There is something wonderful about the moment that your body insists that you are ill and everything has to stop. Particularly in our connected world where you can never switch off. Suddenly, and wonderfully, your body simply presses “pause” on everything external.
I cannot read emails. I cannot answer the phone. I simply lie in bed and sleep.
You return to a strangely comforting child-like world.. Even the simpIe act of having your temperature taken has its joys. I went to a boarding school and reliably hated almost my entire time there. So the Fahrenheit numbers on a thermometer are strangely evocative. 98.4F – Well enough to go back to school. 99F – sufficiently ill to briefly stay in bed and miss lessons. 100F – You are either in the sickbay, or, if you’re lucky enough to get ill while on holiday, you can stay at home. The numbers in centigrade don’t have the same resonance. I have only just checked that the 38.6 which I reached overnight was 101.5 in old money. I might have paid more attention if I had known it was that high. No wonder I was floating with the fairies.
My attempt to “cease to exist” lasted until about 4pm – when I forced myself out of bed to speak to Nicky Caine, our long-suffering bookkeeper on Facetime, so that we could pay the wages and other bills. Sympathy for me having the plague might be short-lived if no-one got paid! Nicky lives in London – the supposed epicentre of the outbreak in Britain. We have been working at a distance for several weeks. I had assumed that this was protecting us from her nasty London viruses. It would seem that the reverse is true, and we were protecting Nicky from us!
The cough seems to have stopped (not that I had much in the first place). The fever persists. If I didn’t suspect otherwise, I would say I have flu.
"Music changes when people hear it."
