I feel I’ve been gargling with barbed wire

ON the last day of the old year I wake up thinking Joe Pesci is squeezing my skull in a vice. My head is a bealing deadweight on top of my shoulders. It is throbbing like the dancefloor of Studio 54 on the night Bianca Jagger rode in on her white horse. (OK, I’m speculating here as I wasn’t in Studio 54 that particular night. Or any night …)

My head isn’t even the worst of it though. The worst is my throat. It feels like I’ve been gargling with barbed wire. It’s as if the queen from the Alien films has been dripping her acid blood into my mouth and it has all coagulated around where my tonsils used to be [1]. In short, on this particular morning I’m not at my best.

I have continued not to be at my best ever since. I enter the new year sneezing and hacking and wheezing. It’s the wheezing that bothers me most. The asthmatic gurgle percolating through my … well, what exactly? My sinuses? Do my sinuses extend to my chest? I haven’t a clue. But there’s something in there, rattling away constantly, sounding like the drain after daughter number one has brushed her hair in the shower again.

I moan about my situation. Naturally. To the odd sympathetic noise. J even makes me a cup of tea. But it’s not enough to make me feel better.

And even though Mr Pesci decides to stop squeezing just before my eyes pop out I still retreat to my bed on January 2 and don’t get out again until I have to go back to work two days later [2].

There is nothing new about all of this. I get the lurgy most Januaries. What bothers me, though, are the thoughts it sparks. Thoughts of dissolution, of decrepitude, of decay. What happens, I think after one extended bout of projectile sneezing , if – when – this state of pain, and general feeling-sorry-for-myselfness becomes the norm? Is this all I have to look forward to in my old age? Constantly feeling rubbish.

This is, I realise when my body eventually starts to feel a little more like my own and not one I have been itchily inserted within, the lurgy talking. There’s no reason the future has to be a litany of misery. J’s mum is in her late 70s and has started going to the gym. Loves it. She’s not a new woman but she is a fitter woman. Life can begin again – in some manner or other – at any age. I should take her example to heart. I really should. But I’ll wait until this wheezing stops.