The message from the NHS told me that my age and underlying conditions made me especially vulnerable to Covid-19 – infection would result in very serious illness. I was to go into complete isolation for 12 weeks, not even allowed to step outside my front door. There followed a period of living in a science-fiction film – arranging deliveries with people in masks and gloves, phone calls to remote stranded friends, who all said it was weird – and then everything settled into this endless day.
In 2012 I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told I had less than a year to live. The tumour was not amenable to surgery, and chemotherapy, with all its attendant suffering, could do no more than slow it down. I decided to accept death as a certainty, seek no miracle cures or second opinions, and spend my money. To wake every morning to that hopeless reality; to walk in crowded streets like a ghost, pitying the mortals around you; and still to have that steady knowledge in your solar plexus that your future is a universal blank. It was an extraordinary year.
Anyway, with a mighty bound, I was freed when, right at the last minute, surgeons at Addenbrooke’s hospital removed a tumour the size of a melon and weighing three kilos – and saved my life. Now time has gone by and I’m back in the world. Those months living in the certainty of death are like a fading dream.
But sometimes, when I was walking to the corner shop, I would watch the familiar houses going by, look down at my feet plodding beneath me, feel the breeze on my face and suddenly become aware of the absolute improbability of my being there. I should have been five years in my grave by now. It’s an ineffable feeling. To be. And there’s nothing to do but shake your head and keep on walking.
Now I’m locked in here. Where in all the world would I like to go when I’m set free? Down to my corner shop in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend, and maybe I can feel again that flash of bafflement and gratitude to be alive.
