In an effort to remain willing and able to write, I come to you today with something vile, something which strikes fear into the heart of men and women the various worlds over.

It is indeed a new case of the most annoying of illnesses, where your head pounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to destroy the jungle of your mind. Where you become at times so emotional, that anyone saying “Hi” can cause you to break down in the street, shake your fists weakly in the air and softly moan “why” to the sound of a 50 piece orchestra.

It reaches the point where your nose becomes so emotional that all it is capable of is crying all the time, and that any attempts to quell the flow with far too much kitchen rolls from Poundland will be met by laughter at the illness in question, bellowing out like Brian Blessed, screaming that resistance is futile. It gnaws at you, interfering with everything you do, with a 24 hour call-out being required for the clean-up crew every time you cough and sneeze near anything.

You struggle with medication in vain, thinking it will help, but it only seems to make it stronger, make it adaptable, and in the battle of wills, you feel that you may not make it, to point you want to tell your wife and children that you love them, even if they don’t exist.

I speak of course….of manflu. (OH…..MY…..GOD……)

Regretfully, due to blistering cold weather and then returning to vastly more mild climates in sunny London, I currently have this vile interruption to daily life flowing through my very being, making me appear more gross and messy than the contestants on the “Great British Bake-Off” where someone didn’t like the quiche they made.

It’s just so damned trivial yet highly annoying.

Think about it, you can’t really go to the gym to work off the 12 stone piled on for Christmas nor indeed go and show everyone the epic dance moves you learned by watching Strictly Come Dancing. It’s social suicide to turn up somewhere, coughing, spluttering and sweating over everyone and everything in sight, so for a short time, you become a leaper inside your home, wandering around occasionally and almost like clockwork, the fun begins with the tissues up the nose.

Hopefully I will return to writing more drivel soon, but for the moment, I’m just going to continue lying here staring at the TV. Which of course, is entirely different to what I normally do.