This sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster. But it won’t be featuring an action hero. Most of the footage would show the star lying down, unshaven and with unkempt hair. There would be regular cutaways to him taking paracetamol and cough medicine. In the X-rated version, there might even be close-ups of yellow gunge being coughed into tissues. Whereas, the PG would instead show an improving book being picked up from time to time and then discarded. Yes, I’m afraid that just as I was recovering from my knee injury I got a bad dose of the flu, which turned into bronchitis. Sod’s Law indeed.
However,
my illness has had several unexpected benefits. The first of these is that my
knee injury has improved at a faster rate than it had in previous weeks, probably
due to my enforced rest. The second is that I did read some of the crime novels
I’d piled up and not started. I tried a Jack Reacher for the first time: it had
an unusual pared-down voice, but was rather repetitious. I read several Inspector
Rebus novels: they had interesting characterization, were filled with black
humour and were very well plotted. And the latest Graham Norton: it was an odd
crime novel, mixed with a family saga, the dead body doesn’t emerge until
halfway through. But all of these books gave me something for my writing.
So I did
lose two weeks of my life to a nasty virus, and spent much of the time coughing
my lungs up. Dearest T looked after me very well and I recovered. That’s life,
I suppose. We all have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And
if you can gain something from that too, you’re ahead.
