My Enemy

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Bloody Covid again. Only (to my knowledge) the second time I have succumbed, but against all expectations (being fully vaccinated) far worse than the first time: the mildest of coughs, but a head pumped so full of mucus that it feels as though the top of my cranium might just detach from the rest of my skull with a ‘pop!’ like a champagne cork. I realise that this annoying twenty-first century bully is not interested in those who can give it a fair fight, but preys on us oldies, especially when we are already down. I was at the diminishing end of a persistent cold that had chipped away at my body for weeks: symptoms were slowly subsiding when ‘Pow!’ they returned in spades and, unusually, bowled me over. I do not know whether my ‘cold’ was actually Covid all along, or whether it simply passed its fading symptoms on, but one way or another I seem to have spent some weeks falling to this point and, quite frankly, I’m fed up with it now and ready to fight back. I am currently reviewing a complete list of bones and muscles in the hope of finding one that does not ache.

I’m not good at being ill – God knows I’m bad enough at being well – and I feel affronted. I visualize disease as any other enemy and just as soon as I regroup my senses I will kick its shins. My counter attack began with the peanut butter sandwich I had been craving all night and three bituminous cups of black coffee before a few hours in front of Saturday morning TV which, having worked Saturdays for much of my adult life, I have not seen in many years. Sadly, it is not what it was: what has happened to Daktari? Where are The Banana Splits? Why can I no longer summon International Rescue? Life is not the same when it is robbed of the Frank Bough/Dickie Davies conundrum: Grandstand or World of Sport? Motorcross or all-in wrestling?

After some searching I did manage to locate an episode of Columbo. Not that difficult I admit, but I’m not sure it’s an episode I’ve seen before – at least, not often. What is noticeable is that the peerless 70’s detective is now punctuated by very twenty-first century adverts: fuss-free cremations, on-line bingo, over-fifties insurance policies (guaranteed acceptance, no medicals), stair-lifts, mobility scooters, incontinence pants, and motorized high-seat chairs. It is clear that the Saturday Morning TV audience has changed. It is no longer expected to grow into a Saturday evening audience, it is expected to fade and die with its funeral already paid for and its descent downstairs assured – as long as the electricity is not summarily disconnected. Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion is neither an acceptable source of entertainment, nor what the target audience now wants to see.

So two questions pop into my virus-fuzzy head 1) what does the current, obviously ageing Saturday morning viewer actually want to see and 2) where are the current teens; today’s equivalent of those who comprised the audience way back when? Not out in the fresh air obvs. I watch the news: I know that all young people are allergic to the outside world. They are locked away in darkened rooms playing CoD with a world full of friends whom they have never met – nor ever will if they’ve got any sense. Cyber friends and virtual enemies are the new early-teen staples – and not a single age-prejudiced bug nor a visually impaired lion in sight…

When you thought I was winning the game
You came and snuffed out the flame
You thought you finished me off
But you just made me strong
Each time you dealt me a blow
Each time you brought me so low
I found something inside to help me along… My Enemy – Richard Thompson

The Running Man on a Bicycle

I was dragged out of my running routine by the head-cold that dictates that every step I take is accompanied by a bass drum between the ears. I anticipated problems with breathing as I prepared to run, but not with percussion. I could not return to the weights, as a recent snot-fuelled attempt had me sounding like a hedgehog trapped beneath the shed, so I went for the exercise bike. However, by the time I had decided to lug it from its current resting place – in the arctic garage, between the deep freeze and the tumble dryer – the bass drum in my head had been accompanied by a hi-hat in each ear and any attempt at forward perambulation exceeding the speed of a geriatric sloth resulted in some kind of trans-cranial military tattoo. Imagine – if you can – Cozy Powell’s ‘Dance with the Devil*’ slowed down and piped directly into the cerebral cortex**.

Another dose of synchronicity: the lateness of the hour can no longer be relied upon to bring on the night – days are getting longer although, alas, no warmer – and there, just behind the exercise bike, I spotted my actual bike bike. It seemed a whole lot more sensible to haul myself aboard that. So, I wheeled it out, donned my helmet*** and rode away into the distance****.

I am incredibly fortunate to live in a place that means that I can be on quiet country roads within minutes of leaving my door. Often I do not see another vehicle for miles around – although, when I do it is almost always a small hatchback (formerly mother’s and noisily driven to tears by the change of operator) piloted by someone who is clearly unfamiliar with the function of two of the three pedals, and for whom steering appears to be a pointless frivolity. These cars, on any other day unused to the rev counter turning above vertical, are usually wheezing worse than me. It is, though, because of this narrow country lane/automotive nutcase juxtaposition that cycling proceeds without a soundtrack and I am forced to contemplate the voices inside my head. I fear that, especially in view of cold-constrained faculties, even the slightest diminution of my otic acumen could leave me vulnerable to ending my days as a grotesquely articulated hood ornament.

Cycle runs take me further afield – it is virtually impossible to stay upright on a bike travelling at my running pace – which does affect my ‘baggage’. When I run, I feel that all I need to carry is some means of contacting the nearest paramedic; as a cyclist I am forced to consider the possibility of mechanical as well as physical breakdown. I carry my little repair kit with me: ready to mend a puncture with the best of them – although not to any great advantage, I must admit, as I do not have a pump. Back in the day, all bicycles had a pump attached to the frame and, like the strange squeaking noise from the back wheel, it accompanied you wherever you went. In those days, I recall, the tyre could be inflated with little more than an angel’s fart; now, with tyre pressures three times greater than the car, it requires either biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger or an electric generator. When I head out for a trip on my cycle, my wife sits in the car with the engine running and the back seats down.

As my cold starts to lift, I will return to running, as I do not feel that cycling exercises me fully*****. By next week I anticipate being back on my trainer-clad feet when cycling will return to the roster of recreational activities and running will, once again, become my king of pain.

*If age precludes you from doing so, you can at least view the original here.
**I have absolutely no idea of what that is.
***This is worn at my wife’s insistence. There is an interesting psychology attached to bicycle helmets as, for some reason, motorists give you much more room when you are not wearing one.
****A very liberal use of the word ‘distance’ as I suspect that I seldom move beyond one that makes me invisible from an upstairs window of my house.
*****Naïve supposition that the worse I feel afterwards, the more ‘good’ the exercise has done me.

N.B. today I have fully surrendered to the vagaries of old-age and pressure-washed the bins!

My original ‘running’ blog ‘Couch to 5k’ can be found here.
Last week’s ‘Running Man on Being Antisocial’ is here.

Not Just Any Old Common or Garden Cold

“This is not just any cold*,” purrs the voice inside my head, “this is a Marks & Spencer’s cold.” This is not just a headache, it is a proper banger. Come on, why would I even want to swallow? Breathing freely is just so overrated. Nothing makes you feel as frail as a cold. To be laid so low by what is the most trivial of diseases leaves you feeling incredibly puny. The problem with this kind of cold is that you cannot disguise it: it’s there, ever-present in your voice, unmistakably lodged in your bright red hooter. Now is the time that the surgical mask is for keeping in rather than keeping out – not so much of a blessing when what it keeps in is a great, snotty sneeze. Nobody likes a shiny moustache. I am currently feeding my cold, although it is almost inevitable that I should actually be starving it. If you know the answer, please keep it to yourself, unless it involves chocolate.

Why is it even called a cold, and given that it is, why isn’t a fever called a hot? It cannot be anything to do with the prevailing weather: in the UK everything we caught would be called cold, wet and miserable. Given that a cold tends to involve head to toe muscle aches, a blinding headache, a throat that’s filled with saw blades and a nose that’s filled with God-knows-what, you’d have thought that somebody would have come up with a better name. Let’s face it, if footrot can muster up tinia pedis, an ice cream headache gets sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia and an ingrowing toenail gets unguis incarnates what has a cold got to do to be given a glamorous name – be adopted by Angelina Jolie?

Apparently (thank you Wikipedia) the common cold – let’s make it sound even more mundane – is caused by a toxic brew of up to two hundred separate virus strains, all with the kind of fancy names we crave (my favourite being acute coryza, because it just sounds suitably miserable) but because it is such a cocktail, none of them appear to have stuck. If it was made of alcohol it would be called ‘Knickers off and soundly spanked on the bottom’ or ‘Sweaty nights between the sheets’ or similar. I wonder what a bartender would make of a two hundred ingredient recipe? (I tried to look-up a fancy name for a cocktail maker, but I couldn’t find one, although someone suggested Alchemist. My experience is that Maker of the Ultimately Disappointing would be much more appropriate.)

One of the main ‘risk factors’ for catching a cold is listed as ‘going to child care facilities’. I do not do that, I am the child care facility: the little blighters bring their bounty to me. Childcare bubbles have so much to answer for. It’s impossible to look after children without being exposed to everything to which they, themselves, have been exposed. Children are super-spreaders of everything (including joy, as it goes) but I’d quite like them to keep some of the more unsavoury stuff to themselves.

What a cold does do is to rob you of concentration. The brain that normally allows thirty-minute slots of application, begins to falter after five. Ideas that are normally hammering to be released have taken to their beds in a darkened room where they are drinking hot toddies and watching 1970’s sitcoms. Consequently I write in short bursts, I drink coffee, I moan interminably and I stop as soon as I’ve had enough…

*Just so that you know, I have to Covid test twice a week and it isn’t that – so you can put your bargepole away now.

N.B. I have today been hit by the glitch that many of you have been suffering for some time. Font size has altered randomly, some has been bold, some has been in italics. I think I have now got it where it should be, but if not, I apologise. Not my fault – obviously.