I nearly went for a jog on Wednesday. I say ‘nearly’. I was listening to Neil Hannon’s marvellous Duckworth Lewis album on my mp3, bounding along like a gazelle that’s eaten a bowling ball, when, as I passed the churchyard on the way to Blackheath... something went in my left leg. The calf-muscle, I think. It was there. Then it just went.
So a twenty-minute walk home, followed by a couple of days of making old-man noises whenever I have to climb the stairs. It doesn’t hurt except when I put my weight on it, which is fine except that’s what I tend to use my left leg for, fifty per cent of the time.
The worry now, of course, is whether this constitutes sufficient ‘underlying health problems’ for me to die of Swine Flu. It’s the phrase of the year. ‘Underlying health problems’. It’s the difference between life and death. Nobody quite knows what they are – they lie somewhere in the gap between having unplucked eyebrows and already being dead.
I should be okay. I don’t think having a mildly achey ankle which only hurts WHEN I REMEMBER is going to kill me. And I don’t smoke, I don’t take drugs, and I only drink alcohol because I like being ever-so-slightly drunk. That said, I’m not looking forward to this Swine Flu. Flu’s a swine at the best of times. I had it a couple of years ago, and before that I had it in 2003. I remember it distinctly, as I was laid up in bed listening to Big Finish’s Zagreus whilst enjoying mild dream-like hallucinations. I particularly remember the bit where William Hartnell turned up. At the end of my bed. In the nude.
