A Scare and a Celebration Still On

It’s coming up to a year since my granddaughter became Mrs Victoria Mottram.

Victoria and I are dogged by bad timing. I was determined to be in Cambridge for her graduation, but the missus and I were on a plane coming home from Tenerife at the time and the pilot wouldn’t lend me a parachute.

Then I was determined to be at her wedding last year… but coronavirus got in the way and many people – including us – couldn’t go.

But this coming weekend, she is making up for that with a blessing and celebration, again in Cambridge, and I’m determined to be there.  I don’t see enough of her and her sister, Hannah, and nothing short of World War Three would get in my way.

Then disaster struck.

Over this last weekend I’ve felt quite manky. Nothing strange about that. I feel that way most days, but this time, my sense of smell changed. A couple of years ago, I’d have thought no more of it, but as we should all know, one of the first symptoms of Covid is a loss  OR CHANGE to your sense of smell. If this was Covid, I could forget Cambridge for the third time.

And yet, I was persuaded it was a touch of sinusitis, but the missus wouldn’t have it. We could not reasonably travel and mingle with a roomful of people if I was infectious. So yesterday, I tootled down to our nearest walk-in centre for a PCR test.

They give you the kit and you do the job yourself. The lad gave me the kit and said, where your tonsils are, rub it one side and then the other for five seconds each. My tonsils were removed in 1956.

Anyway, I got on with the job but my hands shake so badly (it’s old age) that I dropped the tickling stick and I had to start again.

Eventually, we got the job done, and waited for the result. A few hours they said. This was at quarter past three. When it hadn’t arrived by one this morning, I buggered off to bed. Her Indoors wasn’t talking to me anyway because the result hadn’t come through. Obviously my fault. But throughout the evening, I was preparing to deliver the news to Victoria and her husband, that I wouldn’t be there on Saturday.

At twenty five past seven this morning, the phone tweeted for an incoming text message. It was the result.

Negative.

I do not have Covid-19, it is (probably) sinusitis.

Cambridge here we come.