How many calories are there in a Strepsil?

Here I am, sucking miserably on a Strepsil and dying of a sore throat and lack of sleep. 

My head is like cotton wool, my nose is streaming and I can’t stop sneezing.

I blame my lecturer- he set this task- ‘What do you understand by the term psychogeography- why does walking help writing?’

So I did a lot of walking as research and caught a cold.

The few friends I have rung in the last few days have nearly put the phone down on my slightly pervy croaking.

Zumba is definitely out. Two minutes of balletic death throes of the black swan would be as much as I could muster- and that would be pushing it. And as for choir on Tuesday night- well I’m just not going there.

Husband is wearing a garland of garlic cloves and sleeping in another bedroom. Son has just confiscated my childhood Alpine cow bell citing “abuse of privilege.”


Let me explain. 

I have exclusive use of said cowbell whose merry ringing from my sickbed is used to summon sympathy and succour from my loving family. The constant clanging got on their nerves and so now I have to get out of bed and go downstairs to make my own tea!
Outrageous.

Why couldn’t I catch a virus that decreases appetite rather than the other way round? Being ill is so very, very boring. The only physical exercise I’m getting lying here prone in bed is mastication.

My room is strewn with Kleenex, newspapers and magazines which I’m supposed to be researching for my next writing project. All the writing and plotting is giving me brain fever. Concentration levels often falter and so I find myself flat on my back in bed with my limbs sticking up, beetle-like. Now I know how Kafka’s Gregor Samsa must have felt.  It would be nice to think that after a week of suffering I might emerge reborn as a beautiful butterfly. 

Fat chance.

 Most likely I’ll end up a chubbier version of a chrysalis.

Now, where did I put those Strepsils....?