The Systems Administrator had a bad night. The SA decamped to the spare room on Saturday for peace and privacy, but I was woken at about four last night by the sound of heavy rain, and realised I could also hear catastrophic noises from the bathroom. I shuffled down the corridor to offer moral and practical support, by which time the SA had tottered back to bed and was lying there sweating profusely. I found the SA a dry towel, mopped up the bathroom, and sat with the SA until the worst had passed, deciding that while there was no immediate need to call for an out of hours doctor (faced with a sleep-deprived foreigner with inadequate grasp of English I'd sooner wait until things were bad enough for an ambulance anyway. You're less likely to be misdiagnosed and die that way) I wouldn't be able to go to work in the morning.
When you aren't accustomed to illness it's tricky to know at what point you are supposed to get medical help. I could think of four reasons why we might need a doctor. Firstly, if the SA had a dangerously high temperature. Secondly, if the SA was badly dehydrated. Thirdly, if the SA had a bacterial infection and needed antiobiotics. Fourthly, if the symptoms so far were merely the precursor to some serious illness. I decided on the basis of the severity and duration of the attack that one and two didn't apply. I didn't see how I could distinguish between viral and bacterial infection, but knew that many vomiting bugs are viral. I was pretty confident that the SA didn't have meningitis, or jaundice. You can never rule out the sudden onset of serious illness, and I have known people who were struck down overnight and are now dead, but it isn't very likely at our age, and I think you would have to look a lot worse than the SA did before the NHS would start investigating that possibility. So on balance neither of us could see what a doctor was supposed to do. The fifth reason to call for a doctor is so that you can pass the responsibility on to somebody else and not have to be in charge, but that's a bit feeble.
I rang work at quarter to eight, got the answering machine, and left an apologetic message. I did feel mean leaving them in the lurch, but at that point I didn't know if the patient was going to continue to deteriorate, and I really couldn't leave the SA alone and untended in the house for ten hours. There are quite a few people in at work on a Monday, even with the manager on holiday, and if needs be the gardeners would have to help with the watering, or the owner do a stint in the plant centre. That could be a nuisance for her given it's the school holidays, but I'm afraid somebody who is ill in bed and too dizzy even to sit up takes precedence over helping at pony club camp, or whatever it was she may have been planning to do. They are a good and understanding bunch of people when the chips are down, and I'm sure they will cope. Of course, putting your family first is easier when you have a low grade job. Supposing today had been a quarterly meeting with the trustees of an important client to discuss investment performance, or the final pitch for a big account that my firm really, really needed to win. Would I still have stayed at home, or made sure my secretary's number was programmed into the SA's mobile in case of emergencies, and departed, leaving a stock of bottled water by the spare bed?
Some of the dizziness was probably due to the SA having last eaten a meal that stayed down long enough to do any good on Friday evening, but yesterday's request for packet soup and rolls turned out to be hopelessly ambitious, and fruit cordial, while containing sugar, was too acid for the SA's traumatised stomach. I suggested trying a plain solution of sugar dissolved in water, a sort of DIY Lucozade, and that went down surprisingly well. By lunchtime the SA was able to sit up in bed, and I was despatched to the village for real Lucozade, plus isotonic sports drinks to replace lost salt, because the SA had cramp. By early afternoon the SA was ready to try again with the packet soup. I expect it will all take a downward lurch this evening, as these things generally do, but it does look like a normal nasty bug, that will run its course, as bugs do.
In between playing nurse I spent some time shifting books around on the shelves, to make room for the ones we've bought or given each other since the last time we had a library sort out. This time the Stuarts and the Seven Years War had to go upstairs from the study to the spare room, to allow me to slot new titles into gardening and cookery. History is getting dispersed over too many shelves in too many rooms, and the SA is going to have to build a new run of shelving this winter, because we are running out of gaps to put non-fiction in. Novels are OK for space for now, since I persuaded the SA that while I was not going to give all the Tom Clancys and Dale Browns left over from the commuting days to the charity shop, still there was no harm in putting them in boxes under the bed. While I was at it some other airport blockbusters and Dick Francis went under the bed as well. I have just finished reading an interesting little book by Jonathan Bate, a Very Short Introduction to English Literature. It is only 167 pages long, and on page 24 he asks what English Literature is? One test of whether something is Not Literature may be whether it gets put away under the spare bed in a box. I think that Bate suggests that Literature lends itself better to re-reading, but I can't put my finger on the line where he says it.
Most of the books I've read in the past two years, that weren't history or gardening, were piled on a stool in the spare room waiting to be shelved. There was nothing from the Booker shortlist, and indeed almost no novels published within the past fifty years, but a fair amount of travel writing, and autobiographies by people who were neither politicians nor celebrities, but led interesting lives and could write. It's a nice question, whether to include such autobiographies among the novels. That seems at first an arbitrary place to put them, but otherwise where do you draw the line? My Family and Other Animals is a semi-fictionalised version of Gerald Durrell's childhood, while Sybille Bedford's novels are semi-autobiographical. Where else should Peeling the Onion go but next to The Flounder and The Tin Drum? Still, putting Sara Wheeler's excellent The Magnetic North, Robert's and Farley's curious Edgelands and Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind into an impromptu travel section (travels in the Far East and Tibet have their own section on the other side of the room. Don't ask) I saw that Sebald's strange, haunting Rings of Saturn had ended up with the other books on Suffolk and not with the rest of Sebald (which is among the novels and in a different room).
It is all very arbitrary. Really we should use the Dewey decimal system and have a catalogue. I don't know, can you look up the Dewey numbers of individual books, if you aren't a library and don't want to pay for the privilege?
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