The Hyggelig Journey

There are moments — quiet, unbidden — when one pauses and wonders: how did we come to this? After centuries of inquiry, of minds that charted the unseen and hands that steadied the fevered, we now find ourselves in a peculiar and disquieting place. A place where truth is not refuted for want of evidence, but rejected for daring to inconvenience belief. The antivaxx movement is a malicious rejection of education — not a lapse in understanding, but a deliberate estrangement from reason. It perplexes, not for its novelty, but for its brazenness. This is not the soft silence of the uninformed; it is the clamour of the wilfully blind, adorned in the rhetoric of liberty and cloaked in a defiant performance of scepticism. Vaccines — the elegant product of scientific rigour and logistical triumph — are cast aside in favour of speculation, rumour, and the seductive pull of conspiratorial thinking. To refuse a vaccine is not an emblem of critical thought. It is, more often, a retreat...

I’ve had dengue. Once more, it has graced me with its unwelcome presence — the second such visitation, and one I could well have done without. The fever was mercifully mild, hardly worth noting. But the itching — dear God, the itching — it was as though my entire being were begging to be scratched. Hands, feet, even the genitals clamoured in unison, each demanding attention with a kind of maddening urgency. Unlike the first bout, there was no dramatic onset to herald the illness. No high temperatures, no conspicuous pain. It was the pruritus alone — insistent and unrelenting — that finally betrayed the virus’s return. I worked through the week in stoic ignorance, chalking up the fatigue to the usual flurry of daily demands. I was, perhaps, a touch more irritable than usual; my thinking occasionally stumbled, like a foot catching the edge of a rug. Yet in the absence of fever and with joint pain too faint to raise suspicion, I all but overlooked the presence of the disease. ...