OK, so here’s my chicken soup secret

I dragged myself round the kitchen, sipping Lemsip and slurping spoonsful of mānuka honey (third mortgage) leaving most of the work to David. At 12 o’clock the doorbell rang and six of the jolliest chaps who ever threw good money after bad arrived at our door bearing two bottles of champagne, flowers and a hearty announcement: “Hello, nice to meet you. Thanks for having us. I’m Richard this is Simon this is another Richard… five of us are gay and one is heterosexual.” I ditched the Lemsip and got out the best flutes.

It was a couple of hours of laughter and fun, as though we’d reunited with friends we’d met on a particularly good holiday. They tasted David’s soup, rather too enthusiastically for my liking, and mine was duly skimmed and simmered. The wine-stained pages of the Florence Greenberg cookbook were invoked, and the familiar smell of global Friday nights began to waft around the kitchen as we grew steadily more raucous.

New friends, formerly strangers, left, a couple of hours later, bearing jam jars of hot soup and printed instructions on how to continue cooking it at home. By now, late afternoon, however, my voice sounded like the love child of said Tallulah and Brian Blessed. I cleared up the dishes a bit and went back to bed (one of those statements is economical with the truth).

“Have you tested?” asked my daughter.

“For what?” I retorted. “Oh, don’t be so ridiculous.”

We dug out the old cotton buds and plastic bits and reminded ourselves how casually we used to do it all those years ago and wham bam, there it was. Red line on T. Oh, the nostalgia. Oh, the anxiety. I had Covid.

(The words of the 45th and 47th President of the United States instructing me to drink bleach wandered into my febrile mind. No wonder he was re-elected.)

And, oh no, I had not had my boosters and, oh yes, it hit me like a hippo had camped on my chest and taken up residence in my hippocampus. Brain fog I believe it’s called and mine was a pea- souper. I had to send out bulletins to all my contacts. Oddly none of them seemed to have caught it and, odder still, neither had David.

This being Sunday, my biggest worry was whether I would test negative by the following Saturday, as we were hosting friends and relatives of the actress Thelma Ruby on her 100th birthday. Centenarian-icide was not on my list of mitzvahs.

I lay in bed for days eating only chicken soup and remembering the last time – in 2020 – that I’d done the same. “Get a kosher boiler,” I’d instructed my long-suffering daughter, “and leave it on the doorstep. It’ll cost the price of a second-hand Honda but it’ll get me over it.” After a week of pure soup and nothing but soup, my mouth felt like I’d been chewing a gabardine sleeve, and so I ordered some apples and limes and sparkling water – and, be still my heart – a lemon mousse to cut through all that fat. I absolutely wolfed down that mousse.

It was only when I threw away the plastic container that I read the ingredients. Alongside the lemon zest, eggs etc were the unwelcome words: pork gelatine. In a mousse! Pig in a mousse! A dessert that offended me, my mousse-eating ethnic tribe and several thousand Muslims in one fell swoop.

I rang Sainsbury’s and was told they had difficulty finding good vegetarian gelatine. “Well, don’t bloody make mousse if you can’t make it ethically,” I yelled. “Who the hell puts pig jelly in a ***ng mousse? Are you totally meshugenah?” The last sentence seemed to prove I was a troublemaker and she offered to refund me the full 95p. But that was then. This was now.

Then was in the time of weird. When we were all in bubbles except in the PM’s office where they were on the bubbly. In the studios of ITV, we wore masks for rehearsals. At this point only three people could be on a set in Corrie, and you couldn’t use props or even have a cuppa. We dressed and made ourselves up and love scenes were played three yards apart with the heavy breathing added on afterwards. It felt unbelievably stilted but in retrospect no one seemed to notice.

Now the week progressed, grumpily, and by Friday I tested negative. As I was giving the toast, Thelma had prayed to several gods, none of them Jewish but, since she is a force beyond nature, they acquiesced. I felt under par, but a new £125 blouse upped my endomorphins and we made it to Morden Hall by the skin of my remaining teeth. It was as dazzling a party as the lady deserved. She positively whooped as I, negatively, drooped.

The next day dawned and David and I embarked for a planned trip to Arosa, Switzerland for a week’s walking in crunchy snow. It involved three changes of trains after the short flight, with a case full of boots and something called salopettes, which I thought sounded like a sexual deviation, but what would I know?

I was short of breath, pink-eyed and suddenly lacking the ability to sleep at that, or any altitude. Nevertheless, it was magical, as only mountains and pine trees and white against viridian and clouds that nurse streaked peaks and birds that will land on your hand can be.

Still, for the first time ever, I feel the next decade breathing down my neck. Get your boosters, friends.