This hasn't been an ordinary flu. It's one that heard me cough more times than maybe in the rest of my life, or that's how it seems -- endless.
I've had rounds of advice from family and friends -- everything from apple cider vinegar to tea and honey. As you can see from the photo, I've invested in just about every kind of cough drop in town, most of which were soothing, but only offered the most temporary ease.
One good thing about this bout of illness is that I've had to stay upright. Attempts at horizontal sleep nearly always failed. But as result of my enforced verticality, combined with an amazing lack of energy, I've been able to do a fair bit of reading.
Best catch-up read was Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last. I bought it last fall, but never even opened it until this month. The ending is a bit lame, a little too happy-happy for me, but most of the book with its too-believable scenarios kept me turning pages.
Less engaging was Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins. Although I may yet persevere, I gave up at page 86. And yes, I did read her previous novel Life After Life, which also took a while to understand enough to follow. This may be just a case of the same sort of wizardry on her part.
But my most fun reading discovery was a series of tiny messages -- not just the ones on fortune cookies (though we did read plenty of those as we relied on takeaway food more often than usual) -- but the ones on the wrappers of all those Hall's cough drops. Almost too small to notice at first, the tiny words offer various encouragements: "You can do it and you know it" or "Nothing you can't handle" or maybe my favourite (I'm translating from the French here) "Don't let yourself fall down," especially appropriate for the icy-deck mornings we've been having.
But now, back to heeding Tennyson's word, the one that follows after all those 'half a league's: Onward -- and please, with no more flu-ish distractions.
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