I wake up with an intense craving for rice krispies, which I think comes down to a yearning for foods with very identifiable textures now that my sense of taste has gone to the dogs. I also feel really odd for the first few hours, in a woozy, out-of-my-skull sense. I wonder if this is simply a side effect of being able to breathe properly for the first time in days. Both my nostrils are in reasonable working order, and while I’m still coughing a bit and my energy levels are prone to crash unexpectedly, I would probably have gone into work if I wasn’t still infectious.
I do a few chores and finish watching The Power of the Daleks, remembering how, as a kid, I could devote myself to a solid Saturday morning of watching one Doctor Who episode after another. Now it seems I can barely do ten minutes without checking my phone or seeing what’s happening on another tab.
While Squish is still feeling terrible, I think I’m getting to the stage where I realise my days will need a bit more purpose if they’re not going to turn into lockdown number four, without even the option of a wander in the park.
In the evening we order out for sushi, which has an enjoyable texture, but the fact I can’t taste the salmon continues to depress me. Also, in the most depressingly obvious metaphor imaginable, my watch stops. It will be another six days before normal time resumes.
Wake up at 8 this morning to the deeply distressing discovery that I can no longer tell earl grey from regular builder’s tea. All my bergamot receptors are kaput.
To cheer myself up, I watch Patrick Troughton’s first Doctor Who story, The Power of the Daleks, on BritBox. The whole thing’s missing from the archives, so they’ve done an animated reconstruction, with cartoon actors and computer generated Daleks synchronised to the original audio, plus colour and wide screen. It makes a great Sunday morning cartoon, and I’m finding the slower pace easier to handle than the more high-concept stuff that’s been developed for the streaming wars.
Squish has the canny notion of turning our bathroom into a steam room by turning the shower to its hottest setting and running it full pelt. We spread blankets over the floor, chuck cushions about and settle in–it’s not a very environmentally friendly idea but the steam does do our lungs a power of good. A single nostril service resumes and I get through 100 pages of book while Squish has a refreshing bathroom floor nap.
In the evening, I have my first zoom quiz of the entire pandemic–as with catching Covid, I’ve managed to push it back to a very late date. The competitors are a mixture of Covid positives, self-isolators and free men. We rock the general knowledge and musicals rounds, but crash and burn on the music questions–plus we miss out on several drag queen questions that provide easy points for other, queerer competitors! We come third overall, with 55 points, and so exhausted we fall asleep almost immediately afterwards
I wake before 5am for the second morning in a row, thanks partly to our cat, Dizzy, who is a great one for jumping onto your tummy, mewing, and thrusting her nose in your face until you either feed her or throw her out. Sleep is impossible thereafter, so I lie in bed and listen to my iPod until dawn breaks.
My iPod’s been indispensable to getting as much done as I have so far. Listening to energetic music takes me out of myself enough for me to commit to the necessary chores, like doing the washing up or hanging out clothes to dry. I have a theory that sooner or later, everyone encounters their happy medium of tech upgrade, after which everything else is in someway a step backwards, and the 7th generation iPod Nano is mine. It’s smaller than my smartphone, has awesome battery life and as I refuse to access music on a subscription model, the lack of wifi bothers me not at all. It does one thing and does it superlatively well.
Most importantly, it has a headphone jack that’s eminently compatible with the t-loop hooks I like to use in place of headphones. As a wearer of hearing aids, the near industry-wide decision to abolish the headphone jack is probably the most ableist thing ever to affect me personally.
After the sun rises, I shower and write up my diary while Squish dozes on. I tiptoe out to phone my Mum shortly after 7, and a DFL courier rings an hour later, waking Squish up. Masking up, I shuffle to the front door in my slippers, where I discover I get a certain kick out of yelling “I’m COVID positive, mate, I can’t sign anything!” through the glass. I think about adding “Flee for your life!” next time.
I lug the hefty parcel through to the bedroom, where we discover that Squish’s mum, Lara, has sent us a care package from Selfridges crammed full of chocolate, cupcakes, face masks and other goodies. This perks Squish up no end, and she gets up and makes us hot toddies — a scandalous thing to be drinking at 8 in the morning, but this is also the point where I realise that the anosmia has kicked in and I can’t taste or smell anything. Which is a disappointment — I was enjoying having a sense of taste for the first few days, and I’d really hoped I’d skipped that symptom. We watch a few episodes of Love, Death and Robots, by way of Saturday Morning Cartoons. It’s the animated equivalent of Black Mirror, but with greater variation in both themes and quality.
Feeling well taken care of
An Amazon guy comes along a few hours later with even more goodies — a stack of hardback thrillers and a bottle of Bollinger we decide to keep until the last night of isolation. Unfortunately he wants to see ID for the alcohol, so I have to shuffle out in slippers, clutching my passport, and I probably expose myself to the whole street whilst trying to work the front door latch hygenically with the corner of my dressing gown. In any case, bless Lara for the gifts — they cheer us both up and make it easier to be missing the big family reunion today. We have a well-lubricated video call later, when the O’Connors are in the midst of a long alfresco lunch.
I spend most of the morning lying in bed and grousing about how dreadful I feel, but after I get up and set about the washing up I start feeling perkier. It helps to discover that my particular friend Irene, who I had round the day before I went into isolation, has tested negative. She’s due to fly home to Malta on the Monday, and I was really worried I’d end up wrecking her plans. She later goes out to get us a few odds and ends from the shop, and adds in flowers, crisps and strawberries of her own accord, making our third care package of the day.
Squish seriously sets about reading all four thrillers in a day — about 1500 pages in total — and succeeds. Her reading speed approaches that of light. She proclaims Hostage, by Claire Mackintosh, to be the best of the set. By contrast, I manage a chapter of my book on Warrior Queens and then fall asleep for two hours. It’s a truly wonderful nap.
In the late afternoon, I subscribe to BritBox for something to while away the lockdown, and spend the evening watching the first episode of Thunderbirds. It looks terrific — pin sharp and full of colour — but I know I’m not the first to point out that a nuclear-powered passenger plane that will scatter radioactive debris over a wide area if it crashes and irradiate its passengers if it stays up too long should never have made it off the drawing board.
Waking up at a quarter to five, I roll over to check my phone and there it was on the NHS Track and Trace app: “Continue to self-isolate for nine more days. Your Coronavirus Test is positive.” I swear and wake Squish, my partner, who discovers she’s positive as well. And we get no more sleep that night.
In many ways, the hardest part is waiting until the time is right to phone work and family and let them know the news. It’s particularly tough on Squish, who works for Jammy Custard, a small animation company in Cardiff Bay. I’m at a school that has clear procedures to follow and where the decisions about who else, if anyone, needs to self-isolate happens out of my sight and hearing. Squish has to message her bosses directly, who read the guidelines, decide whether or not to shutter the office, and announce the decision on the company groupchat. It’s tough for her, but happily the people she’s most stressed that she might have passed it on to turn out to be double-jabbed.
We’ve also planned on visiting Squish’s parents over the next two weekends, the first of which we’ve already had to cancel since we were close contacts. So our relief is palpable when business hours arrive and everyone proves sympathetic.
We were lucky enough to self-isolate early, and that’s principally down to the Track and Trace app. It alerted us that we’d been in close contact with a confirmed case and would need to self-isolate; I used it to book a PCR test within the hour, on realising that my cough was a) new and b) continuous; and it was the first thing to tell me I was COVID positive. Without it, I might have gone blithely into work on Thursday morning.
Tea, chores and Tesco home deliveries dominate the morning. Track and trace call in the afternoon and spend a long time checking my symptoms and going through my movements all the way back to June 9th. The woman concerned either has a slow laptop or is a bad typist, and data entry takes ages. It’s further complicated by the fact that my phone connection is dodgy at first. I’m grateful for my emergency landline as well as for my working knowledge of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which I’ve never used so extensively.
Shattered after all that, Squish and I round off the day with two movies. First up was The Lovebirds, a rom-com about a likeable hipster couple thrust into a crime plot, where they subvert the genre, bicker humorously, solve the mystery and save their relationship. Just the pick-me-up we needed.
We follow up with Anna and the Apocalypse, a low-budget zombie musical which borrows extensively from Shaun of the Dead but manages to get a lot of heart and heft into its utterly daft premise. Cleverly, it takes itself seriously as both a zombie film and a musical, rather than letting the two forms sabotage each other for cheap laughs, and some of the songs are absolute bangers.
I have a headache, runny nose and cough all day, while Squish is only starting to show symptoms, but in any case, we get to bed early.
A Fool Grows Wise 