My sickbed is not a metal framed bed in a light airy space. It is not a place of smooth sheets and solitude punctuated by the occasional ministrations of a starched medical professional or worried spouse in Primark jogging bottoms. Nor is it a dark, damp tangle of yellowing sheets, tissues, funk and sweat.

My sick bed is different (and both of these things). For one thing, it remains the family bed. My boy watches Minecraft videos leaning against my shivering back, my wife reads about cats and Virginia Woolf on her phone. Both of these people have become like the recording of rain I use to sleep, comforting strangers. 

I am not going to die. This is not my grave as John Donne would have it but in the night I do logically conclude I must stay awake to keep breathing. I count my breaths, I note (cause?) their cessation and dramatically haul air into my lungs. I invent my suffering. 

In the morning there is relief when I realise I don’t have to go to work. There is also anxiety that I am falling behind, letting my colleagues down and in danger of being arrested for malingering. My mother, on FaceTime (I do not raise my head from the pillow), says: “You must get up Alex! Annabel don’t spoil him”.

My eventual recovery is marked by a flood and I wake up wallowing in a swampy hollow, cold and weakened. Reflecting on my experience I conclude that my sick bed was a place to rest without rest.  While in it no great ideas were had, no creative breakthroughs made, it merely produced a gap. I have read Catherine Malabou’s ideas on destructive plasticity (a brittle plasticity) which I interpret as a break that substitutes a changeling, an entirely new being. But I have not been ill enough for that, there is no “deep cut in [my] biography”,  I have snapped back to my original form. 

The sheets need changing. 

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