Out of the woods

It was with great relief that we heard that our friends and Silverio’s wife have tested negative. And there are some positive signs that the lockdown is beginning to work.

On a more prosaic note I have run out of paint after 42 litres of white emulsion extended on our interior walls.

I woke last night in a right muck sweat and until I got myself saddled was briefly convinced that the virus had me up against the wall. It is very improbable given the time elapsed (and believe you me I know it intimately - the anxiety-infected passage of time elapsing, that is).

I have an almost atavistic dread of the thing. I can feel it’s claws in my chest.

I had a terrible experience of post viral fatigue in my middlish thirties and being bed bound and adrift for three months left a legacy of, I suppose, a sort of trauma, of a vanishing path of loneliness. Back then PVF was not considered an illness but a sort of confected malingering. But to the wearer it felt like dying.

So all that talk of Covid-19 being but a passing mild flu passes me by. I see the stats in Italy on the 65% of hospital admissions in the known case count and the 30% transition to ICU in notes in the Imperial College modelling paper published today.

Who knows if my dread is an illness worse than the virus itself? But it’s not an empirical comparison I am keen to make. And less so even here in ‘foreign’ when far from that thing called home.

And yet this is home. And I am not shrouded in the dread even most of the time. But it and it’s progenitor stalk the dank woods beyond the rickety boundary fence, rustling in the dry flukes of winter, invisibly present.

I count them away with my breathing in the still fearful hours of the night: one, two, three, four and on and on. And on. Until sleep finally takes me in her arms again.