Down but not quite out

7th January 2024

While no doubt some were nursing the aftereffects of a late and heavy night seeing in the new year, I was nursing my own particular monkey, starting 2024 as I had finished 2023: in bed with flu.

Stephen, bless him, continued to shoulder the burden of looking after everything, a job made somewhat more difficult as he was battling through a heavy cold and bad cough of his own. He wasn’t well enough for work on Tuesday, and help did appear when Maddalena offered to do some shopping for us. After a moment’s reluctance Stephen accepted the kindness and sent a list of basics. She and Marco appeared with the messages later in the morning, having walked down the road with the bags, and passed a bit of time of the day with our hero when he went out to collect them, though the main news was still a roll call of people who had, like me, succumbed.

As for me, I managed to rally enough interest to eat something after three days on a less than subsistence diet. I wouldn’t call what I ate bland, but a bowl of Rice Krispies with milk and sugar for lunch and a ham sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off for dinner was never going to set the taste buds reeling.

And that more or less set the pattern for the week: me in bed, Stephen battling on and trying to tempt me to eat a bit more every day, sometimes even with a bit of flavour. After another day at home on Wednesday he ventured to the factory on Thursday morning, there being some business with boots that needed his attention. After working from home in the afternoon he was back for more of the same on Friday morning, and even managed to fit in a visit to the Post Office to pay for this year’s tessera sanitaria (something, on the strength of the start of the year, that might be fairly necessary) and get in a spot of shopping in the afternoon for a few things for the weekend.

One positive on Friday, if you will forgive me mentioning something that side of life, was that I took the opportunity when Stephen was about to venture into the shower. That it exhausted me for the rest of the day was not really a surprise, but at least afterwards I could slump in bed in fresh pyjamas and without my hair slapped to my head like a helmet.

He was out and about again yesterday, partly prompted by one or two chores that needed seeing to and partly by a problem with the cistern in the downstairs washroom which appeared to be leaking. He sort of fixed it, and then tried phoning Andrea the plumber, but he wasn’t answering. A call to Marco and Maddalena to check he had the right number reminded him that it was Epifania, and so he wouldn’t be working. In the meantime he had gone into the village to collect this year’s supply of recycling bags, though unbeknown to him they had changed the location. You now have to get them from the environmental centre down a scary hill on the outskirts of the village, so he took a rain check on that and went to have coffee and cake with Marco and Maddalena instead and discuss the problem of the plumber amongst other things.

This, though, was resolved in the afternoon after Stephen had had a revelation. When they did the road the other week they had, he realised, covered up the drain at the bottom corner of the field where the road turns into our driveway. He spent a happy half hour or so after lunch clearing away all the earth and leaving a channel for the water to flow away into the drain and not down under the house. This has seemed to work, and once again we can marvel at the peculiarities of living in a house where to cure a leaking cistern you have to excavate a drainage system twenty-five metres away.

If that wasn’t enough good news, the real cause for celebration is that after eight days languishing in bed, I finally rejoined the land of the living, or at least the LCDDB chapter of it, when after another shower this morning I got dressed and managed to sit at the table for lunch. That about wore me out, but a quiet afternoon on the settee at least gave me a change of scenery. And if that wasn’t enough, as a reward for my good behaviour I was treated to a gin and tonic and some crisps this evening before a light supper. OK, it might not be quite what the doctor ordered, but I do now have to start building up my strength, and all that quinine can only do me good in fighting the infection.