About As Lively as Dracula

Whitby no-swim report, 6/28/2024

It’s been a week of minor personal disasters—I was going to type a few weeks but the calendar makes it clear: just one bad week. Not even. Last Friday I swam, and later I went to an excellent jazz listening room with my dear pal Maury; Saturday morning I woke up feeling terrible. I haven’t been entirely well since (though I am better). Sunday I pulled myself together and drove to Round Top, Texas, to watch my kid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put on through the remarkable Camp Shakespeare; my kid was Peter Quince. I tested myself for Covid ahead of time, of course, just in case I had some oddball rebound case.

Monday she and I flew to Edinburgh, where we were not met by our luggage but instead had a lovely conversation with a nice, lonely man working in lost luggage who’d invited us into the office. I always feel for people who work in jobs where they’re likely yelled at; I worked at the circulation desk of a public library off and on for many years, and while I was surely yelled at less often than this man, it did happen. He talked to us of his school years in North Yorkshire, where we were headed; behind us, an American man tried to get somebody’s attention by saying, “Goddammit!” When a different baggage claim guy approached him, he said, “NO GOLF BAG.” I don’t know whether he’d forgotten that they speak English in Scotland, or if fury had demolished his vocabulary. Soon enough we were on our way.

I had been feeling all right but as we drove the two and a half hours to pick up the other half of our party, my ball-and-chain and our older kid (they’d been walking Hadrian’s Wall), I began to wonder what kind of pillows our house in Whitby would have. Many years ago in Berlin, my beloved late brother-in-law James came to visit us, and we’d been out all day, and he was exhausted, and we headed to the American Academy in Berlin where we were staying, and he said, out of nowhere and with passion, “I wish the pillows weren’t square.” I’d never realized that I, too, imagine my pillows for the night when I am tired. Now I always think of Jamie when I do.

I’m proud of my ability to switch sides of the road when driving—that was no problem—but we had a few GPS glitches, which is how I ended up driving through the Tynemouth Tunnel three times in one day. We found the Grand Tynemouth Hotel, where our walkers had been staying, and our walkers themselves and reunited, and then I had a Flake 99, which, because I was sleep deprived, I found hallucinogenically delicious. We made it to Whitby. I met my pillows, and they were good.

I have a cough. It reminds me of a cough from my past, when I coughed and coughed and occasionally vomited from coughing: it was summertime, and I was teaching in Iowa City, and I vomited into a bush and thought, Poor bush. I know it’s not the first time for you. So yesterday morning I went to a walk-in clinic, where I met the first NHS person I haven’t been in complete admiration of, a nurse practitioner—perhaps the first unadmirable nurse practitioner I have ever met!—who was that most dreadful thing: a man who thinks he has a sense of humor. He told a long story about being on a transatlantic flight (he had clearly told it many times) upon which there was a passenger in distress, and the “dreaded question” came over the intercom, and he and his wife slunk down in their seats so as not be bothered. His proud mother-in-law ratted him out. The story went on some time, and featured a not-very-sick woman and the line, “Sir, you are in charge of this airplane now.”

When he was finished, he squinted at my blood pressure reading—he’d been taking it—and said, “Is that usual? Perhaps I should stop talking.”

Reader, he did not stop talking, though my next blood pressure reading was much better. He let me go by telling me that he likes to let the body work things out itself, and is against the suppression of coughs. So here I am still, coughing alarmingly, though otherwise just about returned to myself.

I had plans to swim in Whitby but mostly I am laying low, reading an excellent book in manuscript, and looking out the window. Our luggage arrived yesterday so I am no longer wearing underpants from Poundland, procured by my beloved. Nor the t-shirt featuring Barbie. Things are looking up.

First person who would like a Nigel Farage dog toy, let me know. They sell them in the excellent Whitby Books. I will send you one.