Covid has given me a superpower

Since recovering from Covid, I seem to have quietly been developing supernatural powers. At first I thought I had simply lost my sense of taste and smell, but a year on the situation is more complicated than that, I am starting to realise.

I can’t really taste or smell anything in the conventional sense. If I sniff and sniff, with my nose over a cafetière of coffee, or a pan of bubbling Bolognese sauce, I get nothing.

When the builder boyfriend comes home in the evening, I call up the stairs from the lower ground floor kitchen: ‘What does this smell like to you?’

I burn everything I don’t stand over and watch and I’ve drunk more gone off milk than I care to remember, realising only when I feel the lumps in my mouth.

My taste began to return, then it went again. Currently, it comes and goes. Sometimes, I fancy I can suddenly taste everything, ever so slightly, as if through a heavy cold, but the next day it has vanished and I’m back to a situation where eating has become so boring, I can barely be bothered.