I am not, whatever my wife thinks, a workaholic. Punctiliously conscientious, maybe; if I fall ill and am likely to be out of commission for a while (yes, as feared at the beginning of the week, I do seem to have come down with the plague, thankfully so far in a pretty mild form) then I am going to take the time to inform the people who might otherwise be expecting to hear from me over the next week or so – Head of Department, people in charge of teaching, assessment and exams, students on my various modules especially those with an exam coming up, postgrads, colleagues involved in impact project, co-editor of book, a couple of contributors, niece who won’t be getting a Skype history lesson this week. That’s not workaholism, that’s common courtesy. Workaholism would be getting worried about the fact that the university webpage sends me on an endless loop from the ‘guidance on COVID-19 sickness reporting’ page to the ‘this form no longer exists, please see the sickness reporting guidance’ page. Which to be quite honest I am really not.
But it is true to say that I am very bad at doing nothing. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve remotely grasped the point of a summer holiday involving a lot of sitting around in the sun relaxing, rather than charging round lots of museums and interesting sights – and only on the basis that I have a big pile of books, the opportunity to scribble some blog posts, and the prospect of doing things with exotic local ingredients later in the day. If my brain isn’t working – a common occurrence – then I either do mundane but necessary admin, or something practical like cooking or weeding the vegetable patch, or go for a walk. Whereas currently my head is full of cotton wool, my limbs ache, my coordination has gone and I don’t have the energy to get off the sofa. Which is, I repeat, a much better situation than most people with this virus, to the point where I even wonder whether this is a false alarm or something else, but it is BLOODY BORING.
A friend once tried to persuade me of the benefits of yoga and meditation, as a means of managing my propensity to stress and depression, and I can see this in theory – I just can’t manage it. My energy is restless, even when I don’t have any. I fidget, I tap my fingers without noticing; my thoughts flit from one thing to another, but not in any sort of productive manner. I suspect I’m going to be spending a lot of time on the Twitter.
Sphinx 
I hope you’re feeling better – or if not, that you soon will.
Here’s another “Thucydides our contemporary” take from the LRB blog.
Thanks! Yes, I was grumbling about this on the Twitter the morning; interesting on Hobbes, plausible as an interpretation of what Hobbes may have taken from Thucydides – but a very odd reading of what Thucydides actually said.