Struck down by the dreaded lurgi on Friday night, I’ve spent a miserable weekend doing precious little, barely crossing my door other than to fetch the newspapers from the local shop. It’s just an upper respiratory tract infection, compounded by a sore back – no big deal. I’ve got the doctor’s delusion that illness is something that happens to everybody else. Most doctors are aware of the story of the eminent professor of cardiology who was attending a medical conference I think in Philadelphia, and was found dead in his hotel bed, a bottle of antacid parked on the bedside table. He clearly hadn’t diagnosed his own myocardial infarction. I will follow his example and take some ancient proprietary medicament, like the old Askit Powder, which I seem to recall from the ads, “fights off the miseries”.
The trouble with being poorly is that you can’t get on with anything. You are really under house arrest. Everything gets put on hold. I tried to read an abridged version by Victor Neuburg of John Buchan’s enormous History of the First World War (Lochar Publishing, 1991), even more enormous than Winston’s history, the four volume The World Crisis, but it only depressed me. It is beautifully written, but do I really want to know how adept the Cameron Highlanders were with the bayonet? I’d rather read a Wilfred Owen poem, or something really acerbic by Siegfried Sassoon. So I put the Buchan to one side.
And tried a little German homework for the class on Thursday. I came across the idiom, (die Redewendung), Jemandem rutscht das Herz in die Hose, literally somebody’s heart slid into their trousers. I wondered if it was a little like “His heart sank”, or perhaps “He was depressed to his boots”, but I think it has more of a quality of extreme fear and anxiety. Somebody on safari who turns round in the bush to see a lion a metre away, staring at him – his heart might well slide into his trousers.
But I couldn’t settle to German, or anything else for that matter, and ended up with that old standby, the crossword puzzle. I’ve even done the Sunday Times Mephisto, with solutions like Daidzein, Apocope, Duendes, Arew, and Woodburytype. These household words. It’s enough to bring on an ague.
Nights have been tricky. I seem to have been in a composite dream world the whole time. I am taxiing a Slingsby Firefly across an enormous RAF airstrip – I think it might have been RAF Topcliffe – and I can’t contact the tower because I have forgotten all the frequencies. The numbers spin round my head endlessly. 118.5? 119.1? Can’t remember.
But there is one aspect of being hors de combat that is curiously liberating. For a time, you are absolved of that sense of guilt at not having fulfilled a commitment. It might even give you a new perspective on priorities. That thing that we felt we really had to achieve – was it so important after all?
Well, what was it Edgar said to Gloucester in King Lear? We must be patient. We came crying hither. Tomorrow will be better. Even today is a little better. I aspire to be a glass half full man. I know some people prefer the outlook that every silver lining has a cloud. But I think pretty soon I will “fall in”, and report for duty. I might even sign off my tax return today.
Ah, Death and Taxes. These great certainties.
jamescalumcampbell 