Wow. A pandemic.
If any of you have been reading this blog for a while you will know that I caught Covid back in the Spring of 2020. Actually, more like the late Winter.
I had been the main organiser for a conference for my (now) former employer. It had been a very stressful and difficult event to organise, and culminated in a day that was overshadowed by the emergence of a new virus. Friday 6th March it was, and after two months when we talked about high-performance, and the next phase of growth, all in preparation for the usual break-out sessions and external speakers, all anyone now remembers is that it was the last “in-person” event for a very long time.
At the evening dinner I was seated next to a rather truculent individual, and spent the evening trying to be polite and pleasant in the face of his repeated moaning. He even moaned about his latest Italian skiing holiday, from which he’d just returned. Yes, you’ve guessed it.
The next day, a Saturday, I rode an Audax. I was pretty tired anyway, and I’m not sure if the infection had taken enough hold of me to explain why I only finished within 20 minutes of the cut-off time. It was a very cold and windy late-Winter day, I rode it on my own after Martyn’s car failed to start that morning, and I was conscious of having had a particularly tough few weeks at work. However by the next weekend, riding down to the Blackdowns with Martyn I really found it hard to even pedal. I turned back, leaving him to it, and on the way home, I had to stop a few times for a snooze as I found it hard to stay awake.
By the beginning of the following week I was actually ill, with all the symptoms of this new emerging Coronavirus, and I spent the following weekend asleep and feverish. There were no tests available by then, but antibody testing in May 2020 confirmed I’d had Covid-19, and since we had been in lockdown since March I knew for certain that my colleague had brought me back a present from Italy. He’d actually infected a whole bunch of people that day, so I guess you could call that Conference a Super-spreader event. I’m glad it disseminated something.
Much has been written and spoken of since then about vaccines, viruses, parties and politics. Friendships have been lost, I’ve taken redundancy from my job at that organisation, and in many ways the world seems a different place to that in early 2020. Back in the early days of the pandemic most people lived in genuine fear of getting the illness. The news media was full of stories of death and hospitals that could barely cope with the wave of sick people. There was little understanding of transmission and no known prevention or cure. The world was full of rules and angry people, one containing what we could do in the name of the greater good, the other railing about restrictions they felt were unnecessary.
Beyond Covid, my world has been through so much too. Major illnesses to all of our household, bereavements as we lost Mrs Mendip Rouleur’s Mum, my close friend, and others we knew. So many people suffering so much disruption. Junior off to the turbulent world of Pandemic University and having a really tough time. Turmoil in the job world for us and just about everyone I know. That’s before you take into account the strangeness of lockdown world, conspiracy theories about everything, me even growing a beard. Twice. If the world was turned upside down in 1649, then believe you me, we are living on St Georges Hill
Nowadays there is barely a mention of Covid in the news. Of course, the death of our longest-reigning monarch has taken over the airwaves in the last two weeks, but even before then the pandemic had become just a small piece of occasional stories, perhaps linked to long Covid, or other less immediate crises. The pandemic didn’t create many of the challenges we face now, holistically in the wider world, or more prosaically, for me and my family. But it’s magnified and exacerbated them, and also created a culture where the small-minded and the weak, feel panicked into making short-sighted and stupid decisions. I hope not to be amongst those feeling that fear. Even if I may have felt the effects of the fearful.
Foreign holidays in all their glory have returned. This seems like a good thing to everyone, but is it? In a world that is being destroyed by rising temperatures and rising CO2, is it right we head out on our tours of materialistic consumption of other cultures, or mindless drinking in hotter climes? Hard to say isn’t it, as with all things? But where does beneficial tourism end and destruction of the planet begin?
Guess where we went? Yes, that’s right, Italy. A lovely week in Sorrento and the surrounding area. Relaxing, eating, sight-seeing and enjoying a break from the slog of 2022. So it’s with a particularly appropriate circularity that I now have Covid, Omicron variant, whatever number we are on now, probably. Assuredly caught either on a coach trip back to the airport, or the flight home itself. Or the crowded arrivals hall, or frankly who cares where? Fortunately Junior has gone back to University and remains, a week later, symptom-free and Mrs Mendip Rouleur continues to test negative. Probably because at the first sign of a symptom I hot-footed into Junior’s vacated room and stayed there till she left for work this week in London.
Actually, I’ve come to realise what a little paradise Junior’s room is. He has the best TV in the house, with the full range of channels, and the best bed, and access to everything he could need. I think I may need to make it a bit more unpleasant, otherwise he’ll be here when he’s 30! At least West Ham aren’t winning anymore, normal service has resumed.
So now, as I watch my Strava fitness curve collapse again, and cancel all engagements for the next week, what am I left with? Well, a very irritating illness that is a bit more than a cold, with sniffles, coughing, headache, and nausea. (Note the Oxford comma in the previous sentence). But it’s nothing like the feverish fatigue with flu-like symptoms of March 2020. Not does it have any fear attached to it, and nor is anyone really remotely interested in it. For someone with asthma (like me) it’s enough to render my nights quite uncomfortable, but as long as I keep dosed on paracetamol and hydrated, and avoid eating too much, (and quite frankly I have little appetite anyway), I’m fairly sure I’ll be fine in a few days. Physically anyway.
In a way it’s a good time to get this Omicron out of the way. My cycling season had come to an end, limping to a finish a week after I crashed on a group ride on August Bank Holiday Monday, and I probably needed a bit of a break to let my body recover. Oh, the irony. But I’ve also just had a medical, with generally good results although there are some things to work on. At my age (yes it is next Saturday if you want to send a present) people make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of. But in many ways my medical has defied those. My VO2 is that of someone 23 years younger than my real age for example, and that’s despite my asthma. I know I need to, and can, lose some weight and improve my diet, but beyond that I’m in good shape. Physically anyway.
Once I have recovered from this current minor hiccup I do have a few projects I want to really get my teeth into. More on that in my next post. Unfortunately, all of them are unpaid, and whilst the coffers are not empty, I suspect the plans our new Prime Minister has will not be filling them anytime soon. So if anyone has any work that I can do to a good standard, with financial reward within travelling distance that makes the effort of commuting worthwhile (or a good standard of shower and secure bike storage), do let me know. I’m not fussed about what it is, as long as I can be good at it, and preferably it involves working with nice people, I’m all ears. Message me, I’m hear to listen. Someone else said that recently, but unlike them, I really mean it.
But I have an unease about both the Pandemic, and about its lingering impact that I can’t quite shake. I’m not talking about Long Covid either, although I feel and fear for the people suffering from that too. With a novel virus its true impact and ways of affecting us won’t be known for some time. This one is shaping up to be nasty, and will, like those in charge of our corrupt government, constantly mutate to try and hide the nastiness.
So is the pandemic over or not? Does anyone care? Are we now “living with Covid” rather than trying to fight it? What does that even mean?
Last night I watched a particularly bad post-apocalyptic Zombie film called “World War Z”. Brad Pitt probably did it for the money, but then again, so would I! Aside from the annoying trope of an asthmatic kid (appears in most post-apocalyptic films these days), it did have a ring of a reminder about how fragile our world is, and how easy it would be for it to collapse. Earlier in the week I’d watched Simon Reeve investigate zoonotic illnesses in South America, and how these are becoming more dangerous as we push into previously remote areas. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the powerful and the scared are allies in these situations, exploiting peoples’ fears and prejudices to feather their own nests.
But then if you think how quickly our country was gripped again by a strange Royalist-obsessive fever, and how notions of rational discourse and debate are swept aside so easily, well the Zombies are here already aren’t they? Add in unhealthy dollops of fear, an uncertain financial and employment situation, multiply by 100, throw in some unjustified paranoia about strangers, and what have you got? How quickly will people throw up their hands and say, “oh they are all the same, what can you do?” Before you know it, the camps are opening and the excuses are being made. Maybe this sounds like a different type of conspiracy theory to you, it probably even does to me. But I’m worried.
Someone has got to say enough. Someone has got to stop the slide and say, let’s be the grown-ups. We have to create a better world. Those of us that are Snowflakes, Woke, Progressive, Human, whatever we call ourselves, we have to fight back. We have to choose love.
