Sound the trumpets! I've had a spring clean

How to deal with a nasty virus

The First Breakfast. Bliss was in that dawn etc.

Earlier this week, I had a burst of euphoria. I was out in the sunshine. I was eating a piece of toast. I was looking out at the narrow boats on the Lea navigation, watching a rowing team from the boat club and the odd cyclist powering past, and thinking how inexpressibly wonderful it was that I no longer felt the need to beg someone - anyone! - to find a relatively painless way to cut off my head.

It had started, very suddenly, five days before. I had a friend to stay. I was making her a cup of coffee in the kitchen. As I punched the capsule into the coffee machine, I felt a wave of nausea ripple through me.

I sank into the nearest chair. I clasped my forehead. I clutched my stomach. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not feeling… er, actually, I’m just going to have to nip to the bathroom.”

I raced up the stairs. My friend had to rush off for a medical appointment and said her goodbyes as I vomited up whatever was left of the previous night’s roasted seabass and lemon potatoes.

For the next four days I lay in bed, with the curtains closed and a wet flannel over my face. When I could bear it, I listened to podcasts. When I couldn’t, I tried to bury my face in the pillows in a way that would exert maximum pressure on my forehead in the hope that somehow, miraculously, the pressure would calm the red hammers in my head.

It didn’t.

Meanwhile, my body seemed to be following some kind of emergency edict I certainly didn’t issue. “Evacuate, evacuate”.

It did.

Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Chris Mason, Adam Fleming, Jon Sopel, Lewis Goodall and Hugo Rifkind were my key companions in my darkened dungeon. Why so many men? No idea. But politics podcasts are mostly men. So is politics. So is power. But let’s park that for the moment. One of my brighter hours (well, 46 minutes to be precise) was when I switched to the TLS podcast: two sparky women, Alex Clarke and Thea Lenarduzzi, grilling guests about a new opera of Moby-Dick at New York’s Met and a new book about Croydon.

Most of the time there was silence, broken only by my groans and by Anthony’s increasingly anxious offers to “get me something”. I think he meant food or drink, to which the answer was no, not now, not ever, not ever, ever, ever again. I began to think longingly of the ceremonial sword sitting above me in a pile of old duvets in the loft. It was given to my father when he joined the Foreign Office in 1955. I have no idea why, since he spent his entire career behind a desk, but it could, I thought, come in very handy now. We’d watched Wolf Hall. We’d seen how that beefy man hadn’t waited for Anne Boleyn to kneel at the scaffold, but had, with one quick flick, taken her by surprise and sent her beautiful head tumbling to the floor.

That’s the way to do it. Gory, but efficient. Unlike the pack of howling hyenas who were clearly going to spend the rest of their lives fighting in my head.

Anne Boleyn, brilliantly played by Claire Foy in the BBC adaption of Wolf Hall. I have never wanted to be her before.

On the third day, I didn’t rise again. I told Anthony that perhaps he could find a chemist that was open. He did and the chemist said I should see a doctor, but it was a Sunday and the doctors resteth and I couldn’t move or leave the stable, I mean the bedroom, or more importantly the bathroom, and Anthony picketh up the phone and calleth 111 and after a very long wait, I spoketh to a young woman who had a very, very, very long list of questions. And then, after another long wait, I spoketh to a doctor at my local hospital or at least I did when I could speak because I was also crouched on the bathroom floor and continuing the emergency edict that someone had issued on my behalf.

And lo, the Angel Gabriel arrived, or perhaps it was a doctor, with another angel, or perhaps it was a paramedic, and they prodded me and looked into my eyes and placed a band of nylon around my veins, and stuck a thermometer in my ear, and told me that I was not expecting a messiah, but that I had been anointed with the Norovirus and that it did not usually last as long as this but that it sometimes did, and that I should take the tablets they were leaving me, which were not made of stone, and that all manner of things would be well. And if they weren’t, I should contact my doctor on Tuesday.

I’m sorry for the drift into cod-Biblical whimsy here, but I’m just trying to capture the slightly deranged state I felt I was drifting into as I battled those hammers, those hyenas and that entirely uncalled for emergency drill.

Anyway, the (non-stone) tablets helped a bit and by the fifth day, although I was still queasy, I could get myself under a jet of hot water and swap my pyjamas for leggings, trainers and a hoody and stagger out of the front door and down the road and then down another road and then past the Tesco Express and the green grocers which seems to be open 24 hours a day (which, our Turkish-Cypriot builder told us with a knowing wink, is not because people suddenly need carrots at 3am) and into Springfied Park and past the duck pond and down to the café next to the Lea navigation, which apparently is partly a river and partly a canal.

And there I drank tea and ate toast and thought I would burst with happiness because my head no longer felt as if it was going to explode. Sound the trumpets! Well, perhaps not yet. Sing the Hallelujah chorus, or at least a lullaby. I had taken up my bed and walked. I was blind and now I could see.

It was very, very nice to have that burst of euphoria because euphoria has been a bit thin on the ground in recent weeks. After a meeting the other day, I even got a call.

“I’m just checking you’re OK,” said the (very kind) woman at the other end of the phone. “My colleagues,” she added, “were concerned.”

I felt my cheeks go hot. What do you mean, I wanted to say, your colleagues “were concerned”? I’m 20 years older than most of them. I’m a journalist. I’m a pro. I’m used to covering tough stories and I’m also used to dealing with tough stuff in my life. When I had cancer the first time, for example, I didn’t even tell most of my colleagues.

Of course I’m fine, I wanted to say. I’m healthy. I’m happy. I have everything I could want. Everything’s fine. Apart, of course, from the fact that there has been a fascist coup in the world’s most powerful country and the world is now in the hands of a madman.

Oh, and the fact that the people who got him into power, and are supporting him in power, and who are trying to extend the coup to other countries, are now more powerful than any country and control not just most of the world’s digital communication but will also be in charge of AI, which is going to be the biggest revolution humanity has ever faced.

Which means, to put it crudely, that the lovely life that we in the West have enjoyed, which has allowed us to shape our world view according to facts, express ourselves freely in art and literature and poetry and journalism and live in relative peace and security for 80 years, looks, let’s just say, extremely time-limited.

But yes, apart from that I’m fine.

Here, to take a random example, are some of the things that the failed real estate agent at the White House and the piss-up-in-a-brewery he runs, have done this week:

· Remove every image of Major General Jeannie Leavitt, the first ever female fighter pilot, from the Pentagon.

Major Gen Jeannie Leavitt (photo taken from Tik Tok, which I’m not even on)

· Removed General Colin Powell, the first Black Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman, from a list of notable Americans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

· Sent people who have been convicted of no crime to rot in a prison in El Salvador and ignored a judge’s instruction to turn around the ship they were on.

· Stopped a French scientist travelling to a conference from entering the US because his phone apparently showed messages criticising the administration’s research policy.

· Been played by Putin and presented it as a win, which might make him feel better but certainly didn’t cheer up the Ukrainians, the Baltics, the Nordics or practically anyone in Europe.

· Authorised the Israeli prime minister to break a ceasefire agreement and massacre hundreds of women and children in order to keep himself out of prison.

I think we can all agree that none of this is ideal. That it is, in fact, enough to make you feel sick to your stomach.

And if you’re not following the situation in America, or not much of it, then what I say to you is: lucky you. And also: really?

This is what Kate Maltby said in her column in The i Paper this week:

“We are in many ways powerless, but we do have one choice. The choice to engage with the world, or to look away, offers more power than we know. Look back at historical surges of fascism – for Trump, we must surely all be clear by now, is behaving like a fascist in the White House – and you will find the stories of those who buried their heads in the sand, and those who acknowledged, even if only in private letters and local conversations, that they were living through unacceptable times. Fascism seeks to deny its anti-democratic nature and to reshape our reality; that is why Primo Levi, author and Auschwitz survivor, wrote of ‘bearing witness’ as an act of resistance to fascism itself."

This is what I think, too.

I relished that magical moment by the canal, when I had “evacuated” that nasty virus from my system. It wasn’t pleasant, but there was no other way and I felt as if I’d had a spring clean.

It will not be pleasant to evacuate the other virus, the one that has gripped the world’s superpower and which is trying to grip the world. It wasn’t pleasant gripping the Coronavirus that hit the world five years ago. It hasn’t gone, but its power has shrunk. I don’t know how or if we can weaken the grip of this one, but I do know that we must dredge our brains and search our souls to work out what we can each do to try.