I’ve succumbed to the ‘it’s not Covid’ cold

Making it slightly easier to face the final week of this year’s Sober October is the news that Her Majesty The Queen has been advised to stop drinking for the rest of 2021 ahead of her busy Platinum Jubilee year.

The Queen’s favourite tipple is a dry martini, presumably made with Buckingham Palace gin. The Palace released its own brand of the spirit last year to raise money to conserve Her Majesty’s art collection. Apparently it’s made with ingredients from the Queen’s own gardens. I can picture her going round the flower beds with her secateurs, looking for suitable botanicals that haven’t been peed on by a royal corgi. It must be galling to have your own brand of gin yet not be able to drink it. Perhaps the Palace should release an alcohol-free version. I’ll suggest it to my boss Bella at our next office “thought shower”.

I haven’t been into the office this week because I’ve had that “it’s not Covid” cold that everyone’s been catching. It may not be Covid, but it’s definitely one of the worst colds I have ever experienced and I think I know why I succumbed.

My neighbour Brenda’s mega-freezer has been causing much consternation on the street, parked up as it is in her front garden rather than in her kitchen. She bought the freezer so she could stock up for Christmas/ Armageddon having watched one too many Tory ministers being “reassuring” on the news. And who could blame her? If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that whatever this government says is going to happen, the truth is usually more or less the opposite.

Alas, the freezer will not fit through Brenda’s door and, while it has been standing in front of her house linked to a power socket by a precarious arrangement of extension leads, we’ve had a number of short but annoying power outages. They may not be linked to the freezer but it’s hard not to wonder…

An anonymous tip-off led to a visit from a council officer who suggested that Brenda might want to make other cold storage arrangements. Faced with having to find homes for a couple of dozen chickens (deceased), Brenda asked my advice. I put my PR hat on and suggested she throw a “chicken party” for the whole street. Back at the beginning of the first lockdown, a party to celebrate our return to normality was a popular suggestion on the street WhatsApp group. It hasn’t materialised, though I suppose you could argue that we’re still a long way off being back to normality. Unless it was normality 1978 we were aiming for.

Brenda vetoed the chicken party on the grounds that the person who had grassed her up to the council might be among the people queuing up for a drumstick. None of the charities I could think of wanted to take frozen fowl of an uncertain provenance – there was no guarantee it had been kept at a safe temperature, especially with the outages. So Brenda fitted as much chicken as she could into her indoor freezer, sacrificing some vintage Tupperware containers of unidentifiable meat-based stuff to make space. I took four to put in my freezer, which she promised to fetch as soon as she could. The builders working on the controversial conversion on the street west of ours took two each on the promise that they would fix Brenda’s loose guttering in return.

With the chickens all flown, Brenda turned off the freezer and was at last able to pull in the extension lead and close her living room window, just in time for the rain. However, the freezer caused as much trouble off as on. With no power to keep it hygienically cold, it must have started to whiff of the raw chicken it had once contained. As dusk fell, the neighbourhood foxes made their investigations and had a chicken party of their own. And did those foxes know how to party.

There’s nothing quite like being in bed, completely sober, listening to foxes arguing over how best to get the lid of an empty freezer open. After an hour of it, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I filled the squirty bottle I use for misting my houseplants with cold water and opened the front door. Or course, I couldn’t squirt water right across the road, so I got as near as I dared, leaving my front door open for a quick getaway if one of the critters decided to run at me. We’ve all read about urban foxes and their taste for human flesh. Fortunately, the foxes seemed much more scared of me than vice versa and they scattered at my approach. Unfortunately, one of them scattered straight past me, through my open door and up my stairs.

Awakened by the kerfuffle and my shriek of fury, Brenda came to investigate. She came with me as I tried to find out where the fox had ended up. On my bed, as it turned out. It stood firmly in the middle of my white duvet, daring me and Brenda to do something about it. Squirting it again was a mistake, merely driving it under the pillows.

“What can I do?” I asked.

Brenda, it seemed, had some knowledge of fox handling, having once found a vixen in her conservatory.

“You just have to leave it. Make sure its path to the outdoors is clear and wait until it decides to move.”

Which is how I came to spend the night sitting in my hallway with the front door wide open to the night, waiting for Mr Fox to make a dash for it. He didn’t make a dash for it. When he finally sauntered out at day-break, I went upstairs to discover a fox-shaped dip on my side of the bed.

“Strip the bed and Deet the entire house,” was Brenda’s advice. “Fleas.”

I stripped the bed and covered the room in a fine mist of nuclear-strength Jungle Formula. For the rest of the day, I kept all the windows open. I sat at my laptop wearing a puffa jacket and fingerless gloves but by the following morning, the world’s worst cold had set in.