Bird Strike

So I’ve been going merrily about my business, ignoring the distant thunder of swine flu rattling the headlines and, though not feeling myself immune, at least feeling myself relatively out of reach. Nobody I know has had it. And my place of work brought in an excellent “stay at home if you or someone in your family has it” policy way back when the flu thing first kicked off in the media.

I felt secure. I felt buffered. I knew The Flu was still out there but I had a moat around me and the drawbridge was up.

Until yesterday.

My walls have now been breached. An ugly ballista rolled over my ground troops and fired a flaming rock over my ramparts and set fire to my great hall.

I attended an IT training session at work yesterday. 5 of us in a little room breathing the same air for 90 minutes. Nothing untoward in this. The biggest fear is usually someone with COSHH standard B.O. The pandemic was the furthest thing from my mind.

But just as I was signing my name on the attendance sheet a rather attractive female course delegate breezed in, apologized for being late and calmly announced that her kids were currently very ill at home with Swine Flu.

My chin dropped so fast I still have the pen top imbedded in my beard. My first thought was: in that case what the hell are you doing at work risking a further spread of the virus? But before anyone could speak she made an attempt to qualify her continued presence at work by stating that she thought she’d “probably had it herself by now and was fine”.

Oh great. You think you’ve had it. And you are therefore assuming that you are, as a consequence, not a carrier of the disease.

She then sat down directly behind me.

Have you ever tried to hold your breath for 90 minutes? I can tell you now, it’s not possible though the hallucinations almost make the attempt worthwhile.

So now I’m paranoid. I’ve woken up this morning with a racking cough and a sore throat. My nose is bunging up as I type. Admittedly I’ve had a perma-cold for the last 4 weeks so these symptoms could be just an extension of that but no. I am now convinced I have got Swine Flu and have carried the disease home to my wife and kids.

I should have done more to protect them. I should have stayed away from home for 2 months. I should have placed myself in a plastic bubble for 7 weeks and had the air exhaled from my lungs processed by second-hand equipment bought from NASA. I am unclean. I should be walking around with a bell around my neck or living in a colony in Cheddar Gorge living off berries and discarded McDonald’s hamburgers (a fate worse than death).

*Sigh*

I’m trying to be sensible about it but it ain’t easy,

In all seriousness I’m not so worried about myself as my kids. Ben has chronic asthma so already has a respiratory weakness and Tom is only 2, God bless him. The possibility of infection is and always has been a major worry.

I must admit I feel very annoyed about the blasé attitude of my work colleague yesterday. But at the same time, in sane moments, I’m trying not to let paranoia run away with me. Lots of people have had Swine Flu and shrugged it off. But I also know that others have not been quite so lucky.

I just feel annoyed that someone saw fit to ignore the clear stipulations of my employer based on their own inexpert diagnosis of their own health. Whether it’s Swine Flu or not, whether my fellow delegates and I are now infected or not, it showed a remarkable contempt for the health and welfare of the rest of us.

Or am I just letting social panic and media hype get the better of me? Am I over-reacting?

Or am I on the ball? Should I be acquiring black market Tamiflu and Michael Jackson’s old face-mask right now?

Hand on heart, I promise not to sneeze over those who wish to cast a voice of dissent into the ring.

Battleships

So it’s now officially a pandemic. Though not many people in the media are as yet using that terminology. All to spare us the degrading activity of panicking en masse I suppose.

Swine flu arrived on these shores with a great furore and hoo-hah and then almost immediately blended into the wallpaper as The Great Expenses Debate peppered the MPs in the Houses of Parliament with their own richly scented excrement.

We didn’t exactly forget about it. We just didn’t want to deal with it. Not really. We’ll deal with it later, we thought. When we actually get it or when someone we know gets it.

And like a game of battleships the shells have landed ever closer and closer and now we’re all starting to get a little bit soaked by the resultant spray.

Apparently the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6. Not sure how many phases there are to go but it sounds very worrying. The number of flu related deaths has also increased. 14 so far in the UK according to one report.

People reactions to it have been bi-polar to say the least. On the one hand you’ve got people who have recovered from it shrugging their shoulders and saying it was no worse than normal flu and on the other you have people like the receptionists at my doctor’s surgery who, during a visit my wife made there last week, barred entry to a man who was panicking because he’d merely been on an airplane with someone who had swine flu. They actually kept him standing on the doorstep rather than allow him to come inside.

Despite all the information flying around the situation remains confusing. And confusion breeds fear far more effectively than keeping people well informed.

For my part – currently struggling with a sore throat, headache and a gummy ear – I’m not too bothered. I have no idea whether I’m coming down with a normal cold or the big SF and don’t care. A couple of days in bed sounds effing great. I’m otherwise fit, healthy and well nourished and am confident I will fight it off should it get me.

But my kids I do worry about. Ben especially is at risk due to his asthma. And Tom is barely 21 months old and has been hammered by every cold going since starting at nursery a year ago.

And still the water plumes rise ever closer...

It’s tricky. Do you wish to get it over with quickly or try to keep yourself disease free for as long as possible? Do you pray to get it now while the vaccine is still available and the doctor’s workload isn’t too great... or do you leave it until the whole country has come to a standstill and there are looters carrying off the latest iPods from Currys?

I guess it’s elementary. There is no choice. It’s fate. The will of God. Luck. Whatever.

You certainly don’t invite all your friends’ kids round for a “flu party” as some parents have been doing according to newspaper reports earlier in the week.

It’s one thing to have your battleship holed by a stray shell. Another to sink it yourself with your own guns.

The Shit Sandwich

The shit sandwich is a day where nothing goes right.

Actually that isn’t enough for a shit sandwich. It’s a day when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And all the things that can go wrong delight in their wrongness at exactly the same time.

You get a deluge of wrongness.

If you’re feeling ill and have slept badly the night before that’s even better because then the shit sandwich becomes a club shit sandwich.

Extra big filling. With mayo. Ooh great. Just for me? How kind.

The club shit sandwich also has vicious peppercorns in it that lodge painfully between your teeth and gums like explosive grit. You carry the taste around with you all day. So much so that everything else you experience on that day also begins to taste like shit. It’s like the shit sandwich is spreading or... even worse... breeding.

And shit sandwich begat shit sandwich and its name was 12th January 2009...

The last thing you want to be doing when chowing down on a shit sandwich is gnashing your teeth but alas the Biblical allusions demand that this is done. So you gnash. And gnash. And it’s shit.

And it’s all yours.

Because people will share your lunch, your politics, your office stapler, your darkest secrets but nobody – nobody at all – will willingly share a shit sandwich with you. If you’re packing a shit sandwich you’re eating alone. It’s got your name all over it. Just your name. Just you.

Yes sirree. Sure looks good but if you don’t mind I’ll just stick with this here ham and lettuce... mm mm!

And you can’t blame them. You can’t blame them at all. Everybody gets a shit sandwich every now and then. It’s the way of the world. When it’s your turn to get a shit sandwich it isn’t a cup that can be passed on to someone else.

It’s bequeathed to you by life itself. You’ve just got to grit your teeth and make your way through it. Neck it down right to the last few flaky crumbs of the crust and hope that tomorrow it finds itself in someone else’s lunch box.

Because a shit sandwich isn’t like lightning. There’s no law that says it can’t strike in the same place twice...

There is after all such a thing as a double-decker shit sandwich...

*Sigh*

Pray for me, people. Pray for me.

I’m really not sure I have the stomach for it.

Ne’er Be Well

I had to accompany the council’s Health & Safety Officer on a Health & Safety Inspection of the building yesterday.

It’s one of the many joys of my job.

2 whole hours of looking for trip hazards, checking for correct fire safety signage, electrical service conformity to various regulatory bodies, recommended lighting levels and ergonomic workstation risk assessments... oh bliss.

As you can imagine, I could barely contain myself.

Why is it that all H&S officers are not so much devoid of a sense of humour but lumbered with one so socially inept that they refuse to laugh at anybody else’s jokes while making determined efforts to constantly crack their own?

And why is it that I feel obliged to play along with it?

Anyway, I had to give up faking my laughter about half way round. The cold / virus / bug thing that has plagued me for the last 5 weeks has now plummeted down to my chest and is forcing me to cough and hack up my lungs like an asthmatic coal miner. There was so much sputum flying around the H&S guy ended up looking like Dan Aykroyd from Ghostbusters.

However, inspection-wise we did ok. The guy had to find something to pick us up on – naturally – but it was all minor stuff; easily sorted. Generally though we passed muster.

Good-oh.

I on the hand, handkerchief pressed to my mouth like a consumptive, was condemned as a H&S hazard. If I don’t get better soon I just might find myself Risk Assessed out of a job.

Hmm. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Grot Wars

With all the recent stresses and strains it was inevitable that one the many microbes that inhabit our atmosphere – a nasty flu-like one in this case – should seize on our apparent weakened state and launch a full frontal assault.

Karen and Tom are currently under siege. Boiling oil is streaming from their noses in a vain attempt to stave off the attackers.

I myself am having to engage in flashy sword-play along my air passages just to try and keep my defences un-penetrated. If they wheel out a siege engine, I tell you, I’m done for.

I’ve left Karen and Tom in bed sneezing their bogeys and ballistas over the perimeter of the bedclothes. It’s a dirty war but someone’s got to do it.

I’m at work putting together a master plan that involves vitamin C, Iron tablets and Echinacea tea. My boss has agreed to release me from my duties early at 3pm sp that I can pick up our boy, Ben (currently neutral in this conflict), from school and then head home and rejoin the fray. My boss is sympathetic but unwilling to commit any of his own men to the battle. Reinforcements will not be coming.

If the worst comes... I have a whisky warhead hidden in a secret silo.

The countdown has already begun...

Pants

Can’t deny it. I feel absolutely pants today. I’m suffering from a raging head cold and all its many accoutrements. All of which seem to be disgustingly snot based.

However, I bet I’m feeling a lot better than dopey dwarf, Leo Sayer, who comically slit the throat of his own already poorly career yesterday (surely a case of euthanasia?) by evacuating himself, little poo stylee, from the Big Brother house in high dudgeon all because BB refused to supply him with a clean pair of underpants.

Leo it seems refused to wash his own underpants on camera because it was “degrading”.

Hmm. It’s only degrading, Leo, if your grundies are horrifically spattered with turd-stains, haemorrhoid cream or spunk.

Or all three, of course.

Hmm. Is there anything you wish to come clean about, Mr Sayer?

Apparently not.

Not on camera anyway…

Bug

The January lurgy is upon us.

I left Karen ill in bed when I dragged myself valiantly into work this morning. Valiantly because I too am slowly succumbing to the virus that is currently decimating my office. The place is littered with empty seats draped with gooey tissues and drying snot. Supplies of paracetamol are running dangerously low.

Everywhere about me I can hear the barking of inflamed throats and congested lungs, the perpetual sniffle of running noses.

In my mind’s eye I imagine the lurgy bacteria floating about the office like a horde of evil faeries. Every one of them has Leo Sayer’s face.

That is how I know I am sick.