Going Viral – The Blogalypse 2 – Miffed

Today I am miffed. My temperature is up very slightly after a night where I woke myself up choke-coughing in my sleep with a foam-clogged throat like I do when my asthma kicks off. It could just be a cold that’s irritating my chest, or it could be the Dreaded Lurgy.

All through my childhood we joked about catching the Dreaded Lurgy and melodramatically whinged about various snot-nosed sniffles and feeble coughs, but in the age of antibiotics we mostly took our good health for granted. I’m actually going to encourage future historians to rename Covid-19 as The Dreaded Lurgy because it sounds so much more diseasey. Covid-19 sounds like an acne medication for oily adolesecents with moody slapped-arse faces or at the very best, a sort of lubricant you add to motorbike engine oil.

Just as children hundreds of years ago made up the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a ring o’roses’ about the Black Death, future children will invent playground skipping games to the tune of the suffering of the people in my time.

“Eugh you coughed
You’ve got the Dreaded Lurgy
Makes you cough
Makes you feel flurgy
Don’t kiss me
Your nose has got a burrrgey
Wash your hands
Your lungs are sounding knurgy.”

Of course in the future both flurgy and knurgy WILL be real words, and the spelling of bogey will have slightly changed over the centuries. So this is written in perfect future English and you can’t prove otherwise.

Anyway, I’m pretty darn annoyed right now because I keep thinking what a really crap way to die this would be when last year I had the perfect opportunity to die in the most utterly epic ways and didn’t. Last summer, André and I were in Australia to install our sculpture ‘Icarus had a Sister’ in the home of an art collector and we decided we couldn’t go that far across the world without seeing a bit of it. Upon hearing that it was humpback whale migration season on the West Coast we took a massive detour of several thousand miles to a place called Ningaloo where we not only swam with the whales but also several different types of shark including a scarily curious tiger shark that swam within a few feet of my…feet.

It took me a year to psych myself up mentally and physically for swimming in the open ocean with these incredible creatures, and by the time I did it I was actually quite accepting of the fact I might die doing it and was prepared to take that risk for the once in a lifetime opportunity. I imagined the brilliant drama it would add to the movie version of my life story where Kate Winslet (playing me in a rather attractive wetsuit) would be dragged to her death in the mouth of a huge shark.

As it happened, said tiger shark just swam directly underneath my legs heading slightly upwards towards me. I couldn’t tell you where it went after that because at that moment I was paddling my little legs like a blur to get back to the boat and pleading with those already on board to winch me out asap. I did not stop to look behind/beneath me.

The most dramatic part of that trip wasn’t even the shark encounter but the moment an angsty mama humpback whale split from her pod to come and charge directly at our group of swimmers knocking us flying like bowling pins. When I finally get time and energy to update my Oz blog you will not only read in exciting detail about but get to see actual video footage of the moment I was head butted by a 40 tonne whale and sent flying. Not only did I avoid being knocked unconscious and drowning in the sea, but also I avoided being scraped by the barnacles her giant flippers were covered in, causing me to bleed out into an ocean filled with 80 different varieties of local shark.

I’ve had some quite wonderful adventures in life and I think about other times I worried about dying, like the time André and I were casting a live elephant called Chandrika to update his collection of endangered animal casts that we produce as tactile teaching aids for blind children. I even get nervous around horses and their big cloppy feet, so I was shitting myself before elephant casting day, thinking that all she had to do was take a dislike to me or fall over on me when we were casting one of her feet and that would be an extremely silly way to die.

But being crushed by an elephant sounds SO much cooler now than just drowning in my own phlegm alone in either an isolation ward or my own bed. Oh the opportunities I’ve missed!

Unlike the feeble ladies in a Bronte sisters novel who might have passed away somewhat ‘romantically’ overnight from consumption, fading away in an elegant white nightgown with an ashen face like a wax doll, there really isn’t any poetic pre-Raphaelite artistic beauty to come out of death by Corona virus, since so many people are going to be doing it at once. Even the epic funeral I had planned for myself would be poorly attended due to everyone trying to self-isolate or Government lockdowns (if they ever bother). Who the hell would want to go see the movie of my life when we all had the same ending and you can guess the plot? The script writers are going to have to use some serious poetic license to maintain suspense and excitement. Perhaps I could go rogue in my last hours at the hospital and smear a message to the Government on the walls of my room in my own excrement that incites a civil rebellion. Or something. Still not as cool as death by whale or elephant. Gutted.

Some people might be rolling their eyes at me with all this morbid talk of death. ‘Assuming the worst, as usual,’ they will say about me. They being the friends and family who have to live with my daily angsting about things that largely never happen. And that’s part of the spell, you see. If I say it out loud, people reassure me that it’s ‘never going to happen’ and that I don’t need to worry. It’s almost become like a lucky charm that if I worry about the worst, that means it DOESN’T happen because (and here’s the real secret), IF it turns out that the world we know is really some sort of entertainment drama series for ‘the gods’, Clash of the Titans (original version) stylee, then by revealing plot twists or dramatic developments before they happen out loud, I am producing SPOILERS for those looking down on us for entertainment and therefore to maintain audience numbers up in cloud heaven/the other realm/deity central, the plot writers are forced to come up with a different turn of events. Most of the time this works in my favour, but sometimes the celestial script writers come up with something worse.

I think you will find, dear fellow humans, that we are all collectively to blame for this current virus crisis because we were all moaning last year at how utterly shit everything had suddenly got in the last few years – racist clowns for leaders, horrific climate change issues, refugee crises, home grown terrorists, mass mistrust of everyone, fucking Brexit and so forth. I remember talking with many a nodding friend how it would take an alien invasion to unite the world now. ‘Damn and blast!’ said the celestial script writers for the next season of ‘Earth, the doofus years’, screwing up their proposed plot points and tossing it in the heavenly waste paper basket. Now we’ve got to come up with something else! We were all saying it. We were all thinking it.

And now we have it. An invasion, not of little green men to unite the world in a battle to save humanity but of little green (possibly) virus blob things. A bit like the last series of Vikings where Bjorn Ironside had to swallow his pride and ask King Harald Finehair for help fighting the invading Ru army. Only with more phlegm and less toilet roll.

And I suppose that’s the only thing that’s making me a little less miffed. Is seeing the way countries are sharing data (well…most countries…North Korea and Russia I’m giving you the Michelle Obama side eye right now), some even sharing resources, and many sharing messages of solidarity and encouragement.

And that’s brilliant. Because you have to hope that when the world spends money on science not war, focuses on helping not hurting, and when the whole of humanity is wishing and hoping for the same thing…a cure for this disease as soon as possible so we can all go back to worrying about normal stuff like how many likes we get on Instagram, or whether my bum looks big in this (it does), or whether we’re going to get killed by sharks, wasps, feral clowns or in a roller skating incident rather than this…this scary, invisible, fast spreading horror…we simply have to believe that it gives us the best chance of survival as possible because we are all in this together.

For tonight, my beautiful humans, keep safe, good luck to all of us and see you on the other side.

Previous Post ……………………………………………………………………………Next post