From the editor: Ill intentions

The snow has arrived – we’ve made snow angels, thrown snowballs into the sea from the end of the pier to confuse the seagulls, and spotted how many houses have good roofing insulation in our area (it’s the ones where the snow hasn’t melted off). The Beast From The East has blown in and had the very British consequence of excessive queuing in Redhill. It’s also brought a new flu season. Or is it really the flu?

It used to be that if you were off ill you had to have ‘the flu’, otherwise it was ‘just a cold’. I’m not quite sure where this idea that the flu was the big brother of a cold came from. The flu has a fever, the shivers, exhaustion, that kind of thing. A cold is an obvious virus that makes you sneeze, cough, have a headache and feel like rubbish. You can have mild flu or a heavy cold – who’s the one giving them a hierarchy, man? Viral conspiracy theories aside, it doesn’t really benefit anyone to get into a competition.

The same goes for the concept of ‘man flu’ being an over-reaction. Someone’s feeling crummy and that’s all you need to know. No need to use your on point toxic masculinity to dismiss someone else’s lurghy. That’s just multi-tasking high school meanness.

I think what I’m trying to say through my germ-spattered words (I’m not naming it, I’ll not fuel the flu vs cold debate further) is that enough in life is a competition, feeling under the weather doesn’t have to be too. I’ll take the words of advice who think they had what I’m having. And after a few days of feeling like my head’s in a raincloud I’ll emerge with a croaky voice, in recovery, and seeing which blues and old school jazz numbers I can enjoy the most while I sound like Barry White. And he didn’t have a cold or the flu.

Victoria Nangle
editorial@thelatest.co.uk