The common cold

A completely pointless illness, the common cold is surely the most rubbish malady of all time. In the top five weak illnesses it’s up there with athlete’s foot, pink-eye, excessive sweating and Delhi belly.
In many humans an instance of the common cold is marked by a production of a great deal of pus and mucus, which is in turn expelled through the nose, mouth or something. They ache more and blow their nose alot. In a recent bout of the common cold, I found myself producing enough phlegm to fill a bathtub and blowing my nose around 500 times. When a cold attempts to take hold of me, my body’s reaction is to become incredibly red and drippy and so unpleasant the cold just loses interest and walks out. After producing and removing from my system around three litres of effluent, I wondered whether or not my body’s reaction i.e. producing this junk, was the most appropriate way of dealing with the cold or whether it could just get on with it quietly in the background without making too much of a fuss – the British way.
Instead of doing that, my body put me through a grand opera of discomfort and awkward, mistimed fluid production. Leaking from every facial orifice I put myself in self-imposed exile Quasimodo-style until the bastard thing had been killed off and shat right out of my system, which it now has.
It was naive of the common cold to think that it could set itself up in my body and live there happily ever after, but…what if my immune system hadn’t been up to the job? Perhaps it would have taken control of me like the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and used me to spread more cold until the virus had everyone on earth under its control. I doubt it. The most it managed was hurting my feelings when someone said it was only ”man-flu”.
Maybe all it wanted was few days in me so it could spread to someone else again and repeat the process again and again, maybe that’s the tawdry life-cycle of the cold virus. The sorry existence of the most rubbish illness there is.