Things I Hate About Having A Cold

(Apart from having to blow your nose all the time.)

1. Inability to regulate your body temperature. I’m sitting here in direct sunlight wearing tracksuit pants, a knee-length cardigan, and truly enormous socks, and I can’t tell if I’m still freezing or I’m over-heating.

2. The wacky dreams. I think they’re a function of the symptom suppressants. Last night, I dreamt first that I had a talking mynah bird. Then I think my subconscious became bored, because my late lamented dog turned up in the dream out of nowhere, and ate the bird in a single gulp. At least that behaviour was consistent with her behaviour in life.

Then I had a dream that included, in no particular order, Stephen Fry, Oscar Wilde (no real leap there), someone whose significance to the dream’s narrative was uncertain but who was repeatedly and insistently identified as Abyssinian, some rather lovely oak-veneer bedroom furniture, and rice pudding. I think someone died, too. I’m assuming there was a story connecting all these things, but I can’t remember it.

3. The constant desire, which must be repressed, to one-up people. People keep saying, “Eeh, I’ve had an annoying day,” and it takes all my self-control not to reply, “Yeah? Well, at least you haven’t got a cold!”

Being sick makes me very selfish, apparently.

4. Forgetfulness. I’ve not noticed this specific problem previously but, for some reason, I keep forgetting today that you don’t hyphenate compound adjectives when they follow the noun, only when they precede it. So I keep having to erase things on my marking.

It seems an unusually specific symptom, but I’m blaming the cold regardless.

5. Inability to resist symptom suppressants. They really are marvellous, but I do try and take them sparingly. And then my nose starts up again, and the pressure builds in my sinuses, and I take another tablet. It’s only then that I start thinking, “Hey, that’s right. These are the things they used to make meth-amphetamines out of. Now I remember. I think I might lie down for a while.”

6. General lassitude. I’ve even run out of interesting things to add to this list, and today’s marking has been a long, slow exercise in stubbornness. (Stubbornly pushing myself through it, that is.)

Still, it could be worse. At lest I’ve finally come to acknowledge that this is a cold, not the plague, so it probably won’t be fatal.

Probably.