I’ve got a fucking cold
(No, not 'manflu'. No, not that. I know the difference between a cold and flu. If you've got a cold, you feel a bit grotty; if you've got flu, you feel like you'd rather lie around in your own filth than walk the 20 feet to the toilet, which you end up doing anyway, then crawl back on your hands and knees like some overgrown fucking baby, wishing it would end somehow, the thumping headache and the endless aching... you start to fantasise about what it might be like to breathe without feeling terrible, or walk in a straight line, and you start remembering those carefree pre-flu days when you could just go for a piss, or eat something, or walk down the road, or get into a car, or do anything, without wanting to die rather than go through another five minutes of the endless misery. That's flu. I do get the difference, honestly, despite being male.)
Christ, I hate being ill. Not ill enough that I could realistically take a day off work, of course - much as my daily commute and appearance in a soul-free office devoid of natural light and joy make me feel that scrabbling around in bins for half-eaten kebabs might be a better way of surviving, I find the ordeal of daytime television so dreadfully worse, I mean Doctors, for fuck's sake, how can anyone watch that without hating the entire human race for existing and evolving into beings that could create such awfulness? No, I'll plough on.
I don't really complain to colleagues, but I just sit here full of snot - bright green snot, if you must know, and I'm pretty sure you didn't, but hey, I didn't ask to have this gloopy muck clogging up my nose, mouth and ears, did I? - gently wafting through the day, incapable of concentrating on anything other than trying to blast as much of this evil gunk as possible out of my nostrils. It gets to something, doesn't it, when the highlight of the hour is parping into a tissue. Jesus. Is this what life has become? Having a fucking cold, then writing about it, then complaining about it, then doing nothing about it, just waiting for the fucking thing to leave my body, and being generally misanthropic all the while it's still slurping around my sinuses? Is that what I've got to look forward to? This, for days more? More of this shit? More of my bins overflowing with so many sticky tissues it looks like I've been cleaning up after a bukkake party? I don't know if I can take it.
But no. This is the state of me for the forseeable future. Imagine my cork-like head bobbing along a verdigris sea of bubbling mucus, barely able to keep it from slopping into my eyes and submerging me entirely. That's me, right now. Obviously it doesn't look that way. God knows I'm trying to fight it off with all the Lemsip I have at my disposal, but it seems that, at the moment, the goo is winning over.
I've got a fucking cold. Look, I know you don't care. I am not asking you to care. But since you can't see me or hear my catarrhy snorts, you will just have to take my word for it. I want you to know that the reason why everything here is slowing down, and turning into rubbish, is that so am I. You may see me as some kind of dribbling simian banging my head onto a keyboard and making random shit words appear on a website - and god knows there are times when it does look that way - but no, I am a real person, who occasionally suffers with crappy illnesses, and is therefore less able to produce the sparkling goods. I say sparkling, but you know what I'm on about. Just the usual shit, slightly different order.
I have got a fucking cold. There, I've said it. I've tried to be brave, but I can't take it any longer.
So excuse the shitness for a bit, I can't really manage anything more than a few incoherent sentences thrown together. "So what's new?" I hear you all chortle.
Anyway. I'll be better later.
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About Me
Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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May 17th, 2010 - 12:59
we totally need a money making outlet for snot – if not for the sheer fortune I could earn from my output alone, then for the look on the Dragons faces when i roll up to them and make a presentation about the need for investment in my business, and when they ask what the product is I simply sneeze on them.
May 17th, 2010 - 13:11
Under the Tories how can you expect anything else? The cold is a mere honeymoon when compared to the fucking chest infection/cough I have had since a few seconds after Cameron touched a girl’s breast on the steps of number 10.
…But the cricket win was a tonic of hope and optimism, so it might not be all bad.
Tell me I’m wrong that one’s mood should be decided according to the external happenings of British political and sporting events?
May 17th, 2010 - 15:03
Ah… Get well soon, Anton
(says a sniggering woman at the back)
May 17th, 2010 - 15:46
Yikes, sounds like a hell of a cold
Your writing still seems fairly sharp though, so I shouldn’t worry about the inner simian…
Get well soon!
May 17th, 2010 - 23:05
That’s one humdinger of a cold. I haven’t had one like that since my bygone youth.
If Femail preaches about man-flu ever again, I might have to march into their office a la Rebekah Brooks, only I’d be armed instead of just Really Angry.
Anyway, get well soon, Anton.
May 18th, 2010 - 09:42
“doing nothing about it” – pffffffffffffffffffffft. Try this:
1. Go to chemist.
2. Purchase some of these: http://www.chemistdirect.co.uk/benylin-4-flu-tablets_1_2281.html
3. Take day off work (for the first day at least, those tablets are going to make you feel woozier than Oliver Reed on the day after the Wogan show).
4. Get into bed.
5. Sleep.
6. Upon waking, drink a pint of orange squash (for vitamins).
7. Take more of the tablets. Then sleep again, why not. Sleeping’s great.
8. Wait a day or so.
9. Feel better.
10. Cease whinging.
Easy.
May 18th, 2010 - 22:04
Get well soon!
January 13th, 2012 - 19:26
I am currently at work, miserable with a cold, and googled “I have a fucking cold” as if somehow the world wide web would bring back some magic that would annul my misery. This article came up at the top of the list and I have to say, the humor (or humour as you Brits say) was exactly what I needed to take the edge off the mucousy pathos I am walling in (I apologize to my elementary school grammar teacher for ending this sentence with a preposition).
My wife often marvels at how much of a baby I become when I have a cold and in fact my 1 year old girl braves them better than I. All this does is further exacerbate my annoyance at being sick and make me into an angry, frustrated, headachy and snotty madman…. I wish the rhinovirus that infects me would leave my body and would take the form of a human man so I could beat the shit out of it. And yes, I’d kick him once he’s down.