Being diseased

As I am typing this I can quite distinctly hear each of my laboured, nasally congested breaths struggle their way in and out of my airways. Yes - that’s right - I am ill. I have been remarkably fortunate this term really, and since I did spend 2 days out filming in the pouring rain, and a week sharing saliva with similarly ill cast members in my latest play, I suppose it was to some extent inevitable. Nevertheless I feel I have earned the prerogative to lament - it is, after all, something classicists do well. So thus I shall begin a dirge to my health and wellbeing. Oh for the unblown nose and unstrained vocal chords, oh for the delicate taste buds and un-bagged eyes, oh for the flavour of something other than lemon, ginger and honey in my life.

I often find myself saying I would rather be very very ill for a couple of days, rather than have a mild viral sickness dig it’s heels in for a week. I still generally stand by this statement, that is until I do actually get very very ill, and then I long for the sniffles I once rebuffed. Fortunately at the moment I think it is only a severe sniffles I am suffering from - my sinuses are going haywire and my brain feels thicker than my daily porridge, as I struggle through the milky-oaty trenches, desperately trying to compose sentences for my ever-looming dissertation. But I can at least carry myself far enough to sit down on my swivel-library chair, and there is enough strength in me to open my laptop and make attempts at composition. So I can’t really complain.

What is of course frustrating, is that term is almost over, so it is at this time that people are actually beginning to have fun. There are formals, birthday drinks, post-show celebrations, wrap parties etc. And of course I either have been too incapacitated to attend, or too horrified at the thought of streaming over all my friends, that I have often opted to sit this one out. I am hoping I recover soon, both in terms of my physical health and my now dwindling social life. I do not take well to isolation. A few more early nights ought to do it I am sure.

Besides I need to be fighting fit and raring to go for a number of reasons. Yes, I do need to finish writing my dissertation, and yes I do need to finish translating two epic poems, but that will all come in good time. My priority is of course Percy - when is it anything else? My parents are jetting off to Rome, and so it is up to me to look after the boy, and for a number of days I am going to become domestic goddess, not only feeding and walking the dog, but feeding (and maybe walking?) Alice, as she’s going to stay over for a few days. For a matter of hours I will know what it feels like to own and run a household - a feeling most millennials will never know, and I feeling I also expect to be denied in the long term.

And so I find myself pouring over recipe books and bookmarking good home bakes, instead of re-writing Chapter 2 on the Ajax. Nevertheless at least there is a sense of productivity involved in recipe-research. It especially gives me hope from the depths of my disease, as I pour over the pages of food that I am unable to taste at present, but I know that somewhere in the near future there is a Pizza Fiorentina or a Chilli Con Carne waiting for me. To quell my rising misery I pop another locket into my mouth (although I loathe them, I find them mildly more tolerable than strepsils), blow my nose extra loud to clear those students around me whose typing has become irritatingly and unnecessarily violent, and sip my lemon and ginger tea. It is a heady, nauseating concoction that I can only hope will draw me out of my sickness back to salubrious vitality.