Blakey Related Injury

Reign your sympathies on me, for I am ill with the dreaded lurgee. Not quite ill enough to call in sick from work, but just about enough to make my day a grinding punishment. All last night I’d been cursed with a perpetually leaky face. My nose was like an unrelenting tap of dripping mucus. This morning, I awoke to a similar kind of volume of screwed-up tissues surrounding my bed as an untidy pubescent boy might at the end of a particularly uneventful summer holiday. But let me assure you, at my age, it was all definitely nose mucus. More’s the pity. That’s the problem with ailments. There’s never any illnesses with ‘pleasant’ side-effects, is there. They always involve tedium, pain or misery so the best you can ever aspire to, is feeling just plain old back to normal like you were before. Just for the sake of counter-balance, why can’t we have ‘nice’ symptoms with a cold too, rather than just aches and runny noses? For example, imagine if the mucus build-up wasn’t actually mucus, but another fluid. And it wasn’t in the sinus, but in the groin area. And instead of having to blow your nose a gazillion times, you had to relieve yourself using the nearest practical orifice. Meaning that throughout your working day, you’d be obliged to head off to the toilets every five minutes to knock out a more pleasurable excess, as a matter of valid medical necessity. This’d be great news if your employer is prudish, or better still a guilt-ridden Catholic. They’d be so naturally repulsed by your condition that the first slightest hint of the groinal snivels (or whatever they were), and you’d be sent home for the day! Even more fun when your boss caught a cold himself. Imagine the torturous dilemma and self-loathing on his face every time he was hit by the necessity of vulnerable fluid expulsion. But no. Instead we are left with tedious nose blowing. And this becomes painful after a while. I tell you, I’ve had to wipe my nose so much over the last couple of days that I have developed flaky skin, little cuts and sores between my nostril and top lip. As well as being darn painful it is particularly unattractive. In fact earlier today, I did an impression of Blakey from “On the Busses” with a little too much gusto, and having stretched my mouth a bit too far, one of my grazes unexpectedly popped open and started leaking blood. I must be the first person in the world who has suffered a split lip whilst doing an impression of Blakey from “On The Busses”. Whoever heard of a “Blakey-related-injury” before? Exactly. Colds are rubbish.