Being sick was bad enough, but did everyone else need to be so jolly?

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

January 16, 2026 — 11.09am

On Christmas Day I felt a dullness, a something’s-not-rightness. On Boxing Day, this viral overture launched into fatigue and a tightness of chest and a cough that, like the villain in a horror flick giggling while unsheathing the knife, started as a tickle and landed as a punch running from sternum to spine.

Suddenly, I’m in a beach town flat on my back with a chest infection and flu. And my world would be made entirely of those enervated contemplations that usually only ooze from nursing home windows if the town were not celebrating Christmas, the New Year, holidays, summer days, the annual compulsory high. I can hear fun ... out there ... somewhere.

The sick are illegal aliens during the festive season, unwanted, unwelcome, a problem for winter, for June, not here, not now. They’re hidden away and forgotten so that celebration isn’t damaged by their presence. And to a sick person secreted in a celebrating town, nothing quite makes sense. The gaiety off-stage that leeches into your sickroom – all its laughter, scents, and beats, are a strange music to the sick.

The merriment I hear drifting from various parts of the hillside I’m lying on is a tune from long ago and a place once known, half-remembered, a sort of cruel nostalgia that signals a game of keepings-off with happiness as the prize. How unnecessary, even sacrilegious, is the sound of laughter now, heard from between these sweat-sodden sheets. And how cheap – the young honking it out wholesale, as if it was as limitless as trees or fish once were.

I lie fatigued, a witness hidden amid heedless festival, with barbecues huffing sausage smoke and people dancing on decks across the hillside, arguing over playlists, drunk-singing along with artists that, it’s chastening to realise, I don’t know. This is what it’s like to die at a party, to be a human sacrifice strapped to a rock while the dance approaches climax. This is what it is to be the death’s-door elder – the whole tribe shuffling its feet, impatient to move on – you’ve only got to do this one thing to set them free.

Sickness is a window into senescence – you can glimpse the other side of The Styx from my sickbed. A friend texted an offer to bring round chicken soup, but I’d had her soup before – any chicken would be heartbroken to die for such misadventure. “Save the chickens,” I texted back – meaning, “save the Ansons”.

The medico son-in-law who put me on antibiotics scowled at the scotch in my hand one evening. It was the only thing giving me half an hour of shaky resurrection each day. “If that’s alcohol, I’ll throttle you,” he said. A barefaced refutation of the Hippocratic Oath, but he wasn’t on the clock, I suppose. “What?” I replied. “Oh, this? This is apple juice.” It was the first time I’ve lied about drinking since I was 15. It felt good. The scotch tasted sweetly illicit.

People my age come to realise it’s not only right but necessary to lie to the young. We are a type of auto-fiction created to camouflage ourselves so that they can’t really know us. If you let them see the real you, if you wise them up to all your aches and befuddlement – why, they’ll lock you up in a minute, for your own good, of course, and be driving around in your Mercedes AMG S 63 just to keep its battery charged.

I was taking 26 pills a day. The instructions on their boxes was pharma-jargon – so midwifing the pallid little darlings from their foil wombs and sluicing them down on a wave of juice was an act of faith in higher learning. But then, so much of what we now do every day is. I swallowed approximately 180 pills not really knowing if there was efficacy aboard any single one of them. And I sipped my nightly “apple juice” – just as a memento of easy times.

After a week on the precipice came a moment one evening when I was standing frail in the kitchen holding a piece of soggy toast I’d been gnawing like a toddler does a rusk. Four young adults were in the room, all hoping I’d piss off back to bed ASAP and let them get on with being young in summer. I made a joke, just by reflex, and they all laughed. The sound surprised me – it was real again, laughter, and I had a sudden feeling there was more life to come.

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