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Funny sort of flu
Alice Thomas Ellis
As, am very seldom ill (I am touching the wooden bedhead as I write) I can never understand what's happening when I begin to feel unusual. Finding that my knees will not support me, that my mind is going blank and my eyes can't see straight I imagine these symptoms are caused by the wing of the dark angel, and begin agitating myself about whether I left out anything salient in my last confession and whether I will have time to remedy the omission before either death or Christmas strikes.
A few days ago, quite sure that my number was up, I began to plan a compila- tion of things for the family to do in my absence over Christmas and the rest of their lives when Janet staggered in with precisely the same symptoms as I was suffering from. While it is neither rational nor kind to feel pleased that somebody else is in the same plight as yourself it is nevertheless reassuring — just as long as you're pretty sure it's not the Black Death or something — and I began to feel better. Then a newsreader on the telly announced in the whimsical slot which comes at the end that there was `ten-day flu' around, and everything fell into place. I don't know 'That's Dickens. He invented Christmas.' why this epidemic should be considered mildly humorous but I was glad to know we were not alone.
There are, in fact, several sorts of flu around. Patrice has got one — or possibly two — sorts. The first she contracted in France while staying at a hotel. She woke up one morning looking dreadful and feeling like merde and the proprietor with Gallic sympathy advised her that she would be much better 'chez volts, Madame', which is French for not wanting to be bothered with an ill English person. I remembered the old Parisian urban legend wherein an English loved-one simply dis- appears, bag and baggage, from his hotel room. Not only that: the hotel room disappears as well. There is no room of that number in the corridor, where the door stood there is only wallpaper and perhaps a daguerreotype of the Tuileries, and the concierge, chambermaid, boot boy and kindly old party whom the English pair had met the previous night in the salle manger all deny any knowledge of the missing person. The missing person has, of course, died of the plague and been spi- rited away in order not to discourage the hordes of tourists expected for the forth- coming Grand Exhibition, or whatever.
I told Patrice she was quite lucky, considering. She didn't think so because when the hovercraft had conveyed her to English soil she felt so awful she hired a cab to drive her back to London and the driver insisted on making a detour to pick up his girlfriend. When Patrice asked why he was doing this he said it was so that his girlfriend could look after her on the journey, but when the girlfriend appeared she looked even iller than Patrice, with an English flu involving coughing and sneez- ing. After they had gone a few miles the driver observed a cab from a rival firm plying for trade on what he considered his patch, so he stopped and leapt out to remonstrate with him. As he was doing this Patrice asked the girlfriend — who was by now coughing her head off— why on earth she was coming too when she should clearly have been in bed or in hospital, and the girl said that the driver had considered Patrice's hiring him to be an excellent, economical opportunity to get the Christ- mas shopping done in London. This is why Patrice may now have two sorts of flu.
One sort is bad enough. I tottered into bed at seven o'clock yesterday, incapable even of reading, but I wasn't bored be- cause the baby refused to go to sleep and was doing the rounds of all the rooms in the house. He joined me in bed for a while together with a couple of hippopotamuses, a Garfield and a frog and we discussed the language of animals. (What do hippopota- muses say?) I worried for a while that he might contract my flu but then I thought that as its only notable symptoms seem to be an overwhelming urge to go to sleep and stay that way for a few days it might not be such a bad thing. May I be forgiven.
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