‘I can’t go through this again!’ I groaned, as I lay in bed encased in icepacks, one on my eyes and the other round the back of my neck. Covid – which seems to be alive and kicking this summer despite being pronounced over by the World Health Organisation – always strikes at my nervous system and sets off existing problems, including my fragile emotional stability.

The builder boyfriend brings me orange juice and breakfast on a tray, walks the dogs, feeds the horses, goes to work and comes back to find me huddled under the duvet, sobbing. He is weather-beaten from his day on a roof, and feeling rough himself. ‘It will pass,’ he says. I looked up the latest variant and it is called BA.2.86, which sounds like a flight to somewhere nice, like Lefkas or Majorca. In fact, it’s a trip to somewhere not nice at all.

This is my fourth rodeo that I know of. I might have had it other times and been ‘asymptomatic’. The point is, I can now evaluate the pandemic through my personal encounters with it. We all can, surely. So you would think there is an opportunity for truth and reconciliation there.

Mine began in winter 2019/20, when I sat down next to a famous author at a New Year dinner party and he told me his wife wasn’t there because she had just got back from China with the worst flu ever.

The next morning the builder b and I awoke in agony and I declared the host had poisoned us with the gravy.

The Delta was next, which the BB caught from a children’s nanny who made him lunch while he was working on her employer’s house. She was back from a festival, fully vaccinated. She collapsed the next day and he a few hours later. Me a day after that. It was rough. The BB claimed he had a vision of Jesus as the two of us lay sweating and whimpering.

The third time would have been Omicron, for which I tested positive while not feeling anything, although the BB declared himself quite unwell.

And now it’s all aboard BA.2.86 for a blinding headache, body pains, bad stomach, and seemingly everyone insisting that whatever they have, it cannot be Covid, because they’ve had their boosters.

The BB demanded a client test himself this week and when it came back positive the old boy, up to jab number six, was furious.

Anti-vaxxers are supposed to be nutcases who deny the existence of Covid. But I’ve always been eager to confirm Covid’s severity while refusing to have the jab. Where this places me on the wackometer I have no idea.

All I know is that I don’t want Covid, and I don’t want the Covid vaccine. I want as little as possible to do with the spike protein because it feels to me like something very bad to do with it has happened in the past three years that no expert in authority seems able to properly explain, so I only want to accidentally collide with what I must and take my chances that way.

Most disconcertingly, it feels like just when we are being told it’s all over, things, generally speaking, are, for whatever reason, beginning to get a whole lot worse.

And no one wants to talk about it. The builder boyfriend and I talk about it, every night when he comes through the door, to save my sanity. We talk about how his father blacked out, fell over and smashed his ribs to pieces. We talk about my mother’s bleeding knee joints that need replacing.

We talk about his friend Jeffrey who has a malfunctioning heart valve, and cancer. We talk about the 21-year-old girl who lives opposite our horses and who collapsed on the floor of her home with a heart attack, was revived by her dad, who happened to be a trained first-aider for his company, was put on life support, fitted with a pacemaker, and is learning to walk again.

We talk about a poor chap I met recently at a social event who was in a wheelchair after a stroke suffered in the changing room of the gym, blind in one eye and paralysed down one side; a young guy at church who lost his thirtysomething wife to cancer and is bringing up two children alone; and a retired head teacher I’ve known for years who announced last week that his girlfriend has died of a massive brain bleed. He was about to propose to her.

More misfortune and illness around me than I have seen in my lifetime. And to a conspiracy theorist like me, the seemingly unending strands presented as one randomly entangled terrible coincidence is almost worse than if it had a cohesive narrative.