COFFIN

“It wasn’t the coughing that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in…”

We’re well in to January now and the cold I started with on or about New Year’s Eve is still hanging on and making me feel miserable.

Well, to be honest, a LOT of things are making me feel pretty miserable at the moment, but the persistence of this cold, and the accompanying cough, is pretty much being the icing on that particular cake…

It comes… It goes… It comes back again…

I’m sure that I’m not the only one of course, just as I’m convinced that the minute this cold, damp, nasty little spell of weather goes away, and a ray or two of sunshine his my craggy, potato-like bonce, the memory of even having had a cough will miraculously fade away like a summer cloud and I will emerge blinking into the sunlight and wonder quite what I was making all the fuss about.

Of course, having such a thing does cause me to wonder, however, about the basic “common sense” of many of my fellow inhabitants of this great country of ours. There used to be national campaigns which had memorable slogans like:

“Coughs and sneezes spread diseases! Trap them in your handkerchief!”

Which managed to seep surreptitiously into the national subconscious but which we kind of listened too. Then it seems it was decided that we were all far too clever and sophisticated and didn’t need to be told such things because we all had basic common sense and it was all far too obvious.

Tell that to the bloke coughing all over me on the Tube last week…

While you’re at it, you should also try to drum some common sense into the silhouettes whom I drive past who never seem to have got that other little message that was drummed into us when we were younger…

“Wear something white… or carry a newspaper… Be seen… Be safe…”

Meanwhile, until the glorious day comes when the sunlight dapples upon my upturned face and the germs all scurry away back to where they came from, my conversations are likely to be interrupted by these hacking, grating, rasping bouts of coughing that simply refuse to stop as I try and get my words out, and, I have no doubt, sound delightful to whichever unfortunate happens to be within earshot or hanging around at the other end of a telephone line.

It’s an unusual ailment in that sometimes it seems as if we’ve forgotten about each other altogether, and veritable hours can go by without my making a single squeak.

At other times, it’s like there’s a demon lurking at the back of my throat and poking it with a stick or tickling it with a particularly annoying feather.

And then (and there’s no way of putting this delicately) there’s the occasional mouthful of gunky mucus to dispose of, if that’s not too unappealing an image for you to conjure with on this fine and lovely grey morning…

Ah yes, that old problem; Whether to swallow it or spit it out….?

That, of course, is never an easy call, but you know that it’s far better to get the wretched stuff out of you than to have it lurking somewhere and trying its very damnedest to infect something else inside your body in that oh-so-sociable manner that these diseases have.

Of course the other knotty little problem that I’m having to cope with is the fact that having a sore throat does mean that it is where it is, and so does tend to affect my ability to taste anything, and consequently, my appetite is severely lacking at the moment, meaning that taking in the basic foodstuffs which might just help me to feel better seems so utterly unappealing that I seem to have adopted a new policy of trying to starve the ruddy germs out of my body.

Yesterday lunchtime I stared at a loaf of bread with a view to having some toast, and the memory of the flavour and the mere prospect of eating some more of it so filled me with horror that I simply brewed up a cup of tea instead, which is hardly enough to keep body and soul together, but does have the advantage of not stimulating those “cough” muscles like any actual food seems to…

Except, as I found to my cost half way up the stairs, it still does, and I really think that there ought to be a new word created to describe the tricky little dance of trying to keep the hot liquid inside the mug as you are maintaining your balance on a staircase and simultaneously coughing up a lung.

A hacker…? A Paso Tissue…? The Kha, kha, kha…? Wasn’t there a book called “The Coughin’ Dancer…?

Meanwhile, while you think about that, here’s a new variation on an old adage…

“Cough, cough, go away… I’m sure you’ll be back another day…”

Especially if I have to go on any more trains…