Getting Sick

Diary, 3rd August 2023

ON leave from the Council Offices at present, and for as long as I can sustain my current illness of Covid-19. One of the many lasting benefits of the pandemic is the facility with which one can now take time off work for extended periods by deliberately catching the disease.

This is particularly true in the public sector, where one’s employer is obliged to acknowledge both the extremely deadly and highly contagious nature of the disease, or else risk losing face. To deny that the disease is dangerous would be to concede that the safety measures taken during the pandemic, for which their own unions bravely fought, were in some way unnecessary or damaging to the country.

Much in the spirit of the “pox parties'', in which parents deliberately infect their children by enclosing them in a small space for an extended period of time, I have taken to hosting “sick-leave parties”, where I routinely gather with other public sector professions in the hope that we will make one-another ill enough to not work. This has been tentatively dubbed the “Society of the Sick”, in which new members must be unanimously approved for entry.

One has to be extremely careful in one’s choice of party-goers, while admitting that a higher number of participants will generate a greater probability of infection. Society members should show some indication of having a poor immune system, and this is usually judged by his or her sickly mien. Sick gatherings may occur at any time — indeed, as soon as one person in the Society has any indication of testing positive — and so members are encouraged to keep themselves in poor physical shape, usually through sustained use of alcohol and lack of exercise. This advice is usually superfluous.

Members of the Society are almost always younger men of some low-ranking and low-skilled public position, but have demonstrated high pretensions to obtaining a more vocational, creative role in the future. The latter quality is extremely pertinent, indicating as it does an extreme reluctance to perform their current, official role.

One party-goer, for example, is employed as a teacher of English, but prefers to spend his time painting images of his anime action figure collection in various poses, a genre he has christened Post-Still Life. He has little interest in education, actively despises children, and only became an educator under the misguided belief that the generous holidays would afford him time to launch a gallery exposition. Finding that the best time to promote one’s art is actually in October, November and December — months in which he is obliged to work — he began attending sick parties and has since found a small but profitable market for his work in a fetishist community.

Another regular is a male nurse whose true, lifelong passion for street dancing has been unfairly curtailed by long hours of attending the sick and needy. With regular absences, he has been able to find his feet as a twice-fortnightly dance instructor at the local leisure centre. Only now, he tells me, does he feel that he is making a positive difference to the world.

One of our few female party-goers, and one of the even fewer from the private sector, is a woman employed as a project worker for a charity which organises events for blind children and adolescents, something which she fell into quite by accident. She tells me that her real raison d’etre is to become a Student of Philosophy, having dipped into the subject some years ago. Being inclined to empiricism, she tells me that it is important for the Philosopher to “experience the world” as fully as possible, and spends her sick leave exploring both the primary and secondary qualities of shopping malls. As one of the more liberal users of sick leave, she received some caution from the rest of the Society, who advised her to take more care not to be seen in public, but she quickly reminded us that, as she works principally with the blind, this was a remote possibility.

For my own part, I have deliberately fallen ill in order to dedicate myself to the writing of this diary and its many thankless patrons. The inner workings of local government are of little consequence to me, and I regard The Pedestrian as a far more viable stepping stone to my eventual writing for the New Statesman.