Christ.
I suppose that I should have seen this coming, the warning signs were all there. I've had staff off ill regularly this year, and the frequency was increasing. Even the ones who don't get ill, or, at least, don't tend to phone in sick. Likewise the amount of late cancellations, someone phoning up apologetically to say someone was ill, had risen sharply over the last couple of months.
But I am by nature an optimist, and also, as a general rule, rarely ill. I am also a bloke, and therefore possessed of a pig-headed inability to stare the bleeding obvious in the face.
But it got us in the end. It could have been anyone, we'd spent a weekend in Manchester generally living it up, a friend's wedding an excuse for a couple of days bacchanalia, could have been there, could have been the restaurant, might have been the very chatty Irish woman with zero concept of personal space, though on reflection the likeliest culprit is Mrs Coastalblog's journey back (I'd had to return earlier, she was off out for an extra lunch with some friends), stuck on a train with someone coughing their lungs up, and that was probably enough to do for us. She started feeling a bit wonky, did a test, as she was due to visit her parents, and up came the stripes of doom. The day after, I started feeling ropy, too. Brilliant.
I'd forgotten what annoys me most about covid, even more than the coughing and sweating, is the brain fog and lethargy, the rendering as useless. I'm drifting ineffectually through the day. A couple of jobs and then the dire need of a sit down. A constant faint soreness round the eyes, but mostly the tiredness. Can't complain too much, it's fairly mild, I'm still functional, but Goodness it's tedious.
It also seems faintly anachronistic, Coronavirus? How very 2020. A lot's happened since then. Covid was Boris Johnson, a figure now so ludicrous that he seems to belong to some bygone age, as relevant to the modern day as Disraeli or Gladstone (though as they were substantial figures, maybe someone a bit more rubbish would be more apt, Lord North?), it was the endless sunshine of the first lockdown, as opposed to the fitful, stop-start summers of the last few years, it was everyone losing their minds over Captain Tom, not his daughter being found out to be a massive grifting wrong 'un. In short, it was a lot of things that feel like they belong to a different world. So, feeling slightly ludicrous at having such a passe illness (might as well have mumps, or quinsy) I checked up, and Lord if we aren't actually in the middle of a bit of a wave, or rather, at the end of one (hopefully). Cases rose steadily through the summer, in part because the Euros meant there was a lot of mixing, in part because everyone forgets to vaccinate now (there was a spring booster, did you get it? No, me neither, now look what's happened).
It's hard to keep track of covid cases now, as, unless you have to, nobody tests. Also, I suspect, we are collectively in the middle of an act of great forgetting, the whole thing an increasingly distant, slightly mad memory. But there's one metric which it is still relatively easy to track which, sadly, is deaths. I went and looked at the Government's Health Dashboard which does indeed show deaths climbing from May. For context, it also shows that there were far higher peaks in January just gone and October of last year, which I think is probably the point I'm trying to make, I didn't catch it at that point (well, I was a bit ropy in January, but that could have been anything) so it didn't occur to me that it was still lurking. Indeed if Mrs Coastalblog hadn't tested, I'd probably be sat here now with a mystery illness resolutely not thinking it's Covid.
This, I think, is understandable. The first wave was scary, it was mortuaries being overwhelmed, "let the bodies pile high in their thousands", keeping clear of crowds, the police cracking down on walkers, once out of the house per day. It was a profound global experience the full ramifications of which are still playing out. Quite nice to try and forget the whole thing, dismiss it, repeat the antra "well we've just got to get on with our lives".
Which we do, and must, and if there's a point to any of this it is this. Crack on, live your life. But fr God's sake don't forget to get vaccinated.
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