I’d somehow managed to dodge it for more than two years and a half, but at last the plague caught me – or, in other word, I caught Covid at last. I suppose it was just a matter of time – and that I caught it at the theatre was just as inevitable as it was fitting.

Last Friday, more or less from one moment to the next, I found myself with a very sore throat and a temperature above 39° C. Within hours a rather fierce cough and a cold joined the company – and there I was.

There followed four days of tossing and turning and coughing and that unsettling condition of being always sleepy and yet sleeping very little… All I could do was lie there in as much isolation as I could manage, and read. What I actually understood of what I read, is anyone’s guess.

And, beside the worry about keeping well away from my family downstairs (bless large houses!), you know what I kept thinking? Those of you who are writers will know: I kept thinking of my schedule gently crumpling hour after hour. My poor Draft 0 that I so hoped to finish by the end of the month – but now… I did have my red TWBook3 notebook on my nightstand, and even took a note or two now and then, if anything remotely useful happened to occur, but you know, fever-fueled thoughts and all that. Mostly the red notebook sat there unused and glared at me, an unmissable reminder that I was lagging behind. And all the more because I’d been procrastinating lately, and perhaps, if I hadn’t, things would be in a different case now – but…

And yes, I also managed to miss a dress rehearsals and two performances of a play – but that was well on its way when I disappeared, and there was no real need of my presence. Draft 0, on the other hand…

Ah well.

I’m back to my study, this morning – still very much masked, and by a circuitous route that will keep me out of anyone else’s way – to take advantage of the fever-less hour for this post and some little work on Tom W. Take up things again, see whether I can make sense of… shall we call them the Feverish Notes? And the situation, right now, looks like this: at best, if I manage to work seriously for the rest of the week, I can hope to end July with something half-way between a very detailed outline and the draft I hoped to have. I suppose it’s something. I suppose it could be worse. I suppose I’d better go and work, rather than whine about it.

So… Off I am. Draft 0, I’m back. More or less.