JANUARY is nearing an end and I’m down for a big swimathon – remember? I’m on track to do a mile in March – only problem is the lurgy refuses to go away, lie down and die.
The pool is an aspiration, getting out of bed is an aspiration.
Someone has left a cold tap running inside my head and the drip on the end of my nose is irritating.
I had a dose – so why am I getting it again?
It’s like the Night of the Living Dead or the children of the Hydra’s teeth in that ancient but wonderful version of Jason and the Argonauts. Remember how the wonky skeletons rose up from the ground and no matter how often Jason hacked them to bits and knocked them over, they kept rising again and coming for him?
No sooner do I think this dose is all over than it rises again, phantom-like from the grave, and lurches towards me, Terminator-style, bearing the gift of a hacking cough.
“That sounds like a 60-a-day habit,” say the two other males in my life, visibly shrinking from me on the sofa.
They are very thoughtful if, physically, very distant. They bring drinks and food and, I dare say, if they could get a hold of one of those sticks people use to take selfies with, they’d mop my brow with a warm towel from a respectable distance.
I start off nights in the bed and then, at about 3am, it all gets a bit much, and I’m down on a makeshift bed on our sofa, trying to lose myself in a good murderous crime thriller, mumbling at our house spider who has turned into a kind of pet and generally feeling extremely sorry for myself.
Swim a mile – I couldn’t even make it to the local shops without fearing that the return walk will morph into a Shackleton epic.
Just when I think it is all over and I heave ho back to work with true enthusiasm, I come out having got struck down again. I carry hygienic wipes with me and wipe keyboards and phones and earphones – but to no avail.
But work takes my mind off my misery.
“And it’s nice and warm and you can have a cup of tea while you’re there,” says my other half. “At least you were not born in Afghanistan or Aleppo and you’re not digging trenches in the road or down a sewer.”
Who is he – Job’s comforter in the corner?
All this is true. I am very grateful. After all, it is January and it is the time of year when everyone is meant to be happier, healthier and truly grateful for everything.
They say you should go to bed at night and list three things that have made you happy during the day. Getting up out of the bed is one of them – at the minute I am managing to do that for whole five minutes in the day.
Drinking a decent coffee is number two – but my taste buds are rejecting anything but water at the moment. Getting to my work would be number three – I actually miss it.
My pleasures are small.
But it feels like January is the time when we’re all surrounded by ideas and resolutions for a whole new 2017. The television and the papers are creaking with stories on how to lose that blubber. Nice TV doctors are on hand to take an intimate look at your poo and take you in hand in the best possible way.
It makes for addictive watching. After all, when your jeans don’t do up, it is deeply satisfying to watch someone whose love handles are elephantine. Suddenly, it is not so very bad. Call it schadenfreude – guilty milord.
I call it the Janaury blues and a first world problem.
It is difficult not to get caught up in the clean, green, living machine represented by impossibly beautiful people on television. In work, there are people swigging impossibly ugly green juices each morning. And yes, I pulled the juicer book from under the bed and thought about it.
But then the lurgy came back a-visiting and somehow, all that clean green stuff went out the window.
If you want to be grateful in a Pollyanna way then just think of a week’s flu as a deep colonic cleanse. You’d pay a fortune for it in a Swiss clinic but hey, hook up with a virus and you can have all that for free. What’s not to like?
Roll on February.
