It's only a cold, but...

MANFLU MUSINGS

I am dying.

Well, we all are, aren't we? It's the inevitable end for everyone. But also the instinctive whinge in response to a minor ailment that inconveniences. I have a cold. Frustrating, as I feel a bit too out of breath to go for one of my (embarrassingly brief) gym sessions, and I'm not sleeping as well as usual. It's just a cold. And in a few days time I'll be back to normal.

But.

It is a reminder.  I've been very lucky, with little by way of serious illness or injury in my life.  The worst was probably the glandular fever that dragged on for six months or more in my twenties, and that was only really bad because it hit me  six weeks after moving to the deep south (Hampshire) and starting the job which would give me my career for three and bit decades.  But there's never a good time to be ill, is there?  It stops you doing stuff, it gets in the way of plans, it's never going to be welcome.  Even the small stuff.

A cold is nothing.  But nobody knows if, when, they might be hit with something worse.  Accidents happen, viruses circulate, cancers strike, there's a myriad of means for life to make our bodies go wrong, to stop being the thing we take for granted every day and become a microcosmic battleground.

Of course if something serious there are different ways of dealing with it.  I wonder if I'd be half as positive as these guys?  I don't think Doddie would have let a cold stop him doing much.