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.