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.