Your ‘end of summer cold’ may be something far worse

I was only thinking recently how long it had been since I'd been ill. Oh, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: fast forward to last Monday, and I was knocked flat by Covid-19 - like it's 2020, all over again.

- VICTORIA RICHARDS

Fast forward four more days, and I've got just about enough energy to walk upstairs, but I have to have a little rest along the way. I also have a cough that's making me bend double through wheezing, hacking fits, a streaming nose, sore eyes, a headache and a constant temperature - you know, the type where your skin feels so sensitive to touch that even the insides of your ears, hurt? That.

I am also having the kind of dreams you usually only have after you've worked your way through an entire cheeseboard at Christmas. On the first night, I dreamed I fell out of an aeroplane and woke myself up in a shuddering halt by shouting “...it’s just a dream!” - and that was a good night. I remember this from the first round of Covid five years ago, too.

I was meant to be getting the Tube into town on Thursday, though, to spend all day working in a newsroom full of people. So, in a move that made me feel like I'd suddenly been transported back to five years ago, when the pandemic first hit, I asked a friend to pop out and grab me a Covid test.

I don’t think I would even have thought of testing if the symptoms hadn’t felt so darn similar to the days of Omicron and Delta - after all, I have been recently training for a 10k run at the end of the month, so I am used to bits of my body protesting when I get out of bed in the morning. But this time, I felt like I'd been run over.