Going Viral – The Blogalypse 11 – One year on

It was around a year ago that I first started meerkatting over video footage from Wuhan, China, being shared on Youtube, about a new virus that was spreading fast and killing a lot of people. I will admit now that I immediately stocked up on one of Amazon’s bulk loo roll offers right then and there and got in a shed load of tinned soup and warned my aged parents to do the same before most people in Britain had even begun to notice what was happening the other side of the world. I won’t apologise for being prepared way ahead of schedule before everyone else caught on. It’s part and parcel of being a life long worrier or ‘Highly Sensitive Person’ as we prefer to be known.

The idea is that in any group of social mammals you will always get 10% that are on the look out for possible danger and stay on high alert. This includes meerkats. Not all the meerkats are meerkatting on hind legs, looking suspiciously at passing aeroplanes and warning the others, no. Apparently only 10% of them. We have this in common with all social mammals. Our totem spirit creature is Beaker from The Muppets. He encapsulates what it is to live inside my head at any given moment. And last year, Beaker’s people were right at last and the only people who were ready for the pandemic.

In ancient human cultures, we would have been the reveered seers, the genius battle-planners, the trusted advisers of royalty. In modern times we’re just considered doom-mongers, angsty-emos or ridiculous wibblers. I’ve been mocked for this quality my whole life. Mocked and pitied. A dear wise friend once said to me that she reckoned 100% of the things I worried about never actually happened. She wasn’t entirely correct, but I knew she was largely right for about 95% of the ‘stuff’ in my head and that was embarrassing enough to recognise in myself.

It’s true, I may have wasted the equivalent of 38-40 years of my 48 year long life worrying about things that never happened completely unnecessarily, BUT for those few shit mega-disasters that actually DID happen you’ve got to know I was absolutely AWESOME at dealing with it. I won’t even pretend I didn’t feel a tiny bit smug to read about people having to make their own loo paper out of old t-shirts or newspaper while knowing I had a stock of triple-ply quilted bog roll large enough to last me till I retire. Of course I would have shared if someone I knew had needed it. But thankfully most people managed just fine and the shortages didn’t last long, other than the national deficit of inflatable hottubs which is only now starting to abate.

However, for all my preparation and angst, it didn’t stop me catching bloody Covid. Yes, folks, back when I first started this blog, Andre and I were having what we strongly suspected was a milder case of the Dreaded Lurgy but within a few weeks we were lucky enough to start to feel we were in recovery and put the scariest times of it behind us. These suspicions were confirmed when Andre donated blood plasma later in the summer of 2020 and was told he did indeed have antibodies to it, however not enough to be useful to them or even to him. So we definitely had The ‘Rona, and had missed our precious weeks of possible immunity digging the garden and watching Netflix when we could have been holidaying in the Bahamas unscathed.

We hoped that at least we’d survived the worst and seen the back of it. However, Covid had other plans. Covid had decided to move in and stay. Yes…..I’m talking Loooonnnnnnng Covid. The gift that keeps on giving.

After trying to dismiss the ongoing breathlessness and fatigue as regular common or garden post-viral fatigue, the arrival of additional weird symptoms started to ring alarm bells. I’d developed seriously painful frozen shoulder on the right side but had put it down to a fall I’d had a few months back commando-rolling the dog out of the way of an oncoming cyclist. However when I suddenly developed the same frozen shoulder on the left side too, and pain radiating down to both wrists, hands and fingers, with puffy inflamed joints that came and went, I started to panic.

A call to my doctor didn’t elicit any useful information or help, so I soldiered on regardless. But as the weeks and months passed, and it got to the stage where I even needed help to get my bra on and off (a job which, thankfully, Andre has never complained about or turned down), and the pains in my arms were so bad I couldn’t sleep, I knew something wasn’t right.

In lockdown, where we could hardly work anyway it was easier not to notice how truly bad the fatigue was becoming, unless we actually tried to do something and then found 2 hours of moderate activity = several hours of going back to bed making groaning noises. Sadly not for rumpy pumpy ‘nooners’ so much as necessary nana naps. But the racing heart I would get after every meal became disconcerting, and the brain fog never really cleared, leading to me giving up driving entirely for the rest of 2020.

For Andre it was still all about the breathlessness. A keen runner (marathon-man, ultra fit type), the strain of not being able to get out in his running shoes and let off steam got a bit much. After several months he experimented with very short runs, often followed by several days of exhaustion and coughing fits and hours of him staring frustratedly at the apps from his fitness watch which basically told him that since covid he’d gone from having the fitness age of an ‘excellent 20 year old’ (he’s 48) to having the fitness age of the withered potatoes we tried to grow last year in our Apocalypse vegetable garden. A few blood tests later and it turned out I was still the biggest loser in the Long Covid championships when it was revealed that covid seemed to have made me suddenly pre-diabetic and buggered my thyroid gland to boot. 10 months to the day since we first showed symptoms, we are both still struggling and suffering to a degree. Others have been left in far worse shape.

Of course, these things may well have been on the cards for me at some point in my life any way, you could argue, but as I’d only recently had a big set of blood tests before covid it was really easy to see how it had knocked my whole body akilter. And there was only so much damage I could legitimately blame on a few weeks of chocolate mug cakes and lounging about in my pyamas.

Even the weird frozen shoulders and swollen wrists seemed to be mentioned more and more by others online in Facebook forums for people recovering from covid. And after a few months, diabetes or blood sugar issues and thyroid problems were indeed being mentioned on medical websites as known after effects from Covid, along with all kinds of other issues from cardiovascular to neurological disorders. One doctor wrote: ‘You should look at it almost like radiation poisoning. It can affect any cell in your body, any organ in your body, but will affect everyone sligtly differently.’ And I believe him.

But there’s the thing…belief. Around the world, millions of people have died in this pandemic but there are still millions who think it’s a hoax, who won’t follow the most basic of rules to wear masks in public or to keep their distance.

I got so fed up with walking into town where huge crowds of ‘Walkers’ slump along the roads like nothing is happening…Breathing, coughing, spitting, sneezing without a thought for anyone. I have briefly considered embedding razor blades in the outer edge of a hula hoop and hooping wildly as I walk into town to do my shopping to keep the gaumless anti-maskers at a safe distance. But I guess I should hold something back in my arsenal for the Third Wave. Plus it could be carnage in the courgette aisle of Sainsbury’s if I don’t time my the spin of my hooping just right.

The Second Wave is well and truly here, after several false starts last year. And yet still the non-believers don’t believe. Or some will admit there is a disease called Covid19 but they still think it’s just the flu and we’re all being lied to about the dangers. Or that it was made on purpose in a lab. I met a lady whose mum recently died from Covid19 who still thought it wasn’t real. One person online who I was chatting to told me in all seriousness that all the politicians had their vaccinations months ago because this was ‘all planned by Hitler back in the 1930s’.

You heard that right, folks. Apparently Hitler invented the ‘Rona and the Governments have had the antidote all along. It’s all part of a big Deep State plot to….to erm…make us….buy more…seeding potatoes? Loo roll? Pilates DVDs? Soda Bread cook books? Honestly….I’ve completely lost track of what the crazies on QAnon think this is all about. I don’t know and I don’t want to know any more. Reading their comments on Facebook threads about vaccinations, death rates or politics makes me feel like I’ve pushed my brain out one nostril boiled it in vinegar and salted it before inserting it back up the other nostril. Their belief system is arguably the silliest and most dangerous set of views I’ve ever encountered.

But they DO think Donald Trump is here to protect us all from it and reveal the great truths of the world (I’m still waiting for him to tell us what’s in Area 51 like he promised years ago). And despite him being voted out of office, dumped by several of his banks, his favourite golfing association and probably most of his unsatisfied mistresses, there are still millions of loyal Trumpers who firmly believe this bloated cyst of a human being is the second coming of Jesus.

The world is well and truly broken. At least half the humans are crazy and none of us can agree which half. But I suspect we might all be simultaneously correct for different reasons. We are all a little bit crazy right now. Some more than others.

My Apocalpyse vegatable garden flourished, then waned and is now just somewhere the dog and local foxes take turns to leave turds for me to find. The pumpkins I lovingly nurtured most of last year only grew as big as oranges and yet never actually turned orange. I have a feeling the markdown vegetable seeds I bought on ebay may have been a ripoff.

A rat that we unnervingly kept seeing in the back garden took a few big bites out of one of the mysterious alleged pumpkin squash things and rejected it as inedible garbage. The same rat was found belly up on the patio a while later having found life in my vegetable garden too depressing to bear. Random but pertinent additional thought: To this day I cannot get the size of it’s enormous ratty testicles out of my mind.

I have still not yet made soda bread from scratch like the rest of the British middle class in lockdown and now probably never will as I am on a carb-free diet to try to reverse the insulin issues covid left me with. Nothing could be quite as depressing as making freshly baked bread that one can only sniff as others eat without you.

In fact the only thing that I really achieved last year that truly stuck was learning French on the Duolingo app. Although even that had its frustrations. I spent all year working through the many different themed lesson challenges looking forward to the section labelled ‘The Arts’ in section four, dreaming of the day I could once again show my artwork in Paris and would be able to speak in great detail to an art-hungry audience about how we had constructed the sculptures and developed their unique patina…all in perfect French with a convincingly outrageous French accent. But to my utmost disappointment, as if to reflect the pattern of disappointment of the entirety of 2020, the Duolingo ‘Arts’ linguistic training failed to mention sculptors or sculpting even once, and instead spent a disturbing amount of time training me how to discuss jazz music, clowns, paintings of clowns, and films starring clowns.

My last wonderful trip to Paris was indeed slightly scarred by two things:- the Parisian obsession with jazz music EVERYWHERE and constant cigarette smoke. If I’d have had to face clowns as well as jazz I think I might well have fled into Les Alpes never to return. As it is, jazz music, the Parisian variety, remains to me like musical masturbation. Fine and fun to muck about with on your own, but you should never inflict it on an audience. Particularly not in a lift, a taxi or a shopping centre where one cannot escape it. Put your saxophone away sir, there’s a lady present!

Alas, my dreams of showing in a fabulous Paris art gallery and chatting like a native with the trendy urban arts junkies of that beautiful city were not to be, much like most of my other dreams of 2020. In fact, what with all the crazies taking over the world/internet, the inability to see one’s loved ones, visit the cinema, go for a swim or avoid the plague, news about said plague, conspiracy theories about said plague, I’d say that this year’s been a bit of a nightmare…with just a touch of one of my weirdest cheese dreams thrown in. And 2021 hasn’t shown itself to be that much better so far. As fast as our scientists develop vaccines, Covid develops a new variant. We’ve got the fallout from Brexit to deal with, and America is imploding. We’re running out of things to watch on Netflix. It’s a bit sucky to be frank.

In the future, when people are allowed to make new movies again and cinemas re-open, they will write some godawful melodrama about these troubled times and I have absolutely no doubt the theme tune to this disaster movie will be a truly grating masturbatory jazz trumpet solo and someone singing in badly-pronounced French about clowns.

I’m starting to lose hope that there will be another side to see you all on. But if there is and if we do….let’s NOT go and see that movie together. Till then, stay safe, stay away from QAnon, don’t eat the small white pumpkins and hopefully…..see you on the other side.