The land of contagion
Illness, fairy tales, and a cat.
I'm ill. I've been ill for seven days now and I wish I could say clever things about it, Susan Sarandon-like* but I can’t because my brain is foggy, my body is feverish and frankly I feel like crap. It’s not Covid. It’s probably “just” the common cold. But the cold — actually about 200 different viruses — is common because it/they is/are very very good at infecting us. See also, the “common” rat/pigeon/cockroach.
* wrong Susan. Sontag. See, brain fog.
I have also been quiet because before I got ill I was in the last few weeks of writing my book. I’m still in the last few weeks of writing my book but I am slightly handicapped by see above brain fog. That is one thing I have learned this week: what brain fog actually is. Or might be. Depending on what kind of brain fog. Menopausal brain fog is probably due to reduced oestrogen reaching the right receptors. Viral brain fog is probably different. Lots of diseases cause brain fog and probably they have different ways of doing it. Lots of probablys when it involves the brain and viruses. Two major theories, summed up badly by me here:
the virus gets through the blood brain barrier and inflames anything it can find in the brain.
the virus gets through the blood brain barrier and messes with glutamate levels in the brain. You don’t want anything messing with glutamate levels in the brain, they have to be as precise as the Little Bear’s porridge in the Goldilocks fairy tale, and if they go awry, cells can’t communicate as well and things get foggy.
the virus doesn’t get through the blood brain barrier but screws up your nervous system which does.
Here is a whole BMJ article on brain fog and neurology.
And that is all I can manage to write about it. My head hurts.
Book review corner
I read Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, because someone on Twitterx recommended it. If it had been a printed book, I would not have finished it because after I had finished it and thought, god, that was long, I realised it was more than 500 pages. I did start reading it on Kindle, and felt I had read a whole book and looked at the percentage and it was only 30%.
I didn’t really like it. It was indulgent, not edited enough, and not as clever as it intended to be. A lot of it read like a sixth-former wrote it. A lot of it was just plain bad. I thought Stephen King was so good at writing he wrote about writing and people read that too. But this was poor. A shame and a disappointment. But it got me through a few days of illness so thank you Stephen for that.
Animal hero of the week: Chicco the cat
Chicco did not brave gunfire or survive violent river battles or save people from burning buildings. He just gave people pleasure by being a nice cat. He had a home and human guardians, but every day he headed for the old town of Memmingem in Bavaria (I don’t mean he travelled for leagues to get there from a city on a hill far away, he lived in Memmingem but not in the old town) and just hung out here and there. You could encounter him in cafés, bars, on benches, anywhere he felt like curling up and snoozing and being a nice friendly cat.
He was so popular, he had his own Facebook group called Chicco: A cat from Memmingem. He was known as Stadtkater (Town Cat) despite not actually being a Town Cat but a Cat With A Home And Who Was Fed And Who Had A GPS Tracker.
Chicco died earlier this year, aged only five, and the town has honoured him accordingly, with shrines…
and now with a crowd-funded €4,000 statue.
All that money for a random cat?
A Facebook user wrote, “What Chicco achieved in his short cat life — making people smile — that’s something some humans never achieve in a lifetime.”
Not sure that’s true: you’d have to try extremely hard to spend a whole lifetime without making even a child smile, but still, the thought is nice.
Auf wiedersehen, Stadtkater.