There's something amiss with my immune system. There has to be. If there was an Olympic entry for catching coughs and associated cold symptoms then I'd be disqualified from entering on the grounds of professionalism. I get more coughs than a junior doctor specialising in testicular inspections working all the overtime he can get. The stupid thing is, I can't work out why.
While I was growing up we lived in really olde worlde country houses. Real wood floorboards, latches instead of normal door catches, solid doors instead of sapele internal honeycomb things. You get the picture. I can remember with alarming clarity my teenage years in the end bedroom of our country farmhouse cottage when, as a first point of reference to the day after waking up in the morning, I would roll over and watch to see what the curtains were doing. Depending on how hard they blew I knew how windy it was outside and what sort of ride I'd be having on the bike. Seriously. Most of the year, especially in late winter, I would be under my duvet shivering despite having generated 8 hours of heat and my major incentive for getting up was the prospect of being able to put on more layers of material than I already had over me. I used to be up and dressed in about 25 seconds in those days - sometimes a couple of seconds longer if I stepped on an edge of floorboard with my bare feet and had to allocate a brief period of vocal obscenity to celebrate.
I can also remember trying to patch my windows up once (God knows how the glass ever stayed put in the first place) with some putty that I'd found somewhere, probably from some work we were having done around the house or possibly from my brother's room which usually resembled something laboratory-like from a classic Frankenstein movie. I can remember thinking as I started 'People get paid to do this, there must be a knack, but how hard can it be?'. I probably should have listened to myself (I usually do know best, it's just that I always talk myself out of it as I can't resist the prospect of a good debate), it would have avoided the pictorial reconstruction of an explosion in a plasticine factory from being renedered on the window. And it still didn't stop the smallest breeze from throwing the black curtains about.
Ahhh the colour schemes of youth. Black and white. And the white was merely a token compromise for the parents, such was their insistence that all-black was not a proper colour scheme and certainly wasn't going to get any approval in their house even if it could be proved to be. Black with thin white stripes it had to be, curtains, duvet, bean bags, the lot. I was allowed black shelves but only if I had white walls behind them. Black ceilings were barred from all conversation. It looked ok though, for a DIY bedroom.
Funny how all those little things, things that you wouldn't dream of accepting today, were ok in those days. Innocence of youth, the understanding of a tougher financial situation, being happy with your lot - whatever it was, pretty much everything was okay. Seldom great, but always okay.
One of the things that I always meander off on in anecdotal times is that I had a ridiculously expensive (at the time and for my age) car at around the age of 20: A 3 year old Astra GTE in cobalt silver. Payments through the roof and driven like it was stolen every day of the year. And almost every night I'd come home, park it up on the grass by the house, leave the keys in the ignition, and go back out to it the following morning without worry that it may not be there. As for the bike, the key never used to come out of that at all, it just stayed in the ignition in the shed and meant I never had to worry about losing it. People just didn't have to worry about that kind of thing.
These days I've got an alarm that cost me more than some people spend on their whole car, I park it under a streetlight, I've got a double-immobiliser and a subsequent coded drive-off keypad, and the keys are kept well inside the house where they won't be easy to find in the first place. And I still worry when I hear a pigeon fart outside.
Evolution is a mysterious beast. As you grow up and learn the ways of the world, the world around you grows up and learns ways around you, so you keep on clambering towards the summit of knowledge but everyone else, good and bad, is right there with you, scrambling around trying to make better progress than the next guy, as the goalposts keep on trundling further away into the distance. And yet, with all this evolution going on, we still can't find a cure for the common cold. Which, bearing in mind the very beginning of this circulatory waffle, really pisses me off.
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