Gah!

I have been feeling rough all week. Every time I think it's fading I perk up a bit then find myself all groggy and snotty again a couple of hours later. I ran a bath on Friday after a knackering day at work and spoke to my girl just before I indulged. I'm usually a shower person but I thought that I'd relax and it'd make me feel better. Girl says: 'The LAST thing you want to do is have a bath. EVERYONE knows that you shouldn't have a bath when you're ill.' Well if it is everyone then it's minus me because I'd never heard that one before. I did learn something though: When SHE has a cold I'll buy some air freshener and industrial strength deodorant. The nagging anxiety about the damage I was no doubt doing my system tainted the bathing experience I regret to report.

The reason I say 'GAH!' though is not because of this but because I started to feel a bit rough about an hour ago after overseeing my son's birthday 'party'. I say party but it was more a bunch of teenage lads alternately booming then squeaking then mumbling then guffawing all afternoon. My boy knows I'm going a bit deaf in one ear and it frustrates him when I can't hear him from two rooms away when he whispers something to me. For this reason, it puzzles me why these lads need the TV on so loud. I was trying to occupy myself with the paper and random internetty type things but the floor vibrated so much it was hard to concentrate.

Anyway, despite the snow and the cold I thought I ought to get something for my re-thickening head so put on some boots and a coat and trudged down to the shops. I really fancied the idea of curling up on the sofa with a hot Lemsip and the paper. I queued behind a very very old lady who paid for 4 cans of special brew and 200 Richmond (really) with coins, vouchers, bits of paper and some fluff. Maybe she just looked old: without all those fags and a few cans of Special Brew and she might have been the same age as me. I never thought of old ladies as Special Brew fans to be honest. Yet another case of anti northern prejudice I suppose.

So I got to the counter and asked for the Lemsip, trudged back and put the kettle on. Savouring the relative silence, I opened the box to discover that they are 'caplets'. They're not even pills. They're a word that doesn't exist! (Granted 'internetty' doesn't exist either but that's not the point). Why call them 'Lem...' i.e. Lemon and '...sip' i.e. you sip it if you can't actually sip it and I doubt very much if the bastard caplets taste anything like lemons. From now on I will buy Beechams.

Talking of 'Caplets', best mate was telling me yesterday about when he was a kid in the North East. I suspect that his family lived in a class all of their own because they lived in neither house, flat or bungalow but a 'Bungalette'. That's certainly not working class but it's a bit off middle class too. The reason it was called this is because it only had one room upstairs. I'm dying to visit this place; in my mind there's this strange cone shaped building but I suspect it's not as exciting as that. We lived in flats and houses when I was a kid. They were pretty ordinary. The only interesting thing I can think of about them is that one was a council house that had a flat roof. They were alternate rows of bungalows and houses faced with some horrible 1960s grey fascia material. In the 90s they put proper pointy roofs on them. They look OK now.