Bloblomov

I've been ill. Sickness in the time of Covid is a worrying, irksome thing. My malaise contained none of the famous symptoms of that disease - though just about any human experience can now be named an outlying indicator of the Corona virus. Broken femur? Covid. Prickly heat "downstairs"? Covid. Strange sense of well-being about your fellow man? Deffo Covid, freaky, freaky Covid. 

This was a journey. I ordered a steak sandwich for lunch at a restaurant I shan't be returning to, and by midnight I was enacting every euphemism in Barry Humphries' "Vomitomicon". I was positively Vesuvian at either end. It was like fireworks night, though you wouldn't be standing around holding a warming mug of tomato soup and saying "ooh" - you would be running, screaming from the depth charges, under a hale of warm, foul-smelling oomskah. Rather more like being in the Somme than waving a couple of damp sparklers down the park. I stayed up till five, head down the toilet, then sloped off to a sweaty bed and dreamless sleep. Susan had been working that night. She came in to find the death of Thomas Chatterton enacted on the ringing sheets. She wisely slept in the spare room. 

The next day I was exhausted and couldn't eat. My stomach was making alarming noises. I was weaker than a kitten, and I've wrestled kittens for money and won, so I know of what I speak. I was feverish and clammy, like a sweaty Ginsters under a service station light-bulb. 

The day after that, my stomach was swollen and it felt like I'd swallowed broken glass. I began to imagine all manner of ulcers and tumours, my stomach lining eaten away by an acid green hungry, hungry caterpillar. I could feel it, chomping away. I would be shitting a magnificent butterfly. The pain felt incredibly unearned. 

The next day I was fine. Which was just as well as I had to be up to attend an anniversary mass, in the country. It was the tenth anniversary of Kelly's death. I drove up with Biddy, Kelly's sister, and had lunch with her parents, but I wasn't my usual effervescent self. 

However, the following 24 hours was all about nausea and a big headache, just behind and beneath my right ear. It was the 12th and Susan was in England visiting her parents, so I stumbled out to the shops in search of more Lucozade, stepping over drunken, red-faced bandsmen, sleeping off their Buckfast in shop doorways, all the way into Ballyhackamore. I didn't mind. I didn't hear a peep out of any of them the whole of the twelfth. There wasn't even that much litter. More like this please. I thought I was going to faint in M&S, and hung around the freezers for a while, clinging to chops until I felt fit to leave. 

Yesterday, the headache was gone, I was still tired, and slightly feverish, but well enough to do some admin and a series of illustrations for an American magazine. 

Today I am mostly well. Well enough not to cancel my flight tomorrow. I'm going to Basingstoke to see my mum for the first time in two years, and I'm confident that whatever I had is not catching. I'm also trepidatious. She wasn't in great shape two years ago: she was just out of hospital following a hip operation and straining hard to use her walker to get about the house. Another break, on the other hip happened soon after, and then came Covid and the Lockdown, and she got shut away, and collapsed into herself. At some point she stopped watching telly. Then she stopped moving. Eating is touch and go. Seeing her on Zoom last Christmas was astonishing - she was a different person. 

She's getting care several times a day. She has her "staff". And the rest of the family are always down, especially Barry who still lives close by (in swanky Sherfield-on-Loddon, donchaknow) and does lots of the necessary stuff. 

I was terrified I'd succumbed to Covid and would have to cancel - another way to disappoint my mum after a lifetime of disappointments. But I'm fitter. I'm better. I went shopping for "fun" shirts today (from the M&S Autograph collection: I look like Bryan Ferry at a barbecue). I shall see her tomorrow. There will be tears. There will hopefully be laughter. There will be things to do.