After two jabs in a vaccine trial, and three Pfizers, I was sure my defences were rock solid, impregnable. Turns out they were unbreachable only in the sense that the Maginot line was unbreachable. Like Axis forces in 1940, the subvariant of the Omicron variant – or whatever they’re saying it is – found a way around the undefended flanks of my antibodies. Yes, I finally got Covid. Yes, I know, yawn. As my elder daughter said to me: “It’s so uncool to get Covid now.” I was in south Wales with her and our dog when I got my first-ever second red line. Feeling decidedly awful, I took to my bed. “You’re being very 2020 about this,” she said. Not long after, she packed her bag and buggered off to leave me to it, all alone but for the dog.
Thence began 10 days of drifting between sleeping and waking states. I had a raging temperature and a cough like my late Aunt Vesna’s in Zagreb when she was smoking at least three packs a day. I woozily remembered her fondly while snatching bits of sleep between death rattles. I wouldn’t have got out of bed at all were it not for the needs of the dog, who, when requiring attention, would lick my face, or any other extremity poking out from beneath the sheets. He would lie around bored to tears until another round of vicious coughing started up, at which point he would slope off elsewhere. As I drifted back to sleep, I imagined him lying on the floor with his big paws over his ears, desolate with the tedium of it all.
There were upsides to all this, though – for me if not for him. It was nice to be able to do nothing at all, for once, without having to feel bad about it. I picked up a couple of books that I’d had knocking around for years without ever opening. One was Metroland by Julian Barnes. The first chapter was so astoundingly good that it was almost exhausting to read. I wasn’t quite up to the challenge. So then I tried a book about the area I was languishing in – a place I’ve been coming to every year (every month, in fact) since I was a toddler – Gower in History by Paul Ferris. As early as the first paragraph, I knew I was blessed to be in the presence of a great writer. The Gower peninsula, he writes, “is about 14 miles long – depending on where you start measuring at the Swansea end – a rocky appendage, like something left over from a design that hasn’t quite worked”. Nicely put, sir.
A more insightful, intelligent, moving and often funny history of anything I have yet to read. That it was about an area I love so well made it a still-greater joy. I came close to thanking Covid for the opportunity to discover the late author. “The unsettling thing about history,” Ferris writes, “is that we know what was going to happen to people next, and they did not. Our past was still their future.” An obvious enough point, I suppose, but I couldn’t get it out of my ibuprofen/paracetamol-addled mind. I’m always unsettled in country churchyards when I come across a grave of anyone who died in the early 1940s. Good God, they never knew that we won the war.
A related thought was expressed – brilliantly, I thought – in a tweet by the BBC’s Fergal Keane in the early days of the unfolding horror in Ukraine. “We are into one of those periods in history whose course will seem blindingly obvious to future generations, but for us feels like the first steps into a dark forest filled with traps and malice.” Sweating away, half-awake with no one but a disappointed dog for company, I lay there quite oppressed by the fears of the millions of souls who have come before us, who didn’t know what to do – though it eventually became obvious – and never found out what was going to happen next.
Eventually my dog could take no more and had to be exercised. A mate took him out and then after a week, once my red line had faded away, I worked up the energy to leave the house myself. As the former England manager Bobby Robson once said of his defender Terry Butcher, who had cut his head open but carried on playing, VCs have been won for less.
It’s amazing how much more you notice when you’re having to walk very slowly. It was deeply mindful. And, mindful of the safety of other walkers, I was careful to stand a good way downwind of them as I told them how ill I was, eliciting great sympathy.
Later, though I still felt rough, I risked a short drive to Penrice Castle, seat of one of Gower’s biggest landowners. Having been enthralled by their story in the book, I wanted to breathe their air. The castles – there’s a ruined one and one they live in – are in a private park but, doubtless to their irritation, a public footpath runs through it. Unleashed, the dog sprinted around, describing great arcs of joy.
We came across a sign acknowledging only the most grudging acceptance of our right to be there. “Keep to the path.” Well, I was, even if my hound wasn’t. “Dogs must be kept on leads.” Oh dear. “No picnics.” None planned. “No cycling.” Ditto. “No running.” Eh? What happens if I break into a jog? Does a sniper take me out? And I’d have to run to catch the dog! This appalling catch-22 brought on another wave of fatigue. So we sloped off home back to bed.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
