DREADED LURGY

That night I felt the back of my throat tightening.  It got between me and my sleep and forced me to dream weird dreams including one in which I had bought a food warehouse, and I couldn't get the stock control right.  When I arose the next morning I was light-headed and my throat felt as if it had been strafed with carborundum stone.  I had a hacking cough, sore lungs and a nose stuffed tighter than toothpaste in a tube.  In addition, I had a headache that seemed to have sucked my eyelids and cheekbones into the back of my skull. When I ventured into the back garden to feed the birds, or rather the solitary fat wood-pigeon that is the only fauna around these parts, the bitter lash of the wind made my eyes water.  For the first time for a long time, I didn’t feel well enough to go to badminton.  I tried to conduct myself as normally as possible.  I ate my toast and marmalade and drank my tea.  I even walked down for a newspaper, though I dragged my feet on the way back, for I felt I was wading through Airfix.  
I couldn’t face walking the dog, so I shovelled her into the car and drove to the coast.  The tide was high, and I lumbered along firm sand near the water’s edge, unable to find the strength to plod through the softer stuff, feebly kicking a tennis ball for the spaniel to collect and return to my feet.  As usual, I was on the lookout for interesting spindrift, but could only find the normal fare.  This comprised a spent rocket cartridge, a broken lobster-pot, a number of circular rubber spacers, a burst inner tube, a shredded tyre, the handle from a teacup and a number of plastic bottles.  The wind tugged at my eyelids and made my eyes stream.
I saw two mute swans swimming on the open sea, a sight I hadn’t seen before. I saw what I took to be a number of wigeon bobbing about on the swell, but they might just as well have been scaup, if not garganey, gadwall or even shoveler.  There were curlew, crooning mournfully overhead, and bar-tailed godwit, eagerly probing the sand with their surgical bills.  At the western end of the beach, I walked the dog onto a spit of sand adjacent to the sea, so that she could have a paddle, which she patently enjoys, even in temperatures of two degrees celsius.  Unbeknown to me, the tide was still rushing in and, when I turned around to go back, there were six inches of water between me and the sand.   I looked down at the comical artifacts that adorned my feet.  They were of the style that might have been worn by DH Lawrence’s grandfather to a Methodist ball in Mansfield in the early 1860s.  They were definitely not designed for wading.  With a sigh, I bent down, removed my shoes and socks, rolled up my trouser-legs, and ploughed back through the water.  I had the length of a cricket square to walk.  The dog skipped gaily past me, thinking this was rare sport indeed.  I felt as if someone had injected liquid nitrogen into my feet.  I hoped I wouldn’t faint.  My teeth started chattering like castanets and I swear my lips turned blue.  By the time I got back to the car I was walking like Jake the Peg in a leg-iron and shivering like Captain Oates.  My car has a switch that is supposed to allow the heater to direct a stream of hot air directly to the feet, but, perversely (the car is French) heat never spreads below the upper thighs.  It is a good job it is an automatic, because I couldn’t have operated the clutch. 
I went straight in the bath when I got home, then spent the next three days in bed.  I thought I was well enough for tennis this morning, and actually dressed for it, until I discovered that I couldn’t lift a spoon, never mind a tennis-racquet.  I went straight back to bed. Maybe in a month’s time I’ll have worked up enough energy to open a tin of beans – until then I have armed myself with cold tablets, lucozade, Werther’s Originals, Sinex nasal spray, several boxes of tissues, a bottle of night nurse and fourteen novels.  That should be enough to get me through till March, unless I suffer a relapse.