I came down with a cold. It’s not unusual – summer is fading into autumn, and the temperatures dropped drastically. Cold wind and pouring rain. A quick jaunt to the baker’s to buy some bread, and catching a cold is the easiest thing in the world.

But then you wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and with your throat burning, and shivering, and the first thing you think is… damn, what if I caught IT?
And you feel a chill of a different nature, and think you need to get those last payments in before they come to take you away.

And by IT I don’t mean of course the creepy killer clown with the red balloon, but rather the virus that has kept us company all these months.

It’s a cold spike of fear that’s easily dismissed with an aspirin and a warm cup of lemon ginger tea (that apparently is also good for your skin and your hair – see? Health and beauty), but it’s there, like a ghost, to haunt us.

And in the meantime, there’s people in the streets protesting their right to not believe in the virus, proclaiming strange political slogans.
We are really living in interesting times, and that’s really a Chinese curse.