Monday morning, and it’s a nice clean day. The weekend’s rain has washed the streets, the standing water has had time to disperse and there is very little traffic about, as the schools, and the associated parents and teachers, are on holiday. I’ve never understood how school holidays manage to empty the roads so completely, but there’s no point agonising about it – just enjoy it. I left home ten minutes late today but still got to work on time.

The lateness was due to my COVID test. I’d started sneezing over the weekend and had a runny nose, watery eyes, bad throat, fatigue and even a headache. I’m normally tired but it’s very unusual for me to have a headache. I just passed it off as a summer cold and left it at that yesterday. However, in the evening, after seeing there is a new variant, and these are the exact symptoms, I decided I’d better do a test. Then I forgot. This morning, I remembered. It was negative, so it was a summer cold. Magnified by thoughts of COVID, it was, for a short while, important. Now that the result was negative it’s just a summer cold aggravated by a touch of cyberchondria.

However, although I don’t have COVID, and can’t pass it on, which is good, I have killed the planet a little bit more. One swab, one plastic bottle, a plastic pouch of liquid, one plastic testing kit, a plastic ziploc bag for disposal and a bit of packaging, including a desiccant sachet. I don’t know the exact carbon footprint of all that, but it’s come all the way from China by the look of the packaging slip. It’s so easy to use plastic, particularly when, like this, you get sent a pack by the NHS. They sent it before one of my hospital appointments, so I took it as a hint they wanted me to test before I went. On the other hand, I might be wrong, as they didn’t actually send me any information with it.

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