Two weeks on, and it still feels like the arctic!

I have to say that I am now well and truly sick of being cold and more often than not, also wet.

Living in one of the highest and one of the few steep, north facing parts of Surrey, the ice and snow hang around here longer than anywhere else and when they fall, do so with a vengeance and we get far more than anyone else locally. I have resorted to taking photos of the garden marked with the date and time and sending them in to work when I can’t get out of the road with the car, as they don’t believe me. For instance as of now, everywhere else the white stuff has disappeared, but not here! Oh no, it is lurking in corners and on the flower beds looking like it will be there until July. There remains a reasonable sized bank of it nestled up against the side of the greenhouse which is frozen solid.

The forecast for the Easter weekend, which being at the beginning of April we might have had not unreasonable hopes of being spring like and warmish, looks dire. Top temperatures of four degrees all weekend, significantly lower than average, with drifting fronts of rain and sleet criss-crossing the country. We might avoid those in the south east, but with what can only be described as a needling, bitter wind still in evidence it still looks as though we have become a far flung outpost of the arctic.

“Don’t be such a wimp” I hear some of you cry! “You can dress for the cold and when you get out and do a bit of exercise you get so warm!” Maybe, and if that’s what you want to do then bully for you, but personally I can do without weather which means it takes about ten minutes to get ready to go out of the front door due to the amount of clothing and thermal protection you have to put on. To walk the dog, I am wearing leggings with jeans over the top, a T-shirt, then a long sleeved shirt, then a thick jumper, then a Barbour. I have a thick scarf which is wrapped round my neck about three times, a woolly hat which makes me look as though I am going to a fancy dress party as an elf, two pairs of sock, wellies and leather gloves. Quite frankly, I look ludicrous and am a fair impersonation of the Michelin Man, being practically circular once everything is on.

There would appear to be no let up in this abysmal weather for the foreseeable future, quite possibly through to the middle of April. It will really piss me off if the moment I go away for my holidays in the second week of April the weather breaks and the UK gets sunshine and mid teens temperatures. I remember two years ago going to Greece with two friends mid April when the weather here had been awful and saying “It’s lovely in Crete in April, temperatures mid twenties and we’ll be on the beach”. The minute we left, temperatures in the UK became tropical and the whole week that we were away, it was 27 degrees here but tipped it down in Greece and was cold. It didn’t ruin the holiday, but it didn’t help after I’d bigged it up so much.

I dread to think how much money we will owe the gas board by the time (if ever) we get to switch the heating off. Four days a week (the weekend and the two days I work at home) the boiler is going for about 16 hours, virtually all day. This is a naturally cold house due to the two open chimneys, an unheated kitchen (the radiator is behind an extra cupboard we installed as I have so many pots and pans, and so we switched it off) and the fact that the French windows don’t shut properly with a gap at the top you can see daylight through. I keep meaning to get them fixed, but they’re not a security risk as the locking mechanism still works and have simply dropped slightly in the centre away from the frame, so it isn’t really a priority. I’m not even sure if you can get things like that fixed, or if they have to be replaced. That definitely isn’t affordable, although if I offset the gas bills I might manage it.

The best investment I have made in recent weeks was an electric blanket, which I bought through an ebay ‘Deal of the Day’ for about a quarter of its usual price. About an hour before we go to bed one of us goes and switches it on and it’s toastie in the extreme when we eventually slip under the duvet. Lovely, and no need for bedsocks.

Now there’s an image to leave you with!

Seasonal disorders

I have a cold. A filthy, debilitating, snot ridden and temporarily life changing cold.

I haven’t had one of these for ages, in fact for about three years since I started having flu jabs each winter. I know they tell you that the flu jab doesn’t prevent you getting a cold (or even some types of flu) but it has done a pretty good job so far with me and this has come as a bit of a shock.

So, symptoms! Firstly there’s the sore throat, which feels like dozens of razor blades have been unceremoniously rammed down it and wiggled about a bit. Then there’s the ear ache, which renders temporary deafness and a throbbing pain at the side of your head akin to being knocked out by a sledgehammer. Just as these are subsiding, comes the runny nose when you could rival an overflowing River Thames for the volume of liquid which seems to run down your face towards your mouth on a regular basis and due to the regularity with which you have to blow your nose, turns you into a passable doppelganger for Rudolph. And after the runny nose the final stage, the thick, usually green immovable snot which takes up residence in your sinuses, redecorates, has babies – often called Grolly – and generally makes your life a misery.

Whichever of Mother Nature’s elves designed our faces and thought it was a good idea to put your nose higher than your mouth and throat ought to be drowned in green gunk. When you get to stage three (the runny nose stage) mucus runs down your throat making you feel sick and out of your nose towards your mouth making you look like some sort of creature from the black lagoon, covered in slime. Prominent in the centre of your face, no amount of make up will disguise the reddish glow caused by too much blowing and for days people will go around trying not to look and saying “Poor you!”.

There really is a mind blowingly diverse range of different cold cures around. Meandering into Boots looking for a simple Lemsip, I was faced with almost a whole row of different makes and remedies in a massive range of flavours and different ways of ingesting. There are powders, syrups, capsules, things that last four hours, eight hours, all night and possibly also boil the kettle for you. But I still maintain my customised remedy of hot water, lemon juice, honey, brandy and a couple of emptied Lemsip capsules stirred in is best. Adjust the amount of brandy according to mood! Not only does it give you a cracking night’s sleep, it tackles the little b*****d viruses head on.

I have manfully (or should that be womanfully?) struggled into work today, and am sitting with a martyred look on my face beavering away (well, not literally at the moment of course, because I’m writing this).  Come 4pm, I will snuffle, sigh, maybe sneeze and cough a bit and make my excuses to go home. On the train, I will hide my face into my scarf looking sorry for myself and occasionally no doubt emerge for a very wet sneeze and good blow (it’s essential to emerge as my scarf comes from Barbour and is expensive, and I don’t want to get snot all over it).

Then I will go to bed when I get home with a hot water bottle and my patent remedy as outlined above, put “The Muppet Christmas Carol” on the DVD player, and so far as blocked nostrils allow, drift off to sleep. Bliss!

Not well!

I have a cold.

I’ve had it for several days, starting with a nagging sore throat like someone had tipped a load of broken glass into my throat as I slept, then progressing onto a nose that ran like Niagara Falls, and which then blocked up like a drain full of cooking fat (yuk – nasty image!) needing Dyno Rod to clear it. Now, it’s just left me feeling generally below par and with an occasional nagging cough which will probably take weeks to go.

Of course it’s only to be expected and it’s incredible that it has taken a whole week since panto for me to get ill. In fact hardly anyone was ill during the panto run at all, which must be a record. There’s usually at least one panic as a principal loses their voice and crawls into the dressing room croaking “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve lost my voice. Can someone sing for me tonight?”.

Naturally as a female I have soldiered on! Despite feeling like rubbish, I’ve persevered and gone to work, done a gym induction, done all the chores and brought the ironing and the admin up to date. If I was a bloke (cue outraged denials from any men reading this), I would have claimed to have had man-flu!

I did have a flu jab this year, which I firmly believe helps stop you getting colds and similar minor ailments too badly even though they tell you it doesn’t. I have experienced similar illness patterns in previous years when I’ve had one of these, and not been nearly so ill with bronchial stuff as in the years when I don’t. They dole flu jabs out at work for free, so it’s a minor inconvenience and they have never given me a mild dose of the flu either, which some people claim they do.

You’d think by now that some bright scientist would have developed a prevention for viral stuff wouldn’t you? They seem to pay scientists to research the bleeding obvious most of the time, so why not pay them to do something that’s useful for a change? Surely there must be some university academic that is currently under-utilised and who would welcome the opportunity to squander several year’s worth of public money developing a cure/preventative treatment for the common cold?

Until they do, I suppose we all just have to soldier on making a fortune for Kleenex and Beechams in the process. Perhaps there already is a cure, but its all a plot by the pharmaceutical companies to retain their profits? Who knows?

At the  moment, I look like Rudolph on a bad day and no amount of make up can disguise it. Maybe that’s an opening in the market – viral symptom disguising make up? Hmmm, thinking caps on!