I think I might have caught Bat Flu.
I have got terrible symptoms of ghastly indigestion and a headache.
I looked these up online, and although the Chief Medical Officer does not exactly mention these in so many words, I am not convinced. It feels absolutely dreadful and although I have not called 101 or 911, or 192, whatever the healthline is, I think perhaps I should consider it if I do not recover soon.
Obviously I am on the taxi rank anyway. Since I am not coughing I do not need to worry about catching germs in my elbow, so I can drive perfectly well.
I suppose that the indigestion might conceivably entirely my own fault. I have been limiting my eating a bit over the past few days, because of being a rotund winter hibernation shape, but this morning Mark made an enormous late-breakfast-early-lunch. This was buttery scrambled eggs on toast spread with home made mayonnaise, with black olives and fresh parsley, and a handful of grated cheese melted on the top of it.
After I had eaten all of this, with no moderate waistline-consideration restraint whatsoever, I felt very disinclined to do anything active at all, and although we faffed about outside doing conservatory things I felt as though I had swallowed a housebrick, and in the end needed to go and have a refreshing snooze before we came out to work.
We occupied the intervening full-of-breakfast time quite productively, though. You can see from the picture that we were doing things with ladders. The thing was that the long bits that go down the conservatory roof were originally covered in copper coloured vinyl. When say originally, obviously I don’t mean when we bought it. I would have considered quite carefully before purchasing something as tasteless as a copper and gold conservatory. I mean that after we bought it, we covered the plastic strips with lovely shiny rose copper coloured vinyl.
The thing is that although the gold has stayed beautiful, for some tiresome reason, the copper just faded in the sunlight. It faded until it had neither shine nor copper, and I did not like it nearly so much any more.
Today it was my job to do something about it.
Mark took the plastic strips down, and I peeled the vinyl off and sprayed them with black paint instead. Mark had some of this because he uses it on car wheels, in order to defraud the MOT station into believing that we are the sort of people who look after our taxis.
I have now crossed ‘car body shop paint sprayer’ off my list of things that I might like to do when I grow up. Mark is quite good at this, and even has a qualification which would allow him to paint anything from a mini to an oil rig, but today it became abundantly clear that I was rubbish.
It is not easy to spray paint at things so that the paint all lands evenly and not in long dribbles. In fact it is so not easy that I did not manage it in the least, and it is a good job that the strips will be for ever on the roof where nobody can see them in any detail. Mark put them all back up afterwards, and you can hardly tell at all that they have been painted by a squirty incompetent.
Also although I borrowed a pair of Mark’s gloves, when I took them off my hands were nicely pink but my arms were black from the wrists to the elbows, which I rather hope scrubs off before we have got to go and get Oliver from school next week. It is not a good look. It makes me appear as though I am an otherwise revoltingly grubby sort of oik who has unexpectedly been paying careful attention to the Government’s advice about the best way of not getting Bat Flu.
Of course I might have it already.
Actually, now think about it, the indigestion has worn off.
Perhaps I won’t ring 123 after all.
