My sniffles are on lockdown to avoid drawing attention
IT’S that time of year. Many of us are bunged up and miserable, the rest desperately in need of the sort of warm sun and celestial light that northern Europe doesn’t do this side of the equinox.
On every bus and train, in each office and factory, anywhere where people are bunched together because they have no choice, it’s muffled sneezes, stifled coughs and pasty complexions.
Sometimes the more gregarious and giving among us don’t bother with the smothering and stifling at all. Such people generously recycle whatever viruses they’ve collected elsewhere, in a spirit of sharing and giving common to our Christian heritage.
I escaped the worst of it. Until this week. Today I woke up feeling like someone had mixed concrete in my headandithadjustset.Mynoseis clogged too and my throat wouldn’t feel any worse if I had tried to swallow razor blades.
But I have places to be, things to do and commitments to keep. Do I release myself out into the wider world and do what I damn others for doing: spraying infected and demonic spores among the innocent and the many?
Or do I stay home – duveted, Lemsipped and self-pampered – and write the entire day off?
The public is traditionally forgiving, even sympathetic, in these types of situations. A muffled sneeze into a Kleenex will often win the sufferer a generous ‘gesundheit’ on the Dart.
But this year is different because of the coronavirus, the publicity-crazed, narcissistic bug that has locked down China and traumatised the world in the past month or so.
Far be it for me to play doctor, but in a world where up to 650,000 can die of the flu in any given year I’ve found it difficult to have my temperature raised by a virus that has killed about as many as expire from boredom watching ‘Oireachtas Report’.
Someone told me the other day that she brought a tickly cough with her to see ‘Uncle Vanya’ in the West End at the weekend and it earned her more attention than its lead Toby Jones.
In the light of this sort of catastrophisation, all the rage in a world where people demand a daily crisis fix, it might be best that I stay put and sniffle in martyred silence.
If you do catch a bug from reading this, however, I suggest you contact the Editor.