Covid has given me a superpower

Since recovering from Covid, I seem to have quietly been developing supernatural powers. At first I thought I had simply lost my sense of taste and smell, but a year on the situation is more complicated than that, I am starting to realise.

I can’t really taste or smell anything in the conventional sense. If I sniff and sniff, with my nose over a cafetière of coffee, or a pan of bubbling Bolognese sauce, I get nothing.

When the builder boyfriend comes home in the evening, I call up the stairs from the lower ground floor kitchen: ‘What does this smell like to you?’

I burn everything I don’t stand over and watch and I’ve drunk more gone off milk than I care to remember, realising only when I feel the lumps in my mouth.

My taste began to return, then it went again. Currently, it comes and goes. Sometimes, I fancy I can suddenly taste everything, ever so slightly, as if through a heavy cold, but the next day it has vanished and I’m back to a situation where eating has become so boring, I can barely be bothered. I’ve lost a stone.

I view it all as a small price to pay for having got over delta last summer and not caught any other kind of Covid since, suggesting I might have acquired lasting antibodies.

However, at some point I suppose I would like to smell and taste again. And I’m baffled as to why the medical professionals seem so uninterested in such a fascinating symptom that could well hold the key to what Covid really is, and, dare I say, where it came from?

It’s almost as if they either full well know why it destroys the senses, and are not telling us, or have no interest in this area of research because there is no money in it.