Michael Rosen is reflecting on what he calls the ‘Lonely Corridor Syndrome’ he still experiences.

The former Children’s Laureate, bestselling author of We’re Going On A Bear Hunt and Covid survivor, 76, was seriously ill with Covid after contracting it in March 2020.

He was in a coma for 40 days, intensive care for 48 and in hospital for three months.

“The main part of me is fine,” he explains on a Zoom call from his home in north London.

“I’m just a bit creaky because I’m nearly 77.”

The two main long-term physical effects are the blurred vision he suffers in his left eye, which he can hardly see out of, and the deafness in his left ear, which unbalances him.

“I’ve also got numb toes. It’s as if you have these strange cushions underneath your feet.

“It’s possible that these creaks and pains which I call ‘pinball pains’ around my body have increased a lot since Covid. But if I do a lot of stretching, that does help.”

He had some counselling to talk through the hallucinations and delirium he experienced in hospital, although his dreams were more hippy-like than nightmarish, featuring visions of German Christmas parties, he recalls dryly.

But he still has disturbed sleep.

“There are some nasty moments when I wake up in the night. I call it ‘Lonely Corridor Syndrome’. As I’m lying there, I’m instantly back in the hospital lying there. It’s a very mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There’s not much you can do about it immediately. I have to go into various forms of mental and physical tricks to play on myself to put it away again. It’s a sense of loneliness.

“Hospitals are wonderful because these people are looking after you, but at the same time they are very confining and separating. You are lonely, you are away from your family and there’s a loss of freedom.”

Two years ago he described his Covid ordeal and recovery in Many Different Kinds Of Love, a touching and at times witty collection of poetry and prose.

In his latest book, Getting Better, he reveals how he is faring now, as well as charting a series of other traumas he has experienced – discovering the Holocaust horrors suffered by his relatives, his sickly childhood, job knockbacks, anti-Semitism recollections and the sudden death of his 18-year-old son, Eddie, in 1999, the most devastating event of his life.

The teenager had gone to bed with flu-like symptoms.

When his father went up to his room the next morning, he found Eddie dead, from meningitis.

Eddie’s death led to him writing Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, published in 2004, a straight, direct account of how he felt when his son died.

He has written about it again in a chapter of his latest book.

“There were times when I thought, I don’t want to revisit this, and then actually writing about it made that easier,” he says now.

“It may sound odd because it’s so painful, but laying it out in a line in chronological order is very relieving.”

He writes about the stages of grief – anger, denial, acceptance – but notes: “That little triad leaves out the pain of it and the regret. You have to deal with that.

“That lives with you all the time. It never goes. You just make it bearable for yourself. So grief at the beginning is unbearable, but you have to find a way to make grief acceptable for yourself.

“One of the ways I did this was to study what it was that Eddie died of. Rather than thinking he was snatched away by death or fate or fortune, or thinking how unlucky I am, I’ve tried to understand what meningitis is. We live with these bacteria and viruses and have to accept it’s the nature of our existence.”

After Eddie, his second son, died, Rosen went on to meet and marry radio producer Emma-Louise Williams and together they had two children.

He reflects, but not in a cold-hearted way: “The world didn’t come to a standstill when Eddie died.

“There are my other children and I was incredibly lucky to have met someone and have two children, which doesn’t displace Eddie but I can’t deny the fact that it gave me other people to care about and worry about in a place where Eddie was.”

He talks in the book about guilt, but reflects he no longer feels guilty about his son’s death.

“One of the things I found very relieving was to get in touch with people who had late teenagers, mostly boys, to realise that meningococcal septicaemia can just happen in hours, and that I wasn’t the only person in the world who hadn’t spotted that Eddie that night had it.”

It’s a heartbreaking chapter, yet, despite the traumas Rosen has faced, Getting Better is no ‘woe is me’ read.

Far from it.

It’s more a book about the possibilities and the hope that can come out of bad things which happen to us or our loved ones, how we can get better, as the title suggests, how we can make it through the doom and gloom.

He meets up with Eddie’s old hockey team who gather every year since he died for a game.

After a 30 second silence for him, the game is on, full of banter and antics, Rosen enthuses.

“There are lots of laughs and of course the lads are not so young these days. Some of them have kids, some of whom are of university age.

“You can find light – seeing these young kids growing up and having kids, we stand about talking about the jobs they do, the aching limbs and it’s great. There’s always some new anecdote about Eddie, about something disgusting and funny that he did. He was a great joker – they won’t repeat the dirty jokes he told.”

He hopes that Getting Better will help other people who are going through their own traumas.

“We spend a lot of our life trying to get better, trying to recover. I hope people will see that when I’m telling stories about what I did and how I coped, that people might think, that seems like a good idea. Putting things down on paper is a way of getting better.”

Rosen has received tremendous support from his family in his recovery from coronavirus, he says.

“I dread to think what it would have been like if I’d just come home to an empty house. The mere presence of your family can be enough. It’s the reciprocity and the proximity, to use two pompous words about it. Sharing and being near to each other has been lovely.”

He tries to walk every day for 30 minutes, stretches with resistance bands and often strokes his two cats to aid his recovery, he says, smiling.

His diary is crammed with bookings to give talks at schools, theatres and to NHS staff in hospitals, while the musical stage adaptation of his book, Unexpected Twist, is currently on tour in the UK.

Rosen describes his ‘before’ and ‘after’ Covid state of mind in the book, the latter giving him a mixture ‘precariousness, fragility and vulnerability’.

“Alongside that is this immense sense – the word gratitude doesn’t express it, it’s beyond gratitude – an incredible sense of affection for all the people in the hospital who did what they could to keep me alive.”

Getting Better by Michael Rosen is published by Ebury, priced £16.99. Available now.