So we finally succumbed to The Spicy Cough this week. After nearly three years since this whole pandemalooza began, it seems our time was up.

Funny thing is that since we’re both working from home these days, we’d pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. All we knew is that one of the kids had a weak cold for all of a morning, and then (as always happens, multiple times a year) the cold started to circulate through the family.

Ah, complacency.

After so many negative RAT tests in the past, after hearing so many stories of negative RAT results for people who then tested positive, we’d all but given up. If we didn’t feel unusually sick, we weren’t.

Of course, that’s not how science works.

Someone heard the lingering cough and suggested I do a test. “Pshaw,” say I, “’tis but a frog in my throat, but I shall humour you.” So I do a test. It comes up positive. These things don’t work anyway, right? So I do another one, using a different brand of test. That comes up positive too.

Well, shucks.

If your experience with COVID was far less pleasant than mine, then you have my sympathies, and I apologise for my cavalier attitude. Yet having been a part of it, it’s easy to see how, years after the outbreak and the gradual mutation of the virus, we now live in a world where it’s become just another part of life.

A kinda sucky, antisocial, spicy part of life.