coldy

I drifted awake in the night with an ominous tickling in the back of my nose and aching limbs, and as I came to, realised that I had the beginnings of a cold.  This was followed by the dismal mental tally of all the things I was supposed to be doing in the next few days, that would be spoilt if I felt awful or could only go anywhere accompanied by a box of man-sized tissues.  The Mercury Theatre tonight, a trip to London to meet an old university friend tomorrow, nothing on Friday.  Work on Saturday - oh no, not work, The Wedding.  The wedding in West Sussex, the one entailing a night in a posh hotel and for which I have purchased a new outfit.  To which my general response was Oh Bugger.  Botheration.  Maybe if I lie very still and hold the duvet tightly over myself it will all be All Right.

They're odd things, colds.  I've felt this one stalking me for about a month.  It's never developed into a full-blown streamer, and never gone away entirely.  Apart from a worse than usual tendency to rhinitis, it has manifested its lurking presence in the odd ache, or occasional slight touch of sore throat.  I once mentioned the tendency of colds to hover on the sidelines to my former GP, back in the days when there was a particular doctor at the group practice that I felt was my GP, and he dismissed my theory briskly, saying that colds didn't work like that and you either had one or you didn't.  I still think he was mistaken.  After all, the medical profession recognises that other viral infections can hang around latent for months, or even years.  The nasty thing the Systems Administrator had back in August is recognised as being capable of flaring up again for up to six months, while a childhood infection of chicken pox can rear its head as shingles decades later.

What prompts colds to progress from a slight hint of something into full-blown stinkers?  Getting cold and wet certainly can.  Novelists have made full use of the dangers of 'catching cold': look at Jane's collapse following her rain-sodden trip to visit Miss Bingley.  Since I have been rather careful recently not to get wet I can't blame a chill.  Nowadays 'stress' is preferred as a culprit.  When you're a bit stressed your immune system is weakened, and the germs that surround you seize their chance to act, that's the theory.  Blaming stress isn't a very comforting idea for the sufferer, suggesting either that your life is out of control and badly organised, or that you aren't coping with it very well.  A cold is no longer a misfortune, but a sign of weakness.

I can't believe that doing one little talk that I've done loads of times before to a room full of friendly people, who plied me with free cake and polyanthus plugs, would be so stressful that it would overwhelm my immune system.  Instead I shall put the resurgence of the cold down to either random timing and luck, or else the fact that it has been getting chillier recently.  The chickens have suddenly gone off lay, the cats have started eating like horses, and my body has decided to flirt with the idea of a cold.  The cure for an incipient cold, if you can manage it, is rest.  Sit down somewhere warm (I know that sitting down gives you diabetes, but that's in the long run) and drink a lot of tea.  Rest.  Do nothing.  It's tough if you have a job, or children to care for, since your average employer is not going to be very impressed if you call in sick explaining that you are starting to develop a cold and don't want it to get worse, and nor is your child when it misses out on breakfast, the school run and football practice.

Luckily I had nothing whatsoever scheduled for today until this evening, so the sum total of my labours has been to write one letter, one card and two cheques, and totter as far as the post office before lunch, and after lunch very carefully prune and tie in some branches of a climbing rose that were in the way of the ongoing shed re-roofing project.  The SA is on notice that I would like to be driven to the theatre tonight, contrary to our usual informal understanding that whoever organises an entertainment drives to it.  The cold has not progressed to the overtly snotty stage, so I should be able to enjoy the play and without ruining it for everybody else, on the other hand it is definitely still there, aching, tickling and slightly clammy.