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.
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.
A Fool Grows Wise 