Dear everybody,
This is just an update, to let you know how we are faring, and it will only, I’m afraid, be short.
This is because, as you might by now have learned, we have had bat flu. We are still struggling our way through the last dark haze of sickness, and I am not yet really able to string sentences together, it has taken me more than twenty minutes to write this much.
Thank you to everybody who has written or sent kind wishes, they have been much appreciated. Maybe they worked, which is why we are not all dead.
We have all had it, including Lucy the double-jabbed and Oliver the young and energetically sprightly. We had it last year, and indeed, this time was recognisably similar, except so shockingly disabling that we have all been utterly and completely floored.
Bat flu in its full joyfulness includes every kind of horror imaginable. There was vomiting and diarrhoea and stabbing kidney pain. There were headaches and joint pains so severe that we could not stand. There was the cough, which still wracks us now, and a dizziness that made standing the most impossibly nauseous adventure.
We could not get out of bed.
We nurtured one another, occasionally, at intervals, with glasses of water and headache tablets. These might have fixed the headaches if I had been able to desist from throwing them up. Mark was perhaps the best of us, and managed at times, to totter up the alley so that the dogs could empty themselves, but other than that we simply groaned and slept and hoped for death.
The poor dogs lay lovingly at our sides, you never know when somebody might need their ear to be sneezed in, and waited.
They had a long wait.
We are no longer infectious. We have all tested clear, and you can no longer catch bat-flu from loitering about in the neighbourhood of our house. We have been Officially Permitted to Resume Our Lives.
Nevertheless, we are not better yet. Like a war zone after the invader has buzzed off, the resulting carnage is going to take some clearing up.
I have been asked to be in a clinical trial for some cures.
I hope to hell I don’t get a placebo.
There won’t be more diary tomorrow, it will be another few days: writing is a jolly sight harder than it looks, but I thought I should perhaps add some explanation…
Onwards and upwards…
