Whooping cough didn’t appear to worry the NHS
It seems clear that the chest infection that floored me for a whole month was whooping cough. The epidemic is surging through London: many people I know have been out of action for weeks, and we all have a vicious damn cough that refuses to shift.
At its zenith, mine was so violent I was sleeping almost upright yet still gasping for breath until, at 3am, I’d drag myself downstairs to boil a kettle and inhale a vat of Vicks-scented steam. I should add, I don’t have a “weak chest” and Covid bounced off me three times. But this was quite frightening and my lungs only feel at two-thirds capacity now.
Given whooping cough is not only debilitating for adults but fatal for infants — five babies have died this year — I’m baffled by the NHS’s apparent indifference. I fell ill in early April. By early March, according to the UK Health Security Agency, there were already 1,319 confirmed cases and concerns that this would be a peak year.
Yet my GP didn’t mention I might have this communicable disease, much less warn me to avoid contact with pregnant women. I’d assumed the one upside of a pandemic would be a more alert and co-ordinated approach to public health. Apparently not.
Scent-ral Line
One lingering consequence is I still don’t know what Argentina smells like. I can’t be the only person who disembarks after a long flight and inhales deeply at the aircraft door.
That olfactory rush of wet, lush vegetation when you land in Sri Lanka or Brazil; the faint tang of wood smoke in India and everywhere the thrilling scent of food being cooked that you’ve never eaten before. I even get excited detecting the different cleaning products used in foreign airports.
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But my acute sense of smell — my only superpower — has faded (along with my sense of taste), and I wonder if it will fully return? I walked the streets of Buenos Aires sniffing. Nada. So it was consoling to read a wonderful “aromatic Tube map” produced by the website Londonist that seeks to describe the distinct smell of each station.
Warren Street is “sooty milk”, Oxford Street is “hairdryer”, Lambeth North “extreme mouse”. The newer Jubilee Line, it argues, is more metallic than the older, rodenty Bakerloo. All very true. My one quibble is Leicester Square’s odour is described as “dog”. I’d say “fried onions and overfilled Hoover bag”.
Mod cons
I took a walking tour of south London which featured what is claimed to be the world’s first concrete house. This 1873 gothic pile on Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, perhaps designed as a rectory and now housing association flats, is grade II listed.
“Look at the cracks,” whispered my husband. Indeed, its mottled façade, like the Southbank Centre and Barbican, shows how badly concrete weathers compared with stone. An interesting house, but strange to preserve what marks the beginning of homes created in cheaper, nastier materials. Bricks are simply friendly to the eye: on another concrete house we looked at, with a Parisian mansard roof, someone had trompe-l’oeiled bricks on to the outer walls.
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Our tour guide also pointed out examples of a new modern eyesore: lovely old masonry repointed with white mortar so a house looks like a child’s drawing or a mouthful of veneers from The Only Way is Essex.
Bottle shock
There is no term to encapsulate the feeling after a long flight in which you are tired despite having merely sat for hours watching movies and grazing on snacks. I don’t mean jet lag, just that spacey, shaken-up sense of discombobulation.
But a friend who gave me Argentinian wine to take back to London warned me not to drink it for a few weeks because of “bottle shock”. This is a temporary condition caused by agitation of molecules, which makes a wine’s flavour muted or disjointed. I’d say bottle shock aptly describes people too.