There. I’ve said it. Four days I’ve had a sore throat now, and I haven’t enjoyed one moment of it. When I was little I’d get to stay at home, wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa watching terrible daytime TV. No matter how crap the TV was or how ill I was, I would secretly revel in the fact that I was at home, seeing life that would normally go by while I was stuck in a class room.
Then at around six pm my mother would come home from the various jobs she seemed to have when I was little, always with a bottle of Lucosade or Fergusade (?) for me. That was the hallmark of being ill for me. Well, it was the hallmark of having my mother convinced anyway – I noticed she wouldn’t turn up with any if she had any doubt about the reality of my illness. If I was lucky and ill enough, she’d present me with one of the orange bottles that went sticky the second you removed the cap. You didn’t even have to pour any before your hand would be glued to the bottle and the see through orange wrapper that surrounded the bottles in those days.
I haven’t had any Lucosade or similar in ages – maybe that’s why it’s taken longer to shake off this sore throat/cough combination that looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Or maybe it’s not the lack of the sickly fizzy potion. Maybe it’s because I went to work instead of staying at home on the sofa wrapped in a blanket watching terrible daytime TV?
If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I didn’t have the best sickie record in my first 20 years on the planet. If I had so much as a runny nose I would turn it into full scale black death with some clever acting that would have made Ferris Beuller doff his cap. Now I seem to be a different animal – I’ll usually keep working in the hope that it goes away without too much worry, thinking that if I ignore it it might just go away.
Anyway – I’m trying my best to do just that, by surfing the good web developers pages and converting this site to XHTML. Hopefully the distractions will work – I never have liked lemsip and having had a grand total of four in two days I’ve realised I’m never likely to endorse it either. Yeauch!