Incapacitated

The Central Intelligence System is under attack!

The main air ducts to the outside world resound with continuous explosions. The two large video screens steam with condensation. And very soon the two loudspeakers will crackle and splutter until their sound ceases altogether. Even now all noise is interrupted by a static-like coughing and choking.

Yes, folks, it’s time for the Annual Cold.

For weeks I’ve worn the unmentionable long johns and weathered the withering looks of my with-it kids – and kept their colds at bay. And mentioning the kids, for weeks I’ve avoided their germ-laden, virus-filled kisses and cuddles, all the while trying to maintain my normal fatherly relationship with them.

Finally a couple of days ago my resistance gave up the ghost and laid me flat on my back. For everything from the neck down it was work as usual. Only the section that keeps everything else in order – the head – was out of action.

(In fact, the glare of my computer screen is too much for my glazed eyes to cope with, and I’ve had to dictate this from my sickbed to my 10-year-old speed typist.)

Talking of heads, having a cold always brings to a head a point of contention in the battle of the sexes that my wife and I constantly indulge in. She always asserts, in line with other wives to their equally beleaguered husbands, that I make a terrible fuss about having a cold. She says that when women have colds they have to grin and bear it. Women, she says, don’t have time to stop for colds. They certainly don’t have time to go to bed for a day and a half. She then proves her point by carrying on regardless when hit by the bug.

I maintain, along with the aforesaid beleaguered husbands, that men suffer far more than women when they have a cold. It’s a well-known fact that men’s skins are thinner; surely that gives us less protection. Consequently we’re more afflicted when a cold strikes us.

This cuts no ice with my wife. Once I have a cold, she follows her normal policy of maintaining a polite distance and ignoring my cries for aid. I grow faint upon my sick bed. If I’m not at death’s door, then I’m in view of it.

I’ve found it to be a strange phenomenon that women always accuse men of making a fuss about being sick. Yet we gentlemen would seldom dare to tell a woman who’s sick that she’s not.

I have to say “seldom,” otherwise my wife would point out that on one historic occasion I didn’t believe she was ill until she proved it by winding up in hospital.

I was in the North Island recently, and spent time with a couple who have two teenage daughters. When the husband comments on his poor state of health, as he has had good reason to do so lately, the three females in his establishment tell him not to fuss so much. He hasn’t even got a son to back him up.

Perhaps all we men are looking for is a little sympathy, a little mollycoddling in our state of ill repose. Perhaps we hope for a little more understanding from women, that in one area at least they’ll realise we really are the weaker sex.