Sicknote

As icy days close in, and the previously absent winter has a go at reminding us it still exists, out come the unused Christmas hats and gloves, breakfast porridge makes its annual appearance, and up pops the duvet safety of sick days.  

It’s at this stage of the season that petty sickness creeps apace, winding its way round the workplace like a sulphuric fart in a small lift, leaving no corner unfouled. People drop off the work radar for a couple of days, followed out, on their return, by another shivering sniffler, like a hibernal game of contagiously diseased dominoes. I had my turn last week.

The problem with sick days, for me, is that finding myself with a whole day I’d otherwise be sacrificing to the gods of work, I don’t want to waste my opportunity to get stuff done, go places I’d normally never see and do stuff I’d normally never do.  There’s a plethora of art galleries and museums I heartily neglect, a world of books I intend to read which perch on my To Be Read shelf.  (In truth, this is more like my To Be Read shelves, and is on the brink of becoming my To Be Read bookcase.  I estimate it will be a To Be Read library by the time I retire. I really ought to buy shares in Waterstone’s).

Unfortunately the nature of sickdays, is that I’m, not to put too fine a point on it, sick. Well, usually.  Or sometimes, at least.

 I may want to fill my time with worth, but the sad truth is I’m more likely to sleep until midday, wake for a Lemsip and then spend the day dozing in and out of consciousness whilst listening to some play on Radio 4 about a bunch of middle class people uncovering the secrets of their grandparents’ abuse of servants in India during the Raj, or some other offering from the Radio 4 write-by-numbers drama factory. By the time I feel anywhere near rested enough to do something, it’s pretty much the time I’d be getting home anyway.

Johnny Rotten, before he became the face of whatever dairy product it is he advertises, once asked ‘ Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ . Yes, Mr Rotten, I have. Every time I waste a sick day on actually being sick. 

What is more annoying than this is when the sickness pounces and it is not a work day.  There is no greater injustice in this world* than arriving home on a Friday to discover that your body has developed a malfunction which results in being bed bound and incapable of doing anything beyond groaning and making Mr Kleenex rich**.

The real shit-smeared nail in the coffin of life here is that, no matter how extraordinarily unwell you are, you will always have recovered by Monday, and have no legitimate excuse to take a sick day. This, along with the existence of the parasitic wasp and Alex Ferguson, is the keystone on which I base my unshakeable belief that there is no God.

And, on that theological bombshell, I’m withdrawing back under the covers because I’m feeling slighty queasy. And, unbelievably, I’m on holiday. Today I planned to do those things I neglect – play guitar, read a book, leave the house.  Curse you, lack of God.   So, instead, I’m off to have that same fitful dream in which a thousand gloomy towers of unread books loom over me, berating me in thunderous tones for depriving them of their destiny while a billion tiny pixies adorned in Waterstone’s T-shirts dance gleefully on piles of burning money.  It’s a recurring highly vivid dream.

If only I knew what it meant.

*This is obviously a lie.

**From blasting snot out of your nose, you filthy minded guttersnipe.