Who's the Daddy: Spending Christmas with Covid

It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest. We spent it in self-isolation with just enough energy to pick at our dinners on Christmas Day.

The roast potatoes were cooked in olive oil, garlic and rosemary, but we couldn’t taste it. We might as well have done them in satsuma scented body butter and twigs and nobody would have been any the wiser. Like most family Christmases in normal times, we’re up and down the motorway visiting family, sleeping on floors like the Duvet Know It’s Christmas thing that does the rounds on Twitter every year, when your family of four dosses down in a box room at your mum’s.

This year was different. Our family and friends rallied round with food parcels and offers to walk our sighthound Walter. You’ve no idea how much your help was appreciated. I’ll say one thing for catching Covid for Christmas, it doesn’t half cut down on traditional festive rows. Nobody’s got the stomach for them. With energy levels through the floor, big afternoon sleeps were the order of the day.

If any of you reading this were startled awake at 4am to shrieks of “HE’S BEEN!!!!” from wired toddlers then I feel your pain. We’ve paid our dues in Christmases past but last Friday we rolled out of bed at 10am, our grown-up daughters about half an hour later, and we swapped presents in the most civilised manner imaginable. There’s a lot of bad things about Covid. Just when you think you’re on the mend, it can suddenly feel like someone’s unplugged you. Then there’s the coronavirus equivalent of Baby Brain, or early onset dementia, depending on your age. Trying to think straight is like doing a wordsearch in the postdrome stage of a migraine.

In short, there’s nothing nice to say about Covid. And we suffered the mildest of symptoms. Anyone who says “it’s just flu” is, quite frankly, talking out of their holes.

All that we had was a rotten Christmas. But, fingers crossed, there’ll be others. A lot of people weren’t so lucky.