Today was a Covid day. That doesn’t really mean too much, because I get on with things. I’m not one of the people who can’t get out of bed. I had a bit of a headache when I woke up, and I was generally a little lethargic, but I got a few things done anyway.. The only notable thing about it is that today is Thursday March 20th 2025, and Thursday March 19th 2020 was the day when I woke up and realised fairly quickly that I must have caught Covid 19. It started with a headache akin to a mild hangover, and within an hour or two I was coughing. A dry tickly irritating cough, nothing throaty or phlegmy. The same cough that I have today.

That was the last day that I had to go in to work. It should have happened at least a week earlier, and probably more than that. London - world hub - DUH. I was working in a language school in the Centre. Imagine. Chinese first, and then Italians, surfing in on the crest of the Corona wave. How uncaring and incompetent do you have to be, as a manager of such a business, not to realise right from the start that you need to prepare to close the place down way ahead of the desperate last minute lockdown declared by the British government? Of course they didn’t care. The school I was working at was called Kaplan, but that name was a hangover from a previous owner. The actual owner was an American corporation called Graham Holdings. A pretty unprincipled bunch, who tried to get me to sign a non-disclosure agreement at the end of a fairly ridiculous financial dispute which I was involved in against them, along with a few others. I did not sign, and I have no hesitation in mentioning them by name.

After that last morning in the school, and after learning for the first time in my life about Zoom, I went back home, into isolation from the housemates, and collapsed on the bed. Within a day or two, the distinctive symptom of early Covid developed - anosmia (I had to look that word up again!) - the loss of taste and smell. Weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. The Covid itself lasted for about two weeks, peaking at some point between days nine, ten and eleven, with a fever which mounted over a couple of days, but then thankfully broke. It was nothing dramatic compared to everything that was happening out in the hospitals. I didn’t have any breathing difficulties (although I do now, whenever the cough is really bad), and the weather was nice once I considered myself safe to go out in the streets. The other bit of good news was that the school gave up the pretence of continuing the classes. For approximately the same two weeks that I had the virus going through me, I had been “teaching” a class, consisting of two Saudis who had been too slow to get their tickets home. Of course it was a charade, and after a few days we were agreeing to stop after not even half an hour rather than going through meaningless motions for three hours. After a week and a bit they told me not to bother any more, and then everything officially closed down anyway.

The next two months were effectively a period of grace and healing, which I desperately needed, having just come out of an abusive relationship which had ended only half a year earlier and had left me in tatters. Every time I think of that, I am profoundly grateful that Covid didn’t happen a year earlier, and my heart goes out to anyone who was in that position during that time. However, there was a catch.

The fever had broken, the weather was lovely, I was on furlough, and lucky enough to have moved less than a month before the lockdown to Eltham, a part of London which had never previously bordered on my consciousness. I got really lucky there. It’s one of the greenest and loveliest parts of London’s sprawl, with a few fascinating little spots, which I had lots of time to discover, and which I may write about another time - not today, however, as I haven’t got to the crux of the tale. The catch.

The catch was that the cough never went away. I tried all the obvious and non-obvious things to deal with it (please don’t write in with suggestions - I’ve heard them all). All the cards on the table - I had been smoking quite heavily at the end of that aforementioned relationship. She was a smoker, and I got dragged in. It’s not an excuse for my weakness, but I was very stressed and depressed by the end, and the next fag was somehow the only thing that I could hang on to. That’s just how it was. However, I am quite sure that the smoking had and has nothing to do with my cough, and this was confirmed after various hospital tests confirmed that there was no significant damage to my lungs. In any case, the heavy smoking went on for little more than a year, at the most, and I haven’t touched the disgusting stuff since that relationship ended. The faintest whiff of it sends me off into a coughing fit now, and I can’t imagine how I was able to do it all that time.

A much more likely exacerbating factor, IMHO, is a mystery virus which I contracted in 2016, little more than a week after the BrexSHit result 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 If that’s not crazily symbolic in your imagination, you might be a computer. It was a much more dramatic virus than Covid, and easily the scariest one that I’ve had as an adult. I was in the pub with a friend, and started to feel a little weak (no, I had only had a couple), and then on the way home I started to cough dramatically, exactly the same cough that is still with me now. It came out of nowhere. It was followed by a very high fever (no idea how high, but high enough). And it lasted much longer than Covid. It was only after TWO weeks of antibiotics that it came under control, and the cough remained for nine or ten months. They never bothered to take a blood test, so I have no idea what it was. Bird flu, SARS, no idea. I did read about what was going around at the time, but can’t remember now.

Whatever any know-it-all doctor says, I can very easily say, from my experience, that the cough which suddenly came upon me that night in June 2016 is the same cough as I’m still going through now, just like the pain that I get in my left knee when I move my leg into an awkward position is exactly the same as the pain that I first felt at the age of eleven, when I was tearing at least twice a week down the right wing of football fields and twisting on that knee. But doctors in this country aren’t very much in the habit of listening, and so any possible link between the viruses of 2016 and 2020 has never even been discussed. They never did anything about my knee, by the way. They just told me to go cycling or swimming instead of trying to play sports in which I needed to twist on my knee. As Basil Fawlty says in one of the classic episodes: That was your life, Mate!

It is quite incredible to relate that I’ve been coughing pretty much every single morning for five years, and yet in all that time no doctor in this country has had the sense to shine a light and look down my throat. It took a trip all the way to Brazil for that to happen. It was a friend of the friends that I was staying with in Porto Alegre who looked down my throat. He was actually a paediatrician, not an ear nose and throat specialist, but it’s not hard to hold a torch and ask someone to open their mouth. He saw signs of a red mark down there, and said that it could be caused by the Covid, but there’s no way to be sure. What else could he say? That’s fair enough, and it’s certainly a lot more than I’ve ever had from a doctor in this country.

OK, that’s more or less the whole story. I cough pretty much every morning, and on a really bad day I’m still coughing before I sleep. The good thing is that the cough at least goes away when I sleep, but then it doesn’t take very long before it starts upon waking. It normally kicks off before I get out of bed, and that’s why I normally tend to lie there without moving for a bit, just to have a little calm before it starts. There are also some really bad days when it’s more than just the cough, and when my whole body crashes. It’s like the way your body feels when you’re getting flu, except that it’s only for a few hours, a day at max. Fortunately that only hits me every couple of months on average. Nonetheless the effect of it can feel pretty dramatic.

I’m not writing this to get anyone to feel sorry for me. I don’t especially feel sorry for myself. Every Saturday I meet Ukrainians who had to leave everything, at little more than 30 minutes’ notice in some cases, and they’re getting on with things. So am I, but I need people to understand how this changed my life. It’s been greatly commented (not enough, I would argue) that people didn’t want to talk about Covid once the worst of the panic was over. I understand, but pretending it never happened is of course disrespectful to those of us who were left with scars. I’m sure that many readers may know someone who’s worse off from it than I am, but the wrinkle for me has been professional. If you don’t know anything about teaching English to foreigners, you probably won’t realise that it involves directly and physically modelling the langauge to people. Difficult to do when you’re coughing all over them. Nobody wants to be in that scene, and so I’ve been trying to change my life around. I’m still teaching a bit, most prominently over the last two years with those aforementioned Ukrainian refugees in Manchester. I’ll be happy to do a bit more, and if you follow the links on this site, you’ll see another site which will help me find more of that kind of work (once it’s completed - soon 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼). But I hope my story is clear enough that the reader will understand why I can’t go back to teaching full time, and why I’ve taken all this time up until now to build myself into something new. Go ahead and take a little tour around the websites, some of which will take a little more time to get working, and tell me that I’m not on the case.

I guess we’re now full steam ahead into a war economy anyway, thanks to a small group of seventy-year-old tossers, who all talk to each other and who know exactly what they’re doing at the expense of the rest of us. I’ve been mentally prepared for it for the last three years (there will be a link to a future post about Ukraine and all of that here soon), so maybe someone will soon have the good sense to put me to work on something that will really make a difference. I’ll be happy to get involved, as long as they understand my limits. I would like a better health service in return for my future efforts, and I think many would concur with that sentiment.