Blow by blow

I have been ill. Nothing life threatening, just one of those colds that begin as a sore throat on Friday night, become a raging cold on Saturday and begins to retreat on Sunday evening, leaving you fresh for work on Monday morning. Naturally, your philtrum is still red raw from the cheap toilet tissue you had in the house, the boxes of expensive pharmaceuticals need replacing and for once all your workmates ask if you had a good weekend.

Aside from SmithKline Beecham's shareholders and kids that get a day off school, nobody likes colds. They are nasty and have a cruel streak to their character, plus they are rarely the same, sometimes they serve thick mucus, while watery snot pours from your nostrils on other days. The countless milligrams of paracetamol and blasts of Vitamin C seem to have no effect on the bacteria raging in your helpless body and you just feel like death warmed up for the duration.

Whether it is the thick or watery mucus plummeting from your nose, you'll be clutching the roll of bog roll all day, leaving little balls of tissue carpeting the floor. Despite going through tissues faster than a teenage boy reading his first porn magazine, there are ways to alleviate the boredom. For example, you can try to break the record for the number of used tissues you can stuff into the middle of the toilet roll or how many times you can reuse the same tissue before it disintegrates.

On the second day of a cold we have all awoken and had that moment of hope that a 'good night's rest' had obliterated the germs, but the moment you clear your nostrils the snot is uncorked and comes streaming out like you have taken a laxative for your sinuses. The second day brings further misery, especially for guys, because a moment strikes when you need to decide between blowing your nose and urinating - there just aren't enough hands to do both jobs.

Once the cold is on the retreat or you can't afford to take any further time off from work, you head back to your co-workers to drive them insane with your sniffing and tickling cough. A sneezing fit in the cafeteria leaves the pastries covered in your phlegm and by the end of the day nobody wants to approach you, which for some is just like any other day.

A true story that came to mind while writing this was back when I was dating my future wife. She wrote to me and told me she had a cold, so I thought it would be romantic to send a pocket tissue with 'I love you' written on the inside. When she saw the tissue, she thought that I was breaking up with her and had included it to dry her tears…unbelievable! One more thought: why do we never remember blowing our nose for the last time?