Covid has made our family a talking point – and cured me of Twitter

There are few consolations to Covid, but it is at least interesting having a celebrity disease. We’ve become objects of fascination to friends and family who’ve not yet had it, and who’ve taken to quizzing us on our symptoms as if they’re small-town yokels who’ve heard we’re in Disneyland.One small mercy of Covid’s lethargy is that it has reduced – though not ceased – my Twitter use, since focusing on backlit screens has been taxing, and it’s surprising how much my brain has enjoyed the break from doom scrolling. Luckily, others are on hand to inform us of every new stat, graph and grim tiding.Weirdly, I’d not noticed that every single person I know has spent the past year doing a correspondence course in epidemiology and each now knows more about the symptoms – our symptoms – than we do. At every stage, and with something not entirely disconnected from glee, we’ve been reliably informed that the worst is probably yet to come. On Day 4, I was solemnly informed, ‘Day 5 is where it gets messy,’ and a few days later: ‘Beware day 8.’ Having now regained just a little get-up-and-go around day 14, I was today reminded that,…
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