Ricard cure for everything: Day 21 of confinement

It has been one of those days – a lot like it was before I was due to come out of the basement last time. Spent a large part of the night coughing, and felt ill all day.
 
But here’s the thing: not Covid19 ill, just generally crappy. Diarrhoea, coughs, feeling hot and… well, just generally lethargic and crappy. I went out and kicked a ball across the street from Ottawacker Jr. – scrupulously maintaining a 4-5 metre gap between us – in case the fresh air would help, but it didn’t. So I went to bed.
 
Mrs. Ottawacker entertained the boy for the day – he had plenty of bike rides and soccer. And I have lounged around, staring at the screen in case it might make the translation I have to do do itself (it didn’t) and then went to bed to try and finish the book I have been trying to read ever since I got to the basement.
 
It is dire. Last Orders it is called, by Graham Swift (a writer I like quite a lot). A series of flashbacks from a group of people who are taking the ashes of one of their recently departed friends to Margate in order to scatter them into the sea. I can sort of see where it is going and what he is doing with the book, but I don’t like the style, I find the story mundane and dull, and I have no interest in finding out what happens. If I didn’t have a rule about finishing books, I’d have moved on to something else by now.
 
And here’s the thing: it won a Booker Prize and was made into a film. I remember seeing the film too – but had completely put it out of my memory until about page 150 of the novel. Then it came searing back into my mind in glaring techy-yawn. Ray Winstone was in it – and Bob Hoskins I think. Oh, and possibly Helen Mirren, which would have been why I wanted to watch it in the first place. (The film was crap as well, and if I had any sort of memory, I wouldn’t have picked up the book from the second-hand store in Calahonda.)
 
In fact, the book was so bad, I got out of bed and started writing the blip. Then I remembered I hadn’t taken a photo all day. So, here is the trusty bottle of Ricard, the cure-all medicine, from which I just poured my own “last orders”. It’s not helping me – but it’s already dulling the memory of the book.
 
The big question now is what do I do about tomorrow? The cough is the worry – as is the fact that I might be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus. I was fine to go up until this morning, now once again I find myself completely uncertain. It’s now been three weeks since I was in Spain. WHO guidelines stipulate two weeks’ quarantine… yuck, what a mess.