Has the vaccine cured my long Covid?

Everyone has their own Covid-19 story, and here’s mine. I caught it in Marks & Spencer in late March last year, when 200 clearly deranged panic-buyers set about stripping the store of its every last ready meal. Web designers grasping the last known packet of Our Best Ever Prawn Cocktail, estate agents fighting over the gooseberry and elderflower yoghurts: it felt like the end of times, and was actually one of the scariest experiences I have ever had. My friend Russell got it at around the same point at his daughter’s PTA meeting. He spent five weeks in hospital. Another parent died.

There were four of us in this small flat. We knew if one of us got it, we all would. It was my daughter Martha, aged 20, who first started showing symptoms. Her Covid was both easily identifiable (dry cough, sore throat, fatigue, slight breathlessness) and, happily, very mild. My symptoms were altogether odder, but Martha had a friend, a fourth-year medical student, who was working on the Oxford Covid project. She text-ed him and asked him about my symptoms. Atypical though they were, every one of them checked out.

Fortunately my Covid was mild too. I was unwell for three weeks, but never so badly that I had to stop work. We freelance writers are a hardy crew, inspired by terror of encroaching poverty to keep on working even if our leg is hanging off by a thread. Who needs a leg to type?

Having had the disease and, I thought, kicked it into the long grass, I kept bumping into people I knew in the street and telling them that I had had it. Every single one of them took an inadvertent step back. People kept saying ‘Are you sure you had it?’, because obviously I was still alive.