Pinch and a punch for the first of the month, I say, tapping Squish lightly on the arm. We lie in for a while watching Love, Death and Robots, an anthology of animated sci-fi shorts which gives us a lot to chew over. Broadly, we hate the photo-realistic shooting ones, which are far too much like videogame trailers–some of the others flaunt their adult animation by using nudity and sexual violence for mere shock value–but there are some real gems here, and some beautiful pieces of animation, and it’s interesting to recognise adaptations of short stories by sci-fi luminaries like Alistair Reynolds, J.G. Ballard and Peter F. Hamilton.
Not much else happens. I type up all the books I’ve read this June, for a long-interrupted blog series, and find great pleasure in the way my fingers rattle across the keys. Since I’ve updated my laptop, I’ve realised that a fair amount of my low writing productivity over the past months can be blamed on sticky shift keys and the general lack of pleasure associated with my old keyboard. All of these blogs have been written up from my handwritten diary entries, which is an enjoyably low-effort manual exercise, and gives me a certain degree of pride in my rudimentary touch-typing skill set.
It being a hot day, I sit out in the sunshine and doodle manicules in the margin of The Anatomy of Melancholy wherever I find an interesting passage–later I sit in and watch the tennis. I try to make a meeting on Microsoft Teams for form tutors at my new school who will teaching Year 7 from September–how exciting is that going to be, having my own tutor group–but I don’t find out what time it is due to differences in the Teams set-up between their email and mine. I come in at the end after everyone’s left and have a quick chat with the Head of Transition, who is very welcoming and understanding. Covid’s played havoc with my plans to visit the school and meet the department, but there’s hope I can squeeze a visit in this Friday, which is an inset day at my regular school.
By the sixth day of self-isolation, most of my symptoms have cleared up. Occasional coughs and sneezes are the worst of it–and sometimes I can cough so hard it makes my head hurt. But I feel I’m pretty much back to full power, and some faint sense of tast may even be returning, to judge by the tingling on the right hand side of my tongue.
It’s rougher on Squish, who is still struggling with the gastric aspect of the Delta variant, something which has happily passed me by. She manages a staggered return to work today, taking a little break between projects. With my job there’s nothing I can do from home, so I lounge about playing a bit of Metroid in between frantic two-player bouts of Doctor Mario, reading Simon Armitage’s translation of Pearl to round off the month’s books, and watching the first episode of Doctor Who: The Moonbase, with Patrick Troughton. This is an animated version of a missing episode, as with The Power of the Daleks, but I really like this style: it’s claustrophobic, shadowy and captures Troughton’s incredible range of facial expression well. It’s enough to make one regret that episodes 2 and 4 survive as live action.
There’s someone at the door while Squish is in the middle of a meeting–it turns out to be her mum, Lara, popping down after a visit to Squish’s grandparents to drop off another set of hardbacks, the silliest and most enticing of which is Her Majesty the Queen Investigates: The Windsor Knot. It’ll have to do pretty well to better Alan Bennett’s hilarious novella, The Uncommon Reader, but I’ll admit to a soft spot for royal family fan fiction.
It’s a flying visit from Lara–she asks if there’s anything she can get us, but I’ve already asked a friend if he can bring us a loaf, so we’re pretty good on that front. Nontheless, she turns up half an hour later with fancy choux buns, piled high with cream and fruit–and I can almost taste mine…
I wake up from various anxiety dreams where I’m wandering around school and breathing on people to the familiar four walls of quarantine. The fear of accidentally giving a bunch of people this virus can be quite paralysing and I’m a bit worried how fast I’m going to adapt to going out into the world again, given how hard I’ve found it to move out of a lockdown mindset before.
A Tesco order arrives, meaning I finally get to eat the bowl of rice krispies I’ve been craving since yesterday, and it certainly brings an interesting texture to the feelingless desert that’s my mouth right now.
I manage to hammer out a review of a poetry collection, but it’s the kind of day when I’m struggling to settle into things. Squish finds out that Track and Trace has been in touch with her office and advised them all to self-isolate until the 3rd. She feels rotten about this, especially since Track and Trace have been dragging their feet and she was hoping they wouldn’t have to shut the office. All her colleagues are getting PCR tests, and we’re really hoping they all come out negative. Squish is scared they will think the worse of her for it; I told her that they understand it’s just one of those things that happens in a pandemic, but she was inconsolable for a little while.
Today’s distraction has been Dr Mario, an ancient 16-bit puzzle game. I bought a mini-SNES a while back for a bit of retro gaming, and discovered you can download a program that hacks it and will let you insert the ROM from any old SNES game, downloadable for free on the internet. It’s a simple game about lining up coloured pills to wipe out cartoon vriuses, but the difficulty is flexible and our competition to finish first can be fierce. Plus, playing it with Covid gives the whole thing a pleasant sense of irony!
Battling coronavirus the old-fashioned way
The Game Boy Advance was my favourite console as a kid, and as with the iPod nano, I’m so comfortable with low-tech 16 bit games and pixel art that I rarely see the appeal of polygons and first person shooters. Sometimes I get so involved that I won’t stop even when I’m not enjoying it any more, and I’ve had to take measures to cut down on my gaming hours in lockdown. Dr Mario, however, hits the spot precisely. It’s just lovely to play a two-player game that we’re both reasonable good at and can get a bit competitive about.
I finish my book, rattle out a diary entry and blog in the evening, which gives a sense of acheivement to a diffuse sort of a day. We watch the next episode of the Harley Quinn TV series, which is punky and good fun–a bit bloodsoaked, but it doesn’t feel as unnecessary in the adult cartoon as it does in the Birds of Prey movie.
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.
A Fool Grows Wise 