Covid is not convivial | thearticle

I have Covid. It’s not especially nice. The PCR test confirmed it a day or so ago. Three of my family now has it. One of us is holding out against infection, but not for much longer. The cat

seems happy to have us all round the house like this. Can cats get Covid? I do hope not.   It goes like this: first there’s a swirling in the head and chest, a bit like the feeling of

lightness you get in the queue for a roller-coaster. It’s like an adrenaline kick, but without the sense of focus. A fog comes down. Then comes the heat, the fever, then the headache, which

is a real cracker and the sneezing, the blocked nose. The first few days — not pleasant. Odd pains everywhere, in the head, the guts, the chest, as if someone were attacking your voodoo

doll. Sudden bursts of all-over-body heat are followed by sharp bone-cracking cold, like a leap into the ice-bath. After that it settles down into what feels like a regular cold. I’ve had

worse. I rate it 5.5 out of 10 on the “Elwes Cold Scale”, with 10 being a cold I caught one time in Edinburgh. That one was like something out of the Exorcist. The strangest thing about

Covid, though, is the loss of taste and smell. It goes quite slowly and then suddenly. My other half said a few days ago that flavours were beginning to get a bit muffled “round the edges”.

This is exactly what it’s like. You can taste that it’s an apple. You know it’s an apple. The crunch of it and the sugary fleshiness are both still there, but that high zesty tang has gone.

The top notes go first. A day or so later, your taste has shut down that little bit more. Now you can get the sweetness, and you still have a sense of the “shape” of the taste, as the

sharper flavours still ping on the back of your tongue. But the next day, nothing. Nothing at all. Eating chocolate is like chewing a candle. It’s a waxy, oily mush of nothing. I found the

most flavoursome thing I could in the fridge, a piece of Stornaway black pudding, and ate it on toast. It was crunch with slime on top. Not even the HP sauce registered. I couldn’t finish

it. It feels as if my mouth is coated on the inside with some protective layer. I ate a lump of raw onion. Nothing. Toothpaste gives a tingle or sorts, but nothing more than that. As an

experiment later I might try a spoonful of Marmite. Smells have gone too. Everything draws an olfactory blank. Yes, there are gags to be made about the human smells from which you are now

immune. But the things you lose when your sense of smell vanishes are terrible. The smell of food, of cooking, of wine, of nature, the smell of your children, your home — all gone, flattened

somehow, by this very odd, very unwelcome virus. To read then, in the news, a local MP joking in the Commons about his party’s immunity from the virus, did not sit well with me. He remarked

that a “convivial fraternal spirit” among his party’s members meant they didn’t have to wear facemasks. The MP in question, Jacob Rees Mogg, is an MP for the part of Somerset where I live,

an area which, as it happens, now has the highest Covid rate in the country. It’s odd that he should make light of our current disaster — most acutely felt by his own constituents —

especially as it’s his own party’s fault. Mogg has not endeared himself to our household with his comments, having now achieved the remarkable feat of appearing both a drip and rather

sinister at the same time. To discourage people from wearing masks, as he seems wont to do, is simply to encourage the spread of Covid. Weedy anti-mask arguments waved around by Mogg’s party

about liberty and oppression lack all proportion. Ever put a hand over your mouth when you cough? Ever turned away when you sneeze? I certainly do. It’s nothing to do with liberty and

everything to do with common decency. Presumably when he coughs, Mogg simply spatters the face of the person opposite with a cloud of saliva and phlegm, before informing his startled

companion that it’s all in the name of conviviality. I remember the pictures of the first wave of victims, wards overwhelmed with patients, their lungs collapsing. We are a long way from

that. But we are a long way from it being over and from it being a subject fit for levity. Only the US, India and Brazil have had more total Covid cases than Britain. Our response has been a

terrible failure. But that’s the outside world. When you have Covid, you’re not allowed out there. You are stuck inside. The weather this week has been wonderful. The forecast looks rotten.

It looks like we’ll be emerging into a month-long downpour. But I don’t care. Just before it all went wrong, I bought a new pair of wellies. They’re still by the door and are immaculate.

When we’re allowed back out, I’ll be slogging up the field in the storm and I will love every moment, as I wade through the cowpats. I wonder whether I will be able to smell them.