For the last three days I have been sick, not ill, not poorly, not unwell, these are words that just don’t occur in Ireland, we had only one word for it : sick.
In the last twenty or thirty years I have had various diseases, some of which ended up with me being in hospital but the last time I remember being sick like this was in January in 1972, 35 years ago(I remember the date because it was in bed, listening to my transistor radio, that I heard about the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin) when, staying with my sister in Dublin I had Quinsy.
This has plainly become a most unfashionable disease, when is the last time you ever heard of anyone having Quinsy?. The OED tells me that it is an inflammation of the tonsils so, presumably, it is the name and not the disease that has gone out of fashion.
On both occasions, then and the last few days, I had a fever and all those bizarre sensations that go with a fever, terror of cold, going to the bathroom from the bed being akin to slithering along ice, ridiculous sensitivity of the skin which felt abraded by anything rougher than a sheet and the bizarre sensation of cold, teeth chattering cold, when I was in fact displaying a temperature of 101F.
The nights were still more outrageous, the mind going off into realms somewhere between sleep and unsleep when the very sheets that constrained one had personalities, mainly evil, and time somehow became yet another character in the drama which my confused mind was playing.
In the middle of last night I woke up, drowned in sweat, and realised that, as in those wonderful Victorian novels, The Crisis had passed and I was now going to live.

One good thing about being sick is that one becomes ones own doctor.
There was going to be no way that I was going to count calories about meals and would happily have eaten melted butter off a spoon if I felt like it.
In the same way I stopped reading Anthony Beevor’s: The War for Spain (I will get back to it) and started to reread Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories.
I had only read this last Spring but, as it had been picked for our book club read I felt I should re-read bits in the unlikely scenario that I might not have enough to say at the book club meeting next week.
This was an extremely good decision.
Untold Stories is a compendium volume of various pieces of biography, journalism, plays and diaries written by Bennett over the last few years.
I suppose that, in modern terms, he is near as we are likely to get to a 21st Century essayist.
He is also of course perfect sick in bed fodder as he can be picked up and read totally randomly.
This I did until I realised that, to my complete surprise, I had read the whole thing through again, for a second time, and within a year.

Here are a few random quotations,
from his diary:
“A letter from a reader comparing her experience of evacuation to mine. She was sent to Grantham and says that Alderman Roberts, Mrs Thatcher’s father was thought to be in the black market and that Maggie used to lean out the of her bedroom window and spit on the evacuees”
on finding himself lunching next to Pinochet and friends in a London restaurant;
“they were tucking into their fish this October afternoon, the murmur of polite conversation drowning the screams from the cellar”
his description of a primary school teacher;
“Miss Timpson is a thin, severe woman with grey hair in a bun and the kind of old lady’s legs, which seem to have gone out now, which begin on the far corners of the skirt and converge on the ankles.”

Bennett went through his life avoiding and form of “splother”. This was his Father’s world for anything that could be termed the very least bit showy.
This included, in Bennett’s case, a refusal of an honorary PhD. from Oxford, and a knighthood on the new years honours list, from the Queen.
The best words on his writing are perhaps his own description of the poetry of a man he much admired, Phillip Larkin;
“He writes with clarity and a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical.
He is always accessible, his language compact though occasionally arcane”

Good on you Alan, and thanks for helping me over the ‘flu!