Normal Service

Normal service has been resumed.

It may not have escaped your notice that indisposition has obliged me to employ ghost writers for the past couple of nights. I was briefly anxious that I might be redundant, but they have all assured me that they have no desire to step into my literary shoes, and so they have stepped back and I have picked up my pen, or at least, my flat computer thing, again. 

I am pleased to be able to announce that I am now on the road to recovery.

Lots of people have sent very kind good wishes, which were encouraging, and maybe the Gods were listening, because I am very much better now, so thank you all very much, who knows how well these things work. If it hadn’t been for all of you I might have been dead by now.

It has been truly horrible.

I don’t think I have ever been laid so self-pityingly low.

For the last few days I have been a truly miserable creature. I have shivered and sweated and groaned and coughed. I could not get out of bed at all on Thursday, and in the end yesterday morning Mark took me to the doctor.

This involved some complicated arguing. In order to see a doctor you have got to be a high-flier in the hierarchy of illness, otherwise you get a telephone consultation for some time next week. 

Mark did not think I would last until next week, and in the end managed to convince even the receptionist, who has presumably heard it all, that fatality was imminent and likely to be both incumbent on her conscience and their insurance. Finally they graciously agreed that I could have a slot at the end of the morning surgery. 

I could not even dress myself without help.

I was hopeless in the doctor’s surgery. She asked me what was the matter, and I just burst into tears, and Mark had to tell her. 

It turned out that I had got a lung infection. Why a lung infection would make you sick and give you a headache I don’t know, but it did.

She gave me tablets to stop me being sick so that I could take other tablets. Then she gave me painkillers and paracetamol and antibiotics, and threatened that if I did not get better quickly we would think about hospital. 

That was a jolly good incentive, I can tell you.

I don’t approve of antibiotics, but to be honest, by that time, if she had prescribed sugar-coated dog poo I would have taken it. 

Mark went to the chemist. It cost an absolute fortune. This being ill is not cheap. 

I have no truck with this noble suffering malarkey. Whingeing and self pity is more my style. I took everything, and put myself back to bed, where I stayed. 

Mark was entirely heroic.

He changed disgusting pox-drenched sheets and carried me into the shower. He propped me up whilst I swallowed tablets and warmed hot pads for my neck. In between all of this he cut firewood and emptied the dogs and fed Oliver and tidied the house and went to work. 

Also heroic, although less usefully, were the dogs, who have stubbornly refused to leave my bedside the whole time. Several times I have struggled upright to reach for a glass of water, to find four anxious brown eyes fixed upon me. In fact I fell over them once or twice, trying to get out of bed, and Mark put a gate up to keep them out, but they sat on the other side of it and cried so much that he decided the risk of a broken leg was the lesser evil.

When I woke up this morning it was clear that the Crisis Had Passed, the way it does for consumptives in Victorian novels. I was still fragile and aching, but everything was going to be all right. It all felt like the bit in the Wizard Of Oz where Dorothy goes from black and white into glorious technicolour, and I stood and looked out of the window for ages. 

 By lunchtime I had managed to get up and get dressed all by myself. The lodger came to see us this afternoon, which was nice, and we sat peacefully in the sunshine in the place where one day the conservatory is going to be. There is a picture of this attached, it is coming along nicely. 

In the middle of all of this Lucy came home, as you probably know due to her helpfully creative efforts with last night’s diary. I was jolly grateful to them all, it just goes to show that nobody is indispensable.

Lucy is coughing as well, but we hope that she might just be end-of-term worn out rather than plague-ridden. She has put herself to bed early tonight, sighing with relief to be home.

I am very glad that it is over.

Things are getting very much better all the time.