Of course I am at work, and trying not to cough on customers. I can only hope that the massive amounts of alcohol that most of them seem to have consumed will sterilise away my horrible flu germs. I have got the windows open, which is a bit chilly, but keeping me awake and hopefully blowing all of the plague bacteria away into the outside world.
This can’t possibly be an exciting entry, because mostly I have been asleep all day.
I was not expecting this, because normally when I go to bed early, I wake up tiresomely early. Then I have to fidget about for ages, bored with being awake by myself, and hoping that I will accidentally wake Mark up. Sometimes I have to fidget quite hard, coughing and sighing, before somehow I manage to disturb him and he realises that it is time for him to volunteer to make coffee.
I could always make coffee myself, but neither of us quite like this. It starts the day off on an oddly wrong note. Rituals are important, especially the ones first thing in the morning. It is jolly upsetting to have to clean your teeth after your wash instead of before.
Anyway, this was not the case today. Last night I slept and slept. Then Mark got up, and I slept some more.
I am feeling guilty about Mark, who is not very well himself. All the same, I have got all the self-obsession of the diseased, and left him to manage this on his own, so he went to the builder’s merchant and has got on with constructing our conservatory. This is coming on quite well. We might have a tropical banana plantation quite soon. He is coughing and groaning quite a lot whilst he does it, but I am too ill myself to be very sympathetic.
Also it is our wedding anniversary. We wished one another Happy Anniversary in bed this morning, and laughed, and then mostly forgot about it. It is nice being married, even when you are not very well.
I slept then, and woke up to shower. Showering is important when your internal thermometer is having an off day, and I have been lurching between feeling burning hot and drenched in sweat, to shivering, with hands and feet turned to icy, unmanageable lumps. The shower made everything blissfully even, and I stood underneath it for ages, steaming my sticky lungs clean.
I slept a bit more, and then Actual Head Boy popped round to spend the afternoon with Oliver. His father stayed for coffee and a sociable half an hour, which was rather nice. I got dressed for this, as a bit of a rehearsal for rejoining the rest of the world, but it did not last very long, and after he had gone, I collapsed back into bed again.
Of course in the end I had got to bite the bullet and get ready for work. This was not at all fun, and I swayed and shivered and gritted my teeth.
In the end it has turned out to be all right, quite surprisingly all right. It turns out that being unwell in a taxi is not really worse than being unwell in bed, apart from not being able to go to sleep. Mark is finding this even harder than me, because he worked late last night and has not been in bed all day. If we manage to finish the night without scraping a taxi over somebody’s pile of ornamental rocks, left on the edge of their lawn as a trap for taxi drivers, we will be doing well.
If I were in a prison camp in Burma in the war I would have to be at work. I will jolly well get on with it, and soon it will be over.
I haven’t taken a picture today. Oliver took one when he went for our morning run without me. Have that one.
