Fool’s Cold by shoutingatco.ws

In a couple of weeks, we all get to play the hilarious Sunday morning game of “is it actually 9am, or really 10am?”, as the clocks go back. Or forward. In the olden days it was fine, you just rolled around the house switching clocks around as you need to.

Now though, in this horrendous digital age of the future, the first stage of the Skynet revolution has taken place. The clocks know. They know it’s winter and that they need to change time, so some of them will do it for you. But not all of them. So the entertainment continues as we try to figure out if our mobiles are lying to us. How about the Sky box, what does that know?

And then we’re all late for church, which is what we all do on Sunday morning. While waiting for the football to start and the shops to close.

Actually, this would be an opportune time to mention the fucking stupid Sunday trading laws that mean if I decide I need a loaf of bread at two minutes past four, I can’t go and get a cheap one from Sainsbury’s, I have to go to Spar and pay a million pounds for their own brand rubbish. THANK YOU LORD GORDON BROWN.

The real first sign of winter arriving isn’t, as some people think, the arrival of Christmas advertising – that just marks the end of August – but it is, in fact, the first person you meet that starts sniffing.

Because winter is the season of the cold, that insufferable little sod of a thing that is, in a way, worse than any other illness. If you have cancer, at least you get sympathy. With a cold, if you react in any way at all, you’re a bloody great wimp and deserve to be kicked down the stairs.

It’s not “man flu”, that hilarious expression that means you’ve got a cold and are milking it. It’s a cold. Just a cold. A sniffle, a headache, a sore throat. It’s fine, I’ll get over it. It’s just a bit annoying.

Actually, the most annoying thing is everyone else’s reaction: If you give them the cold, then they will not shut up about it, as though you did it deliberately. Look mate, some twat gave it to me, I don’t want it, I don’t want to pass it on, I just want it to go away.

Although if you take the other approach and have a day off work, it sounds pathetic that you’re laying in bed because you’re sniffing a bit.

There’s something inherently uncool about having a cold. It’s difficult to imagine Samuel L. Jackson walking up to collect an Oscar with the bottom of his nose all red and chapped where he’s been blowing it every ten seconds.

Or The Fonz offering some words of advice to Richie, but sniffing and taking out a manky bit of tissue because he forgot a handkerchief.

And Anna Friel talking, but her sexy voice being dulled and phlegmy. Even the words about colds are revolting. Phlegm, for God’s sake.

Laying in bed all day with the curtains drawn, a manky face and with a roll of toilet paper by your side. It shouldn’t be called a cold, it should be Teenager Disease.

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