ELEVEN WORDS

I have a cold.

It’s the middle of bloody summer and I have a cold.

A summer cold.

Nothing more, nothing less. I’m not claiming that it’s ’flu, nor will I insist that I am at death’s door. I shall continue about my business quite, well, not exactly happily but rather more groggily that usual, but continue with it I will.

Typical! It’s been brewing up for a few days now, and had been inevitable since well before that because the beloved was struck down with it over the previous weekend, and muddled through and suffered with it, whilst I pottered about the house and occasionally dashed off in search of palliatives to ease her suffering.

My usual “cure all” are those capsules that are allegedly designed to “nurse” you through the “day”, although their name escapes me now, and I had to double up on my weekend supermarket visits last weekend because I completely forgot that the first one I went into didn’t actually have a pharmacy counter. I planned just one trip to the supermarket and, thanks to roadworks on both the major routes out of the small town I live in that head towards my mother’s flat, I was out for over three-and-a-half hours, with an incapacitated beloved “eagerly” awaiting my return with drugs that offered short-term blessed relief.

You see, there I am getting all worked up about nothing again. Mountains out of molehills. You can tell I’ve got a cold…

This cold comes into the house because, unlike myself, the beloved goes out into the big wide world and engages with real people, people who have real germs that they seem to like sharing with their fellow human beings. Her job involves a great deal of day-to-day contact with people not likely to be in the best of health due to their circumstances, and equally finds her crammed up against other passengers, all of whom seem to cough and sneeze their way to and from the metropolis each day courtesy of Northern Rail’s rather bizarre carriage allocation policy on their busier morning routes.

Surprisingly, because it’s “me time”, my system will rally and propel me through the weekend, somehow oblivious to the more subtle side-effects of my growing disease-prompted irrationalities. It can be a dangerous time, not least because my “wisdom” gene is suppressed, but also because, come the cold, hard dawn of Monday, everything will seem as if I have to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with an eighty-a-day smoking habit. Actually “Tuffers” (on TMS at the weekend), was trying to tell us all that being a smoker is an advantage when it comes to climbing Kilimanjaro because you’re more used to having to work your lungs. I’m not convinced that I wasn’t just momentarily delirious…

Having a cold makes me feel thoroughly crabby and not a little bit unwise, for my usual reticence to engage in “mouthing off” about things can be severely impaired when the irritation gets too much. In fact it tends to make me both hypersensitive and totally insensitive at the same time. This is why (at least I hope it’s why…) it only took eleven words to wake me up to what an utter git I can be, but, at the same time, send me into a tailspin of idiocy that I suspect is going to be more complicated to extract myself from than they really merited. Although, if that’s the penance, then so mote it be…

Eleven harmless little words, but the idiotic, hypersensitive side of me took them as gospel and decided to throw out the baby, the bathwater and the whole ruddy bathroom when I read them in the blurry haze of a summer Sunday morning when my immune system was deciding whether to head off into battle or just crawl back under the duvet and ride it out…

“That’s right. Save it for your blog. Maybe someone is listening.”

“Well”, I thought, “that’s pretty much all of the joy sucked out of that then”, having been cut particularly to the quick by the heavy sarcasm of those last four. My trigger points are very few, but then I sometimes forget how well I’ve let you all get to know precisely where they are.

“Congratulations!” my brain rattled on (even I wasn’t listening by now), “You found a way to finally shut me up!” There had been a rather pointless and ill-advised (on my part) little exchange going on which I will explain to you in greater depth another day. I had, after all, been advised to save it for my blog and, as is horrifically predictable of me, I will…

In the meantime, my whole relationship with the tricky world of “social networking” is under scrutiny. Sometimes I can be so startlingly lacking in tact that I remind myself of my mother, and this tiny moment gave me an awful lot to think about, so I was actually quite grateful for the “wake-up” call. I decided to batten down the hatches and give myself some time to do the actual thinking without being bothered by the whole sort of general mish-mash that comes from continuing to engage long after you’ve lost the argument. So, because I really needed to “get out of Dodge”, I started to “block” a few of the normal routes that could be used to reach me, before I realised that I simply needed to change one of my privacy settings instead. That, I’m pretty sure I know, is going to be complicated to explain when I re-emerge blinking into the chaos again, but, like I think I already mentioned, there is a penance to be paid, and if that’s the worst it gets, then fair enough.

So thank you for the opportunity to withdraw and regroup, and, at least for the time-being, I must bid a farewell to FizzBok.

Did I mention that I’ve got a cold…?