Saturday

So last night I was invited to stay at Rob's, I'm sure the people in my ofice, who were becoming increasingly alarmed at my coughing and spluttering, put him up to it. Rob works for the same company as me but works in a diferent office anyway however the invitation came about I was glad of the oportunity to do some recovering from this cold that I have had all week. I have never had a cold like it; normaly one day you feel a bit achy then the next few days you cough and sneeze a bit and thats it. This cold has been a real monster, it just seemed to get worse each day, I could barely think straight and ached all over for days. Each time I coughed, which was quite often, it felt as though I was getting kicked in the side of the head (yes I do know what the feels like I used to play Rugby). Last night as Rob and I walked to the pub after dinner to meet a friend from Uni I stopped a couple of times for a brief coughing fit and was greeted with the sensation of being kicked in the back of the neck as well as the side of the head. I don't know why but at the time I found this hugely amusing and I must have looked quite a sight, coughing, grimacing with pain and then doubling up with laughter. Rob prescribed Whiskey Mac as a good cure for colds and I believed him, Rob is very good friends with two doctors so who am I to argue? The problem was that by the time I got to the pub I had nearly lost my voice and then the smokey atmosphere played havoc with my chest, so I had to leave pretty quick and go back to Rob's.

I sat on the sofa for a while and watched TV with Clare, Rob's long suffering housemate, and realised just how much of modern life revolves around tv, people just get back from work, watch tv go to bed then get up put the tv on whilt they get ready to go to work. If your a student then you just take the work bit out of the day and sit around watching Quincy and adverts for stairlifts. Missing all this TV is a bit of a double edged sword, on the one hand I am missing out on a shared cultural experience, a common reference point for conversations around the water cooler. It would, for example be great to watch Space Cadets. (Foreign readers might like to note that Space Cadets is a new reality tv show in which the contestants have been tricked into believing they are going into space, when in 'space' they are going to encounter aliens) Sure the program sounds cruel and the contestants will never be able to live it down but on the other hand it's a huge moment in TV history and it is a shame to miss that. On the plus side of not sitting around watching tv all evening I do feel as though I have a life and I'm not just sitting about dribbling to a flickering box of images as I slowly get old.