Ill in Paris

Ill in Paris with a temperature of 104° and the doctor on his way I listen to my husband playing elaborate make-believe games with our three year old daughter in the next room. There is talk of mainsails and walking the plank, of elephant graveyards and glass slippers. Hours pass. Now they are sticking strips of paper and fabric and sequins onto blue card. Bits of their conversation drift into the room where I am lying. 'I'm only cross that you wasted all the glue Mary because you have a chance of becoming quite an important collagist one day', my husband says. Then he puts his head round the door and delivers Lemsip Max Strength and sympathetic glances as he can see I'm feeling blue. Why not think about what you would like for Christmas to cheer yourself up, he says. I smile weakly and nod.

The truth is I don't really want anything for Christmas or at least the things I want all seem so tragic. What I'd really like is a deluxe, well stocked medical kit in a white and red box. I imagine all its compartments, the little drawers for crisp dressings and tape, the bottles of strong pills that you can only buy in America, plasters in ten different sizes and tweezers and scissors and the kind of pink antiseptic cream dispensed by dinner ladies in wintery school playgrounds. There would be bottles of tonic and effervescent vitamin pills, an electronic thermometer and my all time favourite medicines: Benolyn, Rinstead Pastilles, Disprin, Valium and Bells whisky. Another thing I'd like is a tea urn. It's not that I am thinking of opening up my own branch of the salvation army, (although would happily do so if instructed) it's just that, as usual, I am aware that in life lit pays to be prepared.

Suddenly the 78 Christmas presents on my list that I have yet to buy start throbbing reproachfully in my brain and I begin to panic. Perhaps I can lower my standards this year. It's time to change my shopping criterion because items that are wholly new to the recipient, luxurious, life transforming, yet subconsciously long-desired are getting harder to find every year. I start feeling sick at the thought of it all. I take my temperature in the fear that it will drop before the doctor arrives, but it has fractionally increased which is good news. Ordinarily my Christmas campaign begins in August but this year I don't know what's happened to the months. Briefly I wonder if, for a Christmas present, I could ask my husband to do my Christmas shopping for me.

The doctor arrives and when I boast about my impressive fever he mutters that compared to most of the people he sees I am hardly ill at all. I apologise which he seems to appreciate. It's not my fault he tells me. Maybe I will be really ill one day, he consoles me. He feeds me some liquid paracetamol and leaves. More hours pass, Now they are reading Babar books and eating Clementines that scent the rooms. I sit up in bed, my head in my hands, but something in my my mood must have lifted because instead of bandages and swabs now I see an amethyst ring and a Spanish red party dress and 12 pink and white French pudding plates with roses on them and well worn gold, dancing in circles in my mind.