** Attention conservation notice: man complaining about being ill **

Day six of an absolute stinker of a head-cold; at the end of each day, it’s felt like a turning point has been reached, only for the actual turning point to occur in the middle of the night, and to be a turning not exactly for the worse, but for an as-yet-unexperienced flavour of equally but differently bad. I actually got a full eight hours of kip last night, but it was punctuated by about half an hour of relentless coughing; today the coughing has retreated, but the intensive snot production of Tuesday is back again; the fever from the top end of the week seems to be gone for good, though, and that’s the straw of hope I’m clinging to.

(In case you’re wondering, I have taken a couple of lateral flow tests, both of which were as unambiguously negative as such tests can be. I’m also pretty sure where it came from, namely a pair of elderly Italian tourists who were on the same train as me last Friday, both of whose wet hacking coughs punctuated the sort of wheezy, laboured breathing that Darth Vader felt obliged to cover up with a black plastic helmet the shape of a bell-end. I probably should have worn a mask! I didn’t! Life goes on. Death and taxes, yo.)

There’s a certain therapeutic value in writing about one’s physical malaise, I suppose—though sharing said writing publicly, that’s a different question—but I suppose most of my motivation for this post is to rail in frustration at the way I always seem to get ill at the most inconvenient times viz. my workload (two talks and slide decks to prepare for next week!), and to demonstrate to myself that I am actually capable of doing something more constructive than clicking on depressing news links from my Mastodon feed.

I have a Te*ms meeting now, which should be fun. I hope your Friday is going better than mine!