Ghosts in the midday sun

I don't mind that our Waitrose (and Morrison, and Sainsbury) have run out of toilet paper and aspirin, but I do deplore the panic-buying of Acme Earthquake Pills. You cannot find them for love nor money ever since we were rocked by an earthquake centred somewhere near Bristol last year which measured a shocking 2.3 on the Richter scale.

I don't particularly want to catch the virus, but certainly do not want H.I. to get it, so I am following all the instructions and hoping for the best, and the best I am hoping for is an ordinary dose of Winter flu.

The trouble with this latest version is that  is that the injection that I forced her to have a couple of months ago is for a different strain. If the elderly whose immune systems are not as they used to be - or should be - get it, it can turn into pneumonia, which is a bacterial infection. I have just found out that you can be inoculated against pneumonia so I am sending her off to get that one too.

I had pneumonia when I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was one of the few times which I can remember when my father turned on the central heating of our vast house, but the hot water was diverted to my room, and my room only. We were short of money, but my mother forced him down into the oxygen-depleted, carbon monoxide-rich cellar to stoke up the ancient boiler with anthracite.

It was the fever aspect of it that I remember the clearest, not that you see things that clearly during a fever, except maybe for etherial, other worldly things. Laurie Lee in 'Cider with Rosie' spoke about a childhood fever in Slad, when he imagined faces in the stains on the walls of their little cottage looking like 'gods gone mouldy' staring at him out of the darkness.

I saw my guardian angel during my pneumonia.

It was at the height of my fever when I woke up in the middle of the night, knowing that I was actually very ill. When I opened my eyes I saw a benign, elderly woman sitting on the chair next to my bed with her hands on her lap, looking down on me and smiling reassuringly.

I looked at her for a few moments, then went back to sleep in the sure knowledge that all would be well. In the morning the fever had gone and I was well on the way to recovery.

Thinking about her later, I wondered how I saw her in perfect detail in total darkness. It seemed to me that this could only be explained by her glowing with her own light. At that early age I suddenly realised why ghosts are always depicted as glowing in the dark.

We don't notice ghosts in the daylight because they look exactly like everyone else. They just walk around trying not to do anything out of the ordinary to attract attention.