Sniffles

I’m just coming out of a bout of cold. Not the chilly isn’t-the-weather-turning kind, but the Please Stop Sweating My Head Hurts Ow Ow Ow kind.  The problem with a cold is that if you tell people you can’t come into work/go to the pub/make your own Lemsip because you’ve got a cold, you tend to be on the receiving end of a sneer, and a scowling look which says You Workshy Piss-taking Lightweight Motherfucker.  The solution to this, obviously, is to take a trot to the other end of the snot spectrum, and Have Flu.

I’m reluctant to participate in this particular technique, because I’ve had flu proper, and it makes a nasty, headshitting, bone-aching, sweatfest cold seem like a summer stroll, in a well-manicured park, in comparison.  From what I remember it was somewhere between Ketamine, Acid and being made of a thick mixture of tepid vomit and broken glass.  I spent a week in bed delirious, asleep,  or, in moments of lucidity, desperately hoping I was on the mend so I could get to the pub. I went a week without a drink.  I never want flu again.

It is out of respect for the Flu Gods (may they never strike me down again) that I don’t cross the boundary between Killer Cold and Bona Fide Flu.  The paucity of the English Language lets us down again.  We need a word which sits neatly on the spectrum, in the middle, laughing at the sniffle and minor ache that a standard Lempsip can mask, but trembling in fear at the Flu which kills like an American Student with a grudge and bag of guns.

In the animal kingdom, these hybrids take the simple and make it special. Take a lion and a tiger, some cat KY and whatever the feline equivalent of a dinner date and Barry White is. Take the offspring of said coupling, and choose one of two options. If the lion is the daddy, it’s a liger*. If a tiger takes parental responsibilities, it’s a tion. Proof that patriarchal priority is not a human construct, but exist in the animal kingdom too.  Faultless logic. Ahem.

Moving swiftly on.

This wouldn’t work for the cold/flu hybrid. ‘I’ve got a fold’ sounds, to me, to be vaguely sexually, but not pleasantly so. ‘I’ve got a clu’ sounds like a Scooby-Doo re-enactment. I suggest, therefore, that it is time to neologise, and step forth into new linguistic territory. From now, a cold which is more like the runny nose and ache of a particularly chemical night out, will remain a ‘sniffle’. Flu remains flu. It doesn’t need pig-, bird-, cat-or donkey-  in front of it to sound unpleasant.  (Please don’t tell me you’ve got bird flu. I don’t tell you I’ve got monkey-AIDS*).  And in the middle, the cold that ruins Christmas from a great height;that wipes out November weekends in sheets of sweat; which kills the occasional frail old lady who forgets to stock up on Lemsip. This beast shall, henceforth, be known as snotfuckery. Please spread the word with your germs.

*Pretty much Napoleon Dynamite’s favourite animal

** Mostly because I don’t have AIDS. But if I did, I wouldn’t try to overegg the viral pudding by throwing the simian prefix into the package. ***

***I’m allowed to make jokes about AIDS, South Park said so. I’m a product of the TV generation.

Work is a Four Letter Word

One of the problems with keeping a blog with my own name on it is that I have to be very cautious about mentioning real people, or pissing off real people. I didn’t mention, for example, the friend who blah blah blah. Nor have I shared my opinions on the recent trend for short pencil skirts, for fear off the repercussions that might emanate from my girlf.*

I find myself in an unusual position at this present moment. I’ve started a new job, and nobody there knows that I e-scribble. I can, therefore, let rip fearlessly, like a man with Irritable Bowel Syndrome at a deaf convention.  So...

Unfortunately, the downside of this is that I don’t really know anyone well enough to have formed anything other than a fleeting impression. First impressions are that everyone is essentially superficially pleasant, tending towards the conservative side of life, and a bit mumsy. The younger staff look like embryonic versions of the old staff, and it’s all a bit Midwich Cuckoos. I hope I’m wrong, and beneath the still surface there is world of filth, vice and excitement, otherwise I may get bored. I suspect I’m going to be yawning and looking at my watch a lot. 

The thing about the workplace for me is that I generally resent the entire concept of getting up and having to do what I’m told so I can afford to drink, smoke and make contributions to a sensible  pension fund. I suspect it stems from watching Jeeves and Wooster as a teenager and wanting that carefree, work free life, and realising that, as I wasn’t born on an absolute pile, the life of an idle and  feckless drone wasn’t really an option. Gutted.

 To counter this simmering black-hearted resentment I’ve always relied on a workplace which is as equally social as requiring of actual productive work.  And, when I first entered the world of paid employment, this is what mostly I encountered.  Mostly because I was indentured in a call-centre wishing swift death on the public, with a bunch of other graduates who had also failed to look for a proper job and were similarly under a mental and emotional apocalypse.  The one perk of hating your job is that it drives you to drink, and many evenings were spent pissing away the pittance of a wage, drowning the dawning sense of the futility of life. Well that, and trying to pull anyone who’d have me.

I’ve had some exceptional experiences through work, and I’ve made some great friends.  I once bonded with a supervisor after explaining to him I’d be a little off form as I’d had a little too much party the night before.  He was very sympathetic to my predicament and sniffing as, he admitted, he too had spent the night being similarly careless with the party favours. My girlfriend was originally a workmate, a first year teacher in a school in New Zealand.  I miss my workmates from last year, with whom the day would disappear amidst teaching, filthy jokes and casually cutting insults.

However, in these times of Economic Uncertainty**, as the BBC calls our financial predicament, such luxuries are not always available.  For now, at least, Work is a place of work, a place where everything is pleasant but serious, and I have no outlet for scathing cynicism about the world in which live.

Until I work out how to break the firewall and get on Facebook. And if you see me there, and if I seem more vitriolic that usual, you know why. You fuckers.  

*I’ve dropped this in to see if she really does read this. If I get an earful about pencil skirts, and accusing her of being capable of giving me an earful, I’ll know she’s read it. That’s all this is, my love. A cunning trap.

** Why don’t they just say the economy is double plus bad. We live times of economic fuckedness, and the Tories are making it worse.  For once I’d love to hear on the news ‘In these times of oh-my-god-the-country-is-in-the-hands-a-gaggle-of-fuckwit-incompetents-and-we’re-all-going-to-die’.