HARD to believe, one: that we're into June. How has the year gone so quickly from sowing early sweet peas to seeing apple blossom and clematis flowers fading and falling? Even the football season is almost over – for at least a week.
Hard to believe, two: I'm suffering from a cold for the first time in about two years. After two moderately bad winters, last year's 'summer' and several serious hill-walk soakings without a sniffle, within days of midsummer I now have the sore thr
oat and cough that is nature's way of telling me to take two paracetamol.
Not that I'm complaining. And now that I no longer need to prove that if Ranulph Fiennes could cross the Antarctic on foot minus a few fingers and toes I could at least force myself to the office when suffering from a cold to infect colleagues, there is nowhere to look for sympathy anyway.
Not that Liz is hard-hearted. She appreciates the way I cough only when necessary, which seems to be every time we pass; she makes sure I have tissues to hand – old open-air farming habits die hard – and monitors painkiller intake.
That is one of many subtle differences between the genders: men feeling unwell opt for large swigs of whatever medicine is in the cupboard or a handful of whatever pills or lozenges are about, while women read the labels.
There are other differences related to being unwell that, I suspect, go back to childbirth. Women have children, while the nearest most men get to pain is toothache. It follows that a heavy cold for a man, with a raging temperature – temperatures always rage, it's traditional – bleary eyes, sore throat, deep cough and runny nose, rates at least eight out of 10 on the pain and misery scale. For women, with deeper wells of experience to draw on, it rates about two.
I stopped complaining about life's minor irritations such as colds – even if I'm still sure it's flu, with this achy feeling and co-ordination shot to hell, there goes the coffee cup – after I wrote an article for a farming magazine as a younger man.
I thought, as you do when young, that I was suffering. Grain dust has always troubled me, causing some breathing problems and skin irritation, and before I wrote the article I had been loading lorries from an antiquated grain store.
The worst of that set-up was the flat-bottomed, cement-floored bins emptied by augers where the last few tonnes had to shovelled and swept. Feeding a hungry auger is hard, frustrating work. No matter how fast you sweep and shovel the last tonne or two, the clattering auger stays ahead. Coalface mining or boiler stoking on a full-speed-ahead battleship always came to mind.
Then there was the dust mingling with the trickling sweat and the continual itching. I was blotchy, wheezy, irritable and feeling sorry for myself when I wrote the article that night and said so. After it appeared I got a letter from a farmer who suggested, kindly enough, that I was young and had clearly had an irritating day – but I didn't have what he had, which was multiple sclerosis. Cold? What cold?
