Terry Prone: Quarantine quartets and Art Deco swimming pools in a cocoon era

UK prime minister Boris Johnson failed to use the surnames of the NHS staff when he praised them after hisrecovery.

DAY 22

I find Brown Thomas gift tokens. Unused. Amounting to roughly €100. I had to do sums because they’re tokens for £65 from 1999. But BT are a decent shower, right? They’ll honour them when the plague finishes, won’t they?

DAY 23

I have to postpone a most important familial Zoom because of a migraine aura. A migraine aura is a fascinating visual oddity which, in most sufferers, precedes the horror of a full-on migraine headache with all the nausea, isolation and general misery attendant thereon. I never get the headache, just the visual distortion, which, to look on the bright side, can be fun. Briefly.

Mine comes in the shape of a kidney-sized swimming pool, decorated all around the rim in Art Deco black and white. Beautiful, it is. The only disadvantage is that you can’t drive (not that I could drive, anyway, at the moment) see a computer screen, read or Zoom, because the Art Deco swimming pool floats between you and everything else. Even if you try to surprise it, you can’t see above or below or around it, and if you try to catch it out while someone else is watching you, they think you have a lot worse wrong with you than a migraine aura.

Nobody pushes the herb fever few as a cure/preventive of this, because nobody can make money from something already in the public domain, but some clinical trials have proven it to be markedly effective, so I take a couple of capsules and 29 minutes later, the swimming pool is gone.

Of course, the reason it’s happening is that I couldn’t get my regular Botox injections at Easter. I’d never notice were it not for the migraine aura. I didn’t start on the Botox cycle to prevent the swimming pool. I started it to prevent my forehead having the distinctive contours of an expertly ploughed field. The migraine aura prevention is a benign — and frequently observed — unintended consequence.

Add to the list of great things you’re forced to miss during a pandemic: Visiting a clinic to be stabbed multiple times in the face at a high financial cost.

DAY 24

Boris Johnson has been released, not just from intensive care, but from hospital. He’s on his way to Chequers to have a bit of a rest for himself, which may be the best thing he can do right now because it minimises other damage in which he might have agency and provides a good example to wannabe Covid-19 survivor-heroes eager to get back into battle.

He does, however, manage to issue a statement praising the NHS to the skies and listing lots of its staff in his declarations of gratitude. Including two nurses, one male, one female. One New Zealander, one Portuguese. And only a first name attributed to either.

Bit like the radio ad for a couple of Irish garages, understandably not being aired right now, which features the voices of about four guys, each with a surname and title, followed by one female. She has a title, OK. She’s the receptionist. But she doesn’t have a surname. Interesting, that, as an example of backhanded casual disregard. Of course, I hear you say, when we use only first names, it’s because we feel affectionate towards the person involved. No. Not so.

However, if you want to fight me hard on this, you might also claim that Boris

was protecting the privacy of the two nurses nearly identified. Again, I have to tell you no. Not so. Their identity was established within hours of the statement’s issuance. Give everybody a surname, no matter what their gender, nationality, race or colour, and we’ll all be grand.

DAY 25

The lovely Jennifer is possessed of a regal calm, so when I do not hear from her, having sent her a script to be thumped into visual shape for the first of three webinars I’ve been commissioned to deliver, I figure she is overwhelmed.

However, the same Jennifer is possessed of perfect manners, so I feel a tad let down when, three hours after I email her with the script, she has not responded in any way. Even though it’s only 9.45 am, I lose patience and text her. “Did you get my emails?”

Within a moment, a text redolent of restraint arrives in my phone. “No,” it says. “It’s a bank holiday. I haven’t opened my laptop today. I’ll check now.” Does morto even begin to describe me?

DAY 26

The reflex kicks in on waking — rescue inhaler. Under pillow. Sit up, let air out of lungs, activate inhaler, breathe, wait for relief. Relief is half-hearted. I try the steroid inhaler and consider things. I cannot have anything you might call BAD bad, because I’d hardly know a human if I met one, it’s been so long. Not an infection, then.

Fog? No. Allergy to dusty old house/cats? Hardly. Nothing has changed. Time to get up and work, even if the accompanying lung noises — akin to a string quarter playing Shostakovich insistently and badly — are a distraction. Then it hits me. The outlying factor. Insomnia.

The previous night, when wearied of circling the same repetitive dreads for the umpteenth time, I took melatonin and it did what melatonin always does. It induced sleep. I search and sure enough, a handful of recent studies end with recommendations to physicians to warn their asthmatic patients of this possible downside of the hormone.

I dispose properly of three hundred and seventy nine expensive 3mg tablets. Well, OK, I’m guessing at the number. Isolation boredom hasn’t hit the point where I’m hand-counting hormone pills.

DAY 26

My son, after a visit where the two of us bellow at each other in a friendly way through treble glazing and a typhoon, does a final yell telling me he touched the black bin so I will need to delouse it. Once he’s gone, I don’t. I figure by the time I need to use it, even the most hardy viruses will have lost out to the weather here.

DAY 27

My iPad confides that I’ve spent, on average, every day, seven hours and 23 minutes looking at it this week. My iPhone says I did an average of 2 hours and 30 minutes. Ten hours a day. This cannot be true, since I also read seven books. And ate and slept (for the most part) soundly. And — now you ask — showered every day at length. It doesn’t add up and I reject the possibility of paying attention to it. It is a technological glitch.

I do, however, cave in and disinfect the wheelie bin. I’m no good at lying, and if my son checked up on me, he would quickly do that raised eyebrow/clamped mouth thing signifying I am a moron. It’s so familiar to me, that expression, even if I couldn’t see it, I’d see it.