We have had a visit, this afternoon, from Will and his mother, who brought him uptown on her new bicycle. Much easier than trying to get a taxi, she says. It certainly makes me wish that I were younger and fitter. Instead, I’m reminded of the story a doctor told me about an ace cyclist who was afflicted, like me, with ankylosing spondylitis. As he refused to give up his passion, his back gradually but inexorably fused in racing position. Walking across a room must have been incredibly awkward and painful.

Thoughts like that reconcile me to the slog of getting better, something that I’m not entirely sure that I’m doing at the moment. I’ve been thinking, ever since Megan and Will left, about crawling back into bed. It’s possible that I ought to be doing something a little more lively than perusing the London Review of Books. I read the Alan Bennett diary and Jenny Diski’s Short Cuts the moment I got my copy; now I’m down to Rosemary Hill on Capability Brown. The Bennett is, as always, a marvel of cutting away. In about as many entries as there are days in a month, the uncannily youthful Bennett gives us the flavor of his year, still rolling his eyes with barely suppressed enthusiasm at the droll folly of the world. Smack in the middle is a pearl of narrative concision concerning an RAF pilot’s emergency landing in a Yorkshire valley in 1941 — there’s a movie in there! Jackson Lear’s review of biographies of President Obama’s parents can only be called unsparing, but I quite agree with Lear that the president is a technocrat, not a politician; as with Jimmy Carter, we’re finding that we’re not best served by chief executives who not only would rather be somewhere else but positively dislike living in Washington. I don’t know what to make of the fact, noted by Hill, that Capability Brown filed his receipts as royal gardener under “K,” for “King.” All in all, an incredibly naive choice. Wouldn’t “HRH” spring more naturally to mind, or, failing that, “C” for “Crown”?

Yesterday was a bustle — perhaps too much of one for a convalescent. Paperwork, mostly. Throwing things away, mostly. V satisfying, as any number of diarists might put it — unsatisfactorily, in my opinion. Writing abbreviated prose, however convenient, is deplorable because reading abbreviated prose is never straightforward. I detest texting for this reason. The Nederlands word for “you” may be “U,” but this never occurs to me when I stumble across minor but reeking illiteracies of that kind.  The whole art of writing is to make what you’re doing look wonderfully easy without reminding the reader that what he or she is doing is wonderfully unnatural. Such idiotismes as “C U L8TR” have precisely the opposite effect: the reader has to work to translate what, in the end, seems wonderfully stupid.

Did you see Caitlin Flanagan’s piece about Joan Didion in The Atlantic? Flanagan’s latest can-you-top-this bit of retroshock is the assertion that “to love Joan Didion … you have to be female.” It comes at the beginning of what is actually a commendable appreciation of Didion’s early work and why it had such an impact on young women in the Sixties and Seventies. Flanagan is wrong to charge Didion with being “another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions,” whatever that means; does anyone else remember Didion’s bracingly conservative take on the Terri Schiavo case? But that’s a detail. It’s harder to argue with Flanagan’s case that Didion was a less-than-compleat mom. However: do you really have to be a woman to love Joan Didion? I admire Joan Didion’s writing, and not least for its acuity about style and fashion — concerns which, in Didion’s view, you don’t have to be female to care about. (One senses that Flanagan feels v differently.) But do I love her?

When I get better, I want to return to one of my pet projects, which is a plot outline of Jane Austen’s Emma. (I do love Jane Austen.) When I read the book a few months ago, it struck me that there are three moments in the novel when the quality of the language undergoes a shift, with the result that Emma falls into four movements, not unlike a classical symphony, with a brisk and energetic opening, a languid slow movement, a comic scherzo, and a happy ending. (I have, however, outgrown the impulse to scout for correspondences to sonata form.) I want to show that this sequence of different inflections is what sustains the narrative and makes Emma the great read that it is. And I want to hammer home the difference between the joyfulness of Austen’s prose style and the cloudiness of her story, which, really, ought to be a lesson unto us. We oughtn’t to like Emma Woodhouse, and if you read the book multiple times, there will be at least one occasion when you’re tempted, at the very least, to hate her. But Charlotte Brontë did not write Emma. George Eliot did not write Emma. (Imagine!) Even Mrs Gaskell didn’t write Emma. Jane Austen did — and so we love Emma, because, as they say, she makes us laugh. 

We hadn’t seen Will since Christmas, and it was hard to believe how much development he had packed into two weeks. His vocabulary has exploded — it now includes my name, which he pronounces as “Dadoo.” (He says “Darney,” his name for Kathleen, quite clearly.) He is surprisingly agile: he carried his little wicker chair from the living room to the blue room without bumping into anything. (Though he did keep saying, “heavy!”) There was once dicey moment, when he discovered the train set, still in its box, that I never got round to setting up at the base of the Christmas tree; it had been resting against a wall for so many days that I’d stopped seeing it. The train set weighed even more than the wicker chair, but there were no remarks to that effect. Just a pssionate interest in the locomotive bneath several layers of plastic packaging. A distraction was successfully hit upon — Facebook friends will know what it was — one that had nothing to do with Will’s discovery, which I’m happy to pass on, that clementines are very agreeable balls for tossing around the house. They have a nice bounce and they’re very easy to spot when they roll under furniture. And then you can eat them.

Well, here I am, at the age that Paul McCartney and John Lennon made proverbial  forty-odd years ago. Since I do the needing and feeding around here, I’m not asking any questions.

I was going to say something about Tyler Brûlé this morning, but I’ve just learned what I ought to have known days ago: an old friend in a faraway city has been in hospital for almost two weeks, and I believe that he is seriously ill. His stoicism has always obliged him to make light of poor health. I have sent him my love, but I’ll refrain from peppering him or his wife with questions.

Yesterday, I ceased to be a sick person and became a normal person with a bad cold. I haven’t had such a bad cold in years. It seems wildly solipsistic to say so, but I blame my vulnerability to the virus on the shock of my aunt’s sudden death last month. I say that it was sudden because that’s what it felt like, even though my aunt was in the hospital for nearly a month. She was taken ill, but she was expected to recover — and then she didn’t. Facing the prospect of long-term dependency on oxygen tanks and the other ministering angels of geriatric medicine, she elected hospice care. She made her decision very quickly and would not be talked out of it. It was sudden.

We say that we don’t want the elderly to suffer and we’re dismayed when a loved one lingers on in semi-consciousness or worse, but until we have tasted pity and dismay, we want to keep death at bay.

For days, I’ve been saying to myself, “And this is just a cold. What would it be like to be really sick?”

And that’s the view from 64.

This time, I’m watching the Inspector Morse series in order. I am now. By the time Kathleen rustled up a chronological listing of the episodes, ranging from “The Dead of Jericho” to “Remorseless Day,” I’d watched four episodes. The first one, “Deceived By Flight,” had been easy to choose. I have a thing for Jane Booker’s plummy dry wit (Booker plays an undercover customs agents who’s in pursuit of the cricket-playing drug runners.) Daniel Massey is in the cast — the image of his father, only better-looking. I had completely forgotten his murderer was his wife. That’s the thing about these shows. They’re so packed with layers of story that you can hold on to only a few of the brighter details, like John Normington’s plummet from the spire of St Oswald’s, in “Service For All the Dead.” You may remember who dun it, but, if so, you’ve probably forgotten quite why.

Choosing a second episode to watch was harder. Agony infected the process. Is this the Morse that I really want to watch next? After much shuffling, I selected “Happy Families,” for the simple reason that the title didn’t remind me of anything. The moment the show started, of course, I knew precisely what I was in for: the gruesome decimation of a family fueled by revenge and silly charity in unequal measures. I take it back: sometimes you can remember everything. I even remembered that Kevin Whately would have to dress up like a Wild West sherriff. It was great fun.

By now, in the firm grip of a Morse jag, knowing that I’d have to watch each and every one — in the kitchen, mostly, while emptying the dishwasher or brewing a pot of tea, with the rest of my normal life serving as the spotty commercial breaks — I grasped that it would never do to go on choosing. I kept the CDs in a drawer in alphabetical order, and I think that I watched the shows in that order once, on a long-ago jag — a perhaps unsurprising number of the titles begin with “Dead” or “Death.” I wasn’t going to do that again. I was in the middle of “The Infernal Serpent” (picked because I remembered the studied adagio of Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s impeccable diction) when I resolved to go on-chronology. I remembered “The Dead of Jericho” fairly well, but I’d forgotten that Gemma Jones’s character really does hang herself. And I knew that Morse’s Jaguar would be battered in the interests of justice at both the beginning and the end.

Last night, after dinner, Kathleen and I watched “Service of All the Dead.” I’d finished “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn” (the second episode) while making dinner — which, in the event, I could hardly eat, because I’d been drinking so much water all day that there was no room in my stomach; among the unappetizing thoughts that crossed my mind at the table was the factoid that you can drown from drinking too much water — and when Kathleen suggested that we watch a Morse, I jumped. Because, as our viewing bore out, “Service” is one of the muddiest of the Morses. Much of it is filmed in a dark old church, full of arrestingly gruesome statuary, lighted by lurid stained glass. The story is unusually tricky, and the storytelling far from straightforward. Kathleen hadn’t seen the episode before at all, and she couldn’t quite believe it when it was over.

One notable thing about “Service of All the Dead” is that it’s the first in the series to have no real University connection. Such episodes are rare, but I’m going to keep track of them as such. (“Happy Families” is another.) In fact, I’m thinking of devising a dataset. “Canals,” for example — do the waterways running through what was, after all, initially a ford figure in the action? That’s a simple yes-or-no. Rating the overt hostility of Morse’s superiors to his “methods” calls for a scale of 1 to 10. The relation of Morse to Detective Sergeant Lewis is more in the nature of a correlation, with .5 representing Lewis’s misgivings and 1 Lewis’s outright doubts.

Although I visited Oxford in 1977, I wasn’t there for very long, and I remember nothing very clearly except stepping into Brasenose, of all places. (I’d be a law student myself a few months later.)  Google Maps has provided inestimable help in placing the scenes that the Inspector Morse series makes so familiar. The labels are hopeless, but that doesn’t matter, because all the series’s colleges are imaginary — Beaumont, Lonsdale, and others. What’s harder to believe, after all these years, is that Morse is imaginary, too.

Nothing could induce me to say that I am feeling better. That would be an out-and-out jinx. Kathleen is almost certain to get much better soon, because the doctor has prescribed a powerful antibiotic. With nothing worse than a humble cold, I’ve nothing to fall back on besides prudent self-restraint. Feeling really lousy is simple: you just lie there an moan. It’s when you feel “okay” that things get tricky.

Yesterday, for instance, prudent self-restraint was imposed onluy after I had run three local errands, one of which involved buying a lampshade, which most observers would probably judge to be non-essential even if I beg to differ. I made the third trip to Agata & Valentina simply to buy applesauce for Kathleen; it turns out that Kathleen really likes the applesauce that they make there. Kathleen begged me not to make a special trip just for applesauce, but I was feeling better than “okay.” (I did take a cab back to the apartment.) Then I removed the Christmas tree. Like the lampshade, a non-essential, except for purposes of morale and will-to-live.

I had planned to make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner — I’ve been wanting to try Fairway’s meatballs since the store opened, in Julty — but once I’d cleaned up after the tree I no longer felt okay. What I felt was washed-out and liable to take a chill. So I bundled up and sat down in front of the old Nippon Electric television — more than twenty years old — and watched videos.

First, we watched At Bertram’s Hotel, one of my favorites of the old Jane Hickson series, in great part because of the bold performance of Caroline Blakiston. Ms Blakinson appeared in Woody Allen’s Scoop — I recognized her instantly, even if her name wasn’t on the tip of my tongue. She has of course also appeared in scads of British TV shows that I’ve never heard of. I wonder if she has worked much on stage.

Then we watched two movies that I’ve long associated but never watched back to back: Get Shorty and Big Trouble. The movies share the bright breezy tone of their ultimate authors, Elmore Leonard and Dave Barry respectively, and they also share Renée Russo and Dennis Farina. What they don’t share is the aame weight, as joint consideration of the shared actors’ roles makes very plain. Get Shorty is a giggling rumination on the improvisational opportunism of the movie business that shudders with hidden sordid backstories, the most sublime of which would be that of Harry Zimm’s — played by Gene Hackman as the ne plus ultra of assholes. Big Trouble is a delicious farce with a few mismatched seams (Jason Lee’s role, I’m thinking).

I took my Lunesta and went to bed, and slept well through most of the night. No NyQuil or other decongestants. Nothing could induce me to count on that happening again tonight, but I do hope. They say that summer colds are the worst, but they’re wrong; the worst colds are holidays colds, especially if you have a pretty Christmas tree in the middle of your foyer that reminds you, every time you go anywhere in your apartment, how out of kilter you feel.