Bleurghhhhhh.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Strange and sad things happening which are too dull to burden you with. As if to amplify this, my body explodes in cold. Yesterday night, there was the smallest suspicion of a sniff; today, phlegm city, as if my whole head is filled with gunk, and then they poured some into my chest for good measure.

Colds are so boring. They are not worthy of sympathy. They are banal and mundane and everyday; every single person gets one, at least once a year.

They are also clichés. I lie, palely, on the sofa, a box of mansize Kleenex tissues by my side. Why MANSIZE? thinks my feminist brain, which can kick into gear even when overcome by sneezing. Is it because we delicate pink little ladies have such teeny weeny noses that we need tissues made by fairies? Bugger that for a game of soldiers.

But back to the cliché. So there is the huge box of tissues, which gets surrounded increasingly by little balled up white fellows. There is the trumpetty blowing of the nose. There is the stupid voice where you can’t pronounce your Ns. No comes out as DOH. There is the old lag coughing, as if I have spent a lifetime on the Captsans. There is the frenzied making of chicken soup. (This one with carrots, courgettes, celery, garlic and flat leaf parsley.)

There is the sucking of cough drops. There is the swigging of Benylin, straight out of the bottle, because even when I have a cold, I’m still not bourgeois enough to use that stupid little plastic measuring thing. I’m a cough mixture outlaw; I just swig what I want.

There is the hooting sneezing; huge, gathering sneezes which take about seven seconds to appear, so I am left motionless in the middle of the room, doing that breathing in sort of thing, waiting for the sneeze to hit. Then it does, in a long shout, so I sound like Edith Evans doing fake sneezing or one of those performance art comedy troupes who like to try to shock the middle classes.

God, it’s a BORE.

And I need to finish my book, and I am very fretful, and I have three bloody dogs staying, and I just want September to be over.

You know I hate it when I give in to wailing. I like stoical. I like mostly stiff upper lip. Everybody has their dramas after all, and mine is quite a small one.

But oh oh oh oh OH.

If this goes on much longer, I’m taking to hard liquor.

 

No pictures today.

But there must be the Pigeon because the world cannot survive without that sort of beauty:

I’m so sorry, I’ve really go no idea if this makes any sense at all. My head is swimmy and I’ve got that hot and cold thing going on, so it might all be arrant nonsense. BUT YOU MUST HAVE THE BLOG. So please forgive.