If only I could catch men as well as I do colds. My body is currently playing host to a colony of uninvited bugs. If something is blowing in from Argentina, I will catch it here. The bugs are impervious to the repeated notices of eviction. They laugh in the face of the cold and flu tablets that make me higher than Courtney Love. They taunt me a second time with the raw garlic that makes me so gassy I levitate like a Yogi. And the vitamin C only appears to boost their resolve.

Clearly the word has got out that I am a fabulous host that the smaller bugs invited two elephants to take up residence in my nasal cavities. Every time I walk, I feel like I wake them up and they start doing a little salsa dance up there.

My body feels like a YMCA, tired and overrun by Germans. So there is nothing else to do but rest until my own body is strong enough to kill the bugs and elephants. So rest I do.

Fortunately I have the T.V for company. However, I had forgotten how bad daytime television is. The first half of the day appears to be flush with cooking shows where the chef’s starched white aprons are bereft of any evidence of cooking. The early afternoon is dominated by diet plans that presumably are designed to take the weight off from all the cooking you have been doing in the morning. And by the late afternoon you are inundated with insurance choices. Death, disability, funeral plans, bad hair cut, anything.  So if you didn’t feel sick at the beginning of the day, daytime T.V will certainly make you feel ill by the end of it.

I strongly suspect that the employer groups and T.V programmers are in collusion. The powerful employer groups have lobbied the T.V stations that in return for ad buys that would rival Ghana’s annual GDP, the T.V stations will ensure they programme the most excruciatingly painful shows that no cold could ever compete with. The pain of the shows combined with the pain of the cold is enough to have you praying for the sweet release of death which is where the funeral plans come in.

On the Richter pain scale, the worst shows appear to be the ones loosely labelled as Reality TV.  And I will never have my own reality TV show because:

• I sing like a cat with a severe case of gastroenteritis
• I dance as though I am directionally challenged
• I don’t cook, I assemble
• I have nightmares about running through the streets naked
• I have all my original body parts
• I am not a housewife
• I am a porcelain princess and couldn’t survive anywhere without a functioning toilet
• I have nothing to confess except my secret love of Sam Waterston
• I failed year 9 wood work and wouldn’t know the difference between a hammer and a golf club
• I don’t own a castle

So I will make myself a bowl of Polish penicillin and pray that the bugs have the good manners, like a hangover, and leave after a day.