At first I felt relieved that my symptoms aren’t too grim. Then I felt bad about my relief, as if I’d failed a basic solidarity duty
It started with a text that was doing the rounds from Lambeth council’s director of public health: the South African variant of Covid had been discovered in a tiny box of postcodes that included our house, and we were all encouraged to get tested. I forwarded it to a neighbour, who said: “This cuts off just before our houses. This is basically: ‘Don’t go to the supermarket down the road.’” Is it a sign of cognitive impairment that I can’t find my own house on a map? Not really: I can never do that.
Still, we had ordered tests by then. I was reasonably sure we were an early-adopter household in the matter of the pandemic. Mr Z had a meeting a year ago with someone else who had just had a meeting with Nadine Dorries, and he felt mortally unwell after that when the news broke that she had Covid. She’s been our go-to yardstick of wellbeing ever since. How do you feel? Well, a bit rough, but not like I’ve had any proxy face-to-face contact with a junior Conservative health minister.
