swamp of germs

My cold is still hanging around.  It comes and goes, almost gone one day then back again the next.  Yesterday I was functioning, not with enormous joie de vivre, but enough to do a day in the garden without feeling tired or unwell, and go out to tea.  Today I woke feeling chilly, a bone-deep cold that neither a hot shower nor porridge nor two mugs of tea could shift, and decided that there was no way I was spending the day outside, pruning or no pruning.  Instead I huddled close to the Aga, aching gently, stiff-necked and snivelling.  And cold.

I've been more worried all along about the cold than the bad back.  The latter sounded so much more dramatic and has elicited more sympathy from my friends and relations, but the cold was the reason my back seized up.  I've been working on my back for over a decade, and if only the cold would go away I know how to sort out the back, but I have no way of sorting out the cold.  Whoever cracks that medical mystery will become very, very rich.

I did make it to the music society committee meeting.  Since one of the only useful things I do is take the minutes it seemed a pity not to be there.  I resisted the attempts of my host to take my coat at the door, saying that I'd been feeling cold all day and thought I'd keep it for now.  Looking on the positive side, he did not express any doubts about my fitness to be out, and he is a retired doctor.  I ought to write up the notes of the meeting now while it is all fresh in my mind, but I think I might save them for the morning, when I might be feeling more energetic.

A fluctuating but non-serious ailment like a persistent cold leaves one terribly in limbo.  I have got a ticket for the Royal Academy tomorrow, booked weeks ago.  Will I feel fit enough to go?  What about Saturday's Plant Heritage lecture by Fergus Garrett?  That's by ticket only and it's sold out, and I've been looking forward to it all year and bought my ticket two months ago.  Next week I'm supposed to be talking to a Rotary Club in Chelmsford about the woodland charity.  I don't want to miss things I've paid for and was expecting to enjoy.  I don't want to mess the Rotary Club around.  I wish I didn't have a cold.  It is such a pathetic ailment.