In which your narrator gets a stomach bug
Hello. This man has been feeling, well, sorry for himself.
This email is a day late, which isn't so bad in the grand scheme of newsletters. But most of my week has been a write-off due to a particularly unpleasant stomach bug. It began ominously on Wednesday afternoon as I gamely tried to stay logged into work video calls, and by that evening I was able to describe in minute detail the tiling pattern of our bathroom floor.
The nadir came on Friday morning, where I had spent my second night in a row sleeping on the sofa (to spare my partner from constant night-time disturbance). I heard the now-familiar crash on the floorboards from the room above which signified my almost-five-year-old son erupting from sleep. As his feet padded down the stairs towards me I groggily looked at my phone to see just how early this wake-up call was happening.
He bounded into the room, flicking on the light as I writhed and grimaced, and it turned out he'd come prepared. He pointed his kid's tablet at me, armed with his newly-discovered camera app, and took a photo of me at perhaps my lowest ebb of the year so far:
I resolved to stop wallowing in self pity from this moment and just... get better. I'd previously been cautiously eating the safest of foods: white rice, unseasoned noodles, plain toast. On Friday morning, though, I rolled off the sofa, pulled out a frying pan, and made myself a bacon sandwich – washed down with a can of coke and followed by a Creme Egg chaser. Incredibly, I managed to keep it all down for a good four or five hours, which I felt sure meant the end of my bug.
It wasn't to last: as I got into bed on Friday night I felt that familiar tingling feeling in my belly and my heart sank. An hour later I was back on the sofa, anxious with worry that this was never going to go away.
The fightback
I'm typing this twenty four hours later, where I've managed to rally once more against whatever strain of bacteria visited this chaos upon me. I'm pretty confident now that it's not a false dawn like yesterday, but I might find myself cursing this optimism when I turn in for bed later this evening.
Still, though, it made me think about the propensity for men to exaggerate the depth of their illnesses. We all know about "man flu", and similarly I'm not the first person to have gastroenteritis. But coupled with the fact that this week is half-term and my unfortunate partner has had to look after both kids pretty much solo (while I've been studying the bathroom), it's hit hard. I've felt guilty for being ill because I'm not pulling my weight... which I don't think aids recovery.
Sometimes, maybe all you need is a precocious kid with a camera to remind you that this too shall pass.
Mini feels this week
Never judge a book by its cover
My friend Nathan texted me a few days ago to remind me of back in 2003 when (as 17 year olds) I told him how disappointed I was to see a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video and realise they were "old men". Californication came out in 1999 and I had to do some depressing maths to figure out how old the band were when they made it. 37, 38, 38 and 29, it turns out. Nathan and I are both 37. I felt humbled.