The daily Covid test provides each morning’s drama. A negative result means another evening of food for the soul
An early morning email arrives. It’s from our friend, Tom, and it reads: “Negative massif, in case you’re worried!” I can’t remember when, exactly, Tom began using the French for massive as an all-purpose expression of enthusiasm – more and more, I notice, it is his word for “yes” – but I understand his desire to greet the day (and us) with a glorious affirmation that just one little pink line has appeared on his latest lateral flow test. Only moments before, in our own Covid-19 testing centre (AKA our kitchen), we received similarly joyous news. Let the trumpets sound. It seems that our beloved annual outing to hear Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican will be going ahead, after all.
Wide awake in the small hours, I sometimes picture a vast landfill site filled to the brim with only the remnants of used lateral flow tests, those bits of plastic now so integral to daily life that we cutely abbreviate them (“latty flow?” we offer, in the same casual tone that we once might have said: “cappuccino?”). It presses on my mind, this medical detritus; no one ever mentions how – if – it’s all to be recycled. But like everyone else, I cannot do without the wretched things now. Here is freedom, I think, in the moments after it becomes clear that no second pink line is going to appear. Another day of life. Lately, my response to opening the door of the cupboard where I keep my (increasingly hard to top up) stash of LFTs is Pavlovian, kicking in even if I’m only after a bag of coffee. My heart hammers. My mouth goes dry. I’m as a nervous as if I was going on a date.
