I mocked, now I’m afflicted
We all say and write things we regret. My own weakness is for jokes. If a line makes me laugh I keep it in, even when I know it’s unjust, even when I know it will bring trouble. So it was some 20 years ago, when writing about the delights of the common cold, that I let it be known that Mucus, Sputum and Phlegm would make a fine name for a firm of solicitors.
It was wrong then and it’s wrong now and I knew it was wrong as I wrote it but I chose not to listen to the little voice of god. I told myself that it was funny and there would be no consequences. But I knew there would be consequences. You simply can’t go around insulting bodily secretions like that. And so it has proved.
I have never known the difference between a cough, a cold and flu. All, it seems to me, are just Upper Respiratory Tract Infections (What? Oh you are kind, and yes I did consider a medical career. But at the last moment I turned off the Boulevard of Prosperity where the doctors’ mansions stand, and headed barefoot down the Path of Stones to a writer’s hovel. Do I regret it? Ha! What’s the going price for souls?)
Anyway, I now get an URTI a year. And each one seems nastier than the one before: it lingers longer, weakens me more, hunches me another few degrees. And every year the cough starts deeper in the chest. Of course I understand what’s going on. Mucus and co are teasing out their revenge, enjoying the protraction of the torture.
Last Friday was a pretty day, with birds singing, lambs gambolling and a sky the colour of a starling’s egg. But I was several days into my annual URTI and I was not a pretty thing. For lunch I managed only a few spoons of chicken soup, sprinkled with self-pity. Nevertheless, after lunch, I took the dog out because you cannot disappoint a dog.
The dog went as merrily as ever, rejoicing in the sensuous world, but I went slowly, hunched and shuffling, avoiding exertion for fear of bringing up the dread solicitors.
Though I remained alert, of course, as all dog owners must, for the council drones that crisscross the sky in search of a dog off the leash and the chance to impose another swingeing fine (I quote from the
page 411: swingeing: adj. excessive, huge, (of punishments) grossly punitive, as in 18th-century England for stealing bread or 21st-century Christchurch for pleasing a dog).
Icoughed. It was a rich strong cough that came from deep. And it brought up a bolus of phlegm that clamped over what we medics know as the trachea. I could not breathe. It’s a funny thing, death. The rational mind may be reconciled to it, aware that it comes to us all. ‘‘Oh hello,’’ one imagines saying to it, ‘‘so here you are at last. I’ve heard so much about you.’’ But the autonomic nervous system will have none of it.
While my rational mind was watching me die from asphyxia, and was oddly aware of two horses in the neighbouring paddock, one brown, one grey, my autonomics went berserk, flinging me to my knees, hunching my spine, making me bark like a sea lion.
Of a sudden the bolus flew, followed by the chicken soup. I collapsed in a heap of weakness on the damp ground. My dog came fussing. And I heard the laughter of the grim solicitors as they withdrew. ‘‘See you next year,’’ they said.