Author: Liz Dawes
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I love this time of year 

Kicking my way through falling leaves and collecting conkers with the kids, followed by Halloween and bonfire night.  It’s also my birthday at the end of November, which means presents and a weekend away at the very least.  What’s not to like?

But here’s the thing.

Around now, the seasons really turn and the weather gets damp and freezing.  And so around now is the time when I get the first in a long line of sniffles.  It happens every year; the endless run of coughs, colds, dripping red noses and bleary-eyed weariness.  For I, Ladies and Gentlemen, am a snot magnet.

In no small measure I blame my children, who stomp to school muffled in coats and scarves, ready to share their new germs in overheated classrooms and bogey-smeared dinner halls.  One of the (many) things that no one tells you as you embark on parenthood is that one of a child’s primary purposes is to bring pestilence into your home.  It is a task at which my off-spring excel.

Every year I prepare my defences.  Flu jab, Echinacea pills, vitamin D and early nights.  Every year I stride about healthily daring the common cold virus to attack my battle-ready immune system.  I swear that I will be healthy and robust and that positive thinking will see me through to spring.  And every year it makes not the slightest bit of difference.  By mid-November I am a mucus-laden, grey-faced, sloppy mass of exhaustion, who fails to yell grumpily at the kids only because she has lost her voice.

Fireman is, of course, immune to almost every germ that enters our household, and peers at the soggy mess that is his wife with vaguely irritated sympathy. He hates it when I have a cold, due to what he refers to as my “implausibly loud” sneezing.   I have, he says, the loudest sneeze in Christendom.

It’s true that it is not dainty, not least because I have a healthy pair of singing lungs which makes for a bigger sound; (I choose to ignore my daughter’s theory that the size of my sneeze is directly proportionate to the size of my massive hooter).  It’s also true to say that I have never been able to master that thing where, instead of releasing the sneeze, one does that little muffled squawk into a hanky with eyes squeezed shut. It’s just not healthy.  A sneeze needs to be released into the wild, not transferred via a small parp to the back of one’s hand. All of that said Fireman’s claims that my sneeze is the decibel equivalent to being hit by a sledge hammer are a little exaggerated.

It’s easy for Fireman to be dismissive of my enfeebled state, for the worst is not yet upon us.  Like childbirth, some things are so awful that you forget them as soon as they are over, but those around you who were traumatised too, forget less easily.  I have not forgotten.  And I know that no matter what state I am in, the time approaches when I must cast my needs aside to cook broth, mop brows, and arrange Red Cross emergency tissue supplies to be flown directly to his bedside.  Why is this, you might ask?

Because by Mid-December, the Man Flu season will be upon us.

I shall say no more ladies.  I shall say no more.