Covid's Metamorphoses.

 So, I made plans. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Hubris? Have you met, Nemesis? You too are going to be SO pally...

It's my sister's birthday on Saturday. She's having a party. We were going to fly over and attend this party. It was our reward for being so good for two years. All the NHS clapping, all the mask wearing, all of that hand washing. The tutting people without masks, the snotty posts about Anti-vaxxers, those two hour queues every time I had the vaccine. And I was happy to do it. It was my fat, smug signature on the social contract.  

"We can't go on living like this!" the lonely men of the internet crowed, "We have to get our lives back on track. We - meaning you - are turning into catastrophists, quaking in your bunkers, scared of the weather, of the Deliveroo guy, of a quick shadow on the banister." And, don't tell them, but it struck a chord with me. Because I was starting to think I'd gone a bit odd. That I'd become slightly institutionalised. Pubular dissolutions and the madness of crowds had lost their allure, where previously I had considered them tip top, just the greatest. I turned down gigs, dinner parties, company. All I could think of was the hot breath, the sticky fingers, the steamed up glasses (again, not something I'd been against, traditionally). 

So we booked plane tickets for the party. We booked tickets to see Patrick "steps out of the shower" Duffy in a French murder mystery at the Opera House*. I was due to go to a film premier. Susan was meeting a friend for dinner. But we didn't do any of that, because we got Covid. It snuck in through a broken pane of glass. Down the chimney like a sooty flock of birds. Up through the toilet like a slick, black rat, glittery claws skittering on the parquet. The fucker snuck in. 

I'm not too sick yet. Though I'm a few days behind Susan, I think, and she's sicker. I'm still just about able to complete basic tasks, so I've found my level. I'm still writing scripts - though brain fog has kicked in. I've got toothache, which is annoying, but I don't think is linked. I also have whiskey, which would have been my mother's remedy for this, and I'm thinking of her. 

Today is the day a company comes to our house and strips it bare. It's genuinely the end of a significant part of my life. Thirteen Vyne Road, Basingstoke is the Higgins Family Home. It's the base of operations. It's where the heart is. Today is the start of the process where that will no longer be the case. We're plucking that heart out. You messed it up, butterfingers.  It'll be emptied and cleaned and painted and, eventually, it will be someone else's home. Our roots are being dug up and tossed on a bonfire. It's sad. It's very sad. 

And I don't get to see my family this weekend. Nemesis is a dick. 

*The Opera House say on their website that you can get a voucher or "account refund" if you call them on the morning of the show, between 10 and 11. So we do. They don't pick up. It's not a "high-volume-of-calls" scenario, its a phone-rings-out-in-an-empty-office scenario. Eventually, at 10.45, some one lifts the receiver. The refund option is a thing of the past, it's now just a voucher, to be used in the next two years. The likelihood that the Opera House, who recently showed "Bridesmaids of Northern Ireland" to no obvious acclaim, will stage something I want to see in the next two years seems slim. Maybe "The Woman in Black" will come back. 

In fact, immediately after putting the phone down, we received an email from the Opera House, explaining that, because of Storm Eunice, none of the costumes had turned up for the play, and Patrick "Man From Atlantis" Duffy would be performing something called "Love Letters" with his co-star Linda "Fonzie's Girlfriend" Purl, and then have a Q&A session about their fascinating lives. 

Dodged a bullet there. Thanks Covid. Just this once.