Illness makes the world shrink.
And I have only had a cold, a blocked up, unlovely, can’t get my breath without coughing or blowing my nose or both., can’t sleep because I can’t breathe – cold. A common cold. Though when you have one, it feels personal. The hacking and wheezing , the lack of any kind of energy. Oh Lord, for the last two weeks I have been an even weaker vessel .
It wasn’t Covid or anything else. Or flu. It was one of those very powerful four letter words again – it was a cold.
And I crawled out like a leper with pockets full of tissues, coughed expecting to be arrested, came home with the essentials and sat – choked lying down – and watched tripe telly (plenty to chose from) in a stupor. A salt water decongestant (Sterimar) rescued my stuffed up nose, lots of lemon and honey my throat – though there is a limit to how much lemon my aged tum will take. Staying in a constant temperature is remarkably hard to achieve unless you stay in bed or indoors all day. Which has led to the mythology of working through it.
Never a heroine, I found constant temperature helped. But I have move about. I can’t just sit, bad for the body, and all it took was to be exposed to the eerily mild weather and a bus with winter heating on full blast when it was unseasonably warm outside. A frightening reverse..
I watched the news, I
felt helpless, I switched off. Out of everything I have read and listened to, I now know more but I am just as frightened. I have heard people say “I was so frightened, it cleared my head.” And I am sure this can be true but waiting and not knowing is an illness all by itself – anxiety. One of the two very young women at the door (Jehovah’s Witnesses) asked me “Do you believe in peace ? Is peace possible ?” And I was caught between history, news, belief systems, wanting to reply and not being able to speak . Maybe just as well. I made half an answer – yes but there has to be collective will for peace and somebody always makes out of war.
I wanted to say please, accept that certainties are personal – don’t try and tell me yours. The evangelical aspect of Christianity has long bothered me – but then I think of a contributor to the magnificently re assembled Summer of Soul (1969)
saying “The Pentecostal churches were where black people were free, anything you wanted to bring and let it be” and I remember that dream as something really worthwhile, even watching from the outside. And oh, that music. Trumpets of Zion …
I know how lucky I am. I have a place to live, food, warmth, can nearly pay my bills (interestingly edf is back to estimated meter readings ) and the fortunate list follows of what works and I don’t take for granted – feet, back, guts, eyes, hands, and so on. And I can read.
At school we were taught to aim for “reading with understanding” which briefly left. But that’s come back and old fashioned Covonia (late afternoon and then just before bed) has given me my second night of sleep for the first time since this all began. The remedy in the Middle East
should be so simple.
And if I don’t write more about that, it is not out of disinterest, it is out of respect. The situation is intricate as far back as you care to go, worsened by successive bad decisions by everybody involved (Britain included) since the 1920s. And two wrongs never make a right. But you can forget “wiping Hamas off the face of the earth.” Hamas is violent obsession with an idea – and you can’t kill an idea. I find it hard to believe that Hamas did not recognise that the price of this insurgency was Gaza – so they threw it under the war bus. And we watch in horror.
A man used to walk round the west end of London with two sandwich boards. I never got to the second because the first stopped me short. It read “the wages of sin is death.”
Annalog 