Waiting

When I was walking back from the Covid testing center on Thursday I passed these dogs, parked in front of Tesco, patiently awaiting their owner. I would be way too nervous to leave Olga standing outside a shop, especially without tying her up -- but these two seemed to know what they were doing. I watched them for a few minutes and they didn't budge.

This is a good metaphor for my life at the moment. I'm waiting too. Biding my time until this bug runs its course and I can rejoin the world.

I felt better yesterday than the day before, so maybe that's a good sign. I'm surprised how much this is in my nose and my throat. My main symptoms have been sore throat, sneezing and a sort of stuffy nose with mild head and face pain. One of my co-workers who had Omicron over winter break told me the same thing -- it's not really in the chest as much as you'd expect, based on what we've all read about Covid. Maybe that's why Omicron isn't as severe.

The NHS prodded me yesterday to complete their exhaustive test-and-trace questionnaire, which asked me where I'd been in the week or so leading up to my positive test. Fortunately, aside from work, I hadn't been much of anywhere -- with the exception of last Saturday, when I walked the Green Chain and went to a movie. This was well before I showed any symptoms and in fact Dave wasn't even sick at that point, so I don't think I was infectious -- and I was masked. But I still dutifully listed all the places I'd been that day -- the tube, the train, the cinema, a sandwich shop.

I'm not sure how they'll use that information -- surely they can't tell who was sitting in the cinema with me, or in the same train car? Maybe it's more a matter of tracking people's behavior to get a big-picture sense of how and when Covid might spread. Anyway, I answered all their questions and more power to 'em.

Then they prodded me to enter my test results into the test-and-trace app, which among other things keeps track of my isolation period. So I did that too.

Otherwise, I spent the day reading and finishing "Shuggie Bain." It was a very good book, and the writing was beautiful. My only quibble is that it is so unrelentingly bleak in its descriptions -- unrealistically so, it seems to me. It's about a boy growing up with an alcoholic mother on a housing estate in Glasgow in the 1980s, and I understand that it was a very deprived area with a lot of people (particularly coal miners) out of work. But every front garden is asphalt, every wall is moldy, every person is slovenly (aside from the alcoholic mother, who hides her disabling addiction behind a facade of poise and rhinestones). I mean, surely someone grew flowers on this housing estate? Surely someone kept a decent home and not all the kids were violent monsters?

Granted, I never went to a Glaswegian housing estate in the 1980s, so perhaps the author's insight is greater than mine.

Dave and I are at a crossroads with our evening TV viewing. We started the fourth season of "Ozark," but talk about bleak! All the characters in that show are so awful I'd just as soon they all die. I'm not sure we'll get through it. Last night we started a Korean zombie romp called "All of Us Are Dead," which is entertaining but bloody (of course). We watched "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," a Netflix thriller parody that was good right up until the last episode, when it suddenly got incredibly stupid.

I abandoned "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" after the second season, so the show I'm most enjoying at the moment is "Seinfeld." We watch it every night.