buying hand cleanser and toilet paper. I'm not too bothered about this as I'm pre-isolated. I never go out except to go on long, looping walks around East Belfast where I talk to no one, go near no one. Except last week I went to do a reading for the Seamus Heaney Centre and it was chockful of academics. Academics who live in each other's pockets, who love and feud and copulate freely, like a soap opera set on an allotment. The smell of seething resentment, pissy tweed and erotic yearning was palpable. These people were sticky with one another.
One of the three cases of Corona virus is someone from Queen's University. So...that's just great.
*It's from Withnail and I, of course.
At some point in the morning I tapped "I feel as sick as a pike" into Facebook in a pathetic bid for sympathy. Two hours later it had attracted a joke about the corona virus and someone asking about the provenance of the phrase "as sick as a pike"*. So I deleted it. I never learn. Social media is not the place for finer feeling. One thing seems clear though - my friends don't much like me.
Its flu. That's what it is. Just flu. Man flu, if you like, if that makes it easier to dismiss my humourless complaints about how dreadful I feel. I complain a lot, I know. It's not cool. I'm not that easy-going and I fear its only going to get worse over time. But I don't think its Corona virus. The media is panicking about the Corona virus: every story is about it: tourism is on its uppers, airlines are crashing and burning. Even banknotes are suspicious now - in the 80's they were packed with cocaine but today it's contagion. At the moment there 3 known cases in Northern Ireland. It doesn't take much to rock the local financial infrastructure. I say at the moment. At the moment the virus isn't classed as a pandemic but already people have stopped laughing at people in face masks. Further down the line, if it goes all Spanish-flu-in-1918, I don't want to look foolish. But equally, there are three people with it in the whole of Northern Ireland. Still...
People are self-isolating, when they're not panic buying hand cleanser and toilet paper. I'm not too bothered about this as I'm pre-isolated. I never go out except to go on long, looping walks around East Belfast where I talk to no one, go near no one. Except last week I went to do a reading for the Seamus Heaney Centre and it was chockful of academics. Academics who live in each other's pockets, who love and feud and copulate freely, like a soap opera set on an allotment. The smell of seething resentment, pissy tweed and erotic yearning was palpable. These people were sticky with one another.
One of the three cases of Corona virus is someone from Queen's University. So...that's just great.
*It's from Withnail and I, of course.
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