“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.” (Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome)
One wonders, doesn’t one, why Ma and Pa Jerome should choose to call their son Jerome. Perhaps it was a big family and they’d simply run out of ideas. Anyway, jolly silly I’d look if I was called Bellew Bellew, although the device served Joseph Heller well in Catch-22.
But I digress. More than a fortnight ago I did not feel well. My grandfather said that if alcohol was invented today it would be hailed as a great break-through in medicine. Accordingly, I found a bottle of Pernod at the back of a cupboard. Short-term it was most efficacious but as I became increasingly short of breath and had chest pains when I coughed, I realised I had bronchitis. Then my glands swelled up and I added in glandular fever. Maybe lung cancer as well as bronchitis, I thought. Then I found what of remains of my brain was fogged-up, so the beginnings of dementia. This was all most worrying but would have been more worrying if my brain had been firing on all cylinders. Now I know I’ve had Covid. (My grandfather referred to any ailment as “a blast”.)