This was a life-changing – practically a life-threatening – experience

This was a life-changing – practically a life-threatening – experience. Not since I swam in the Turkish Aegean in the late Seventies have I been forced to ingest such a tidal wave of sticky and disgusting fluids. Not since the Sixties have I encountered such a phantasmagoria of delirium. Short of incarceration in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If, I can’t imagine there can be a more wretched, joyless, shivery, brain-enfeebling way of passing one’s time Every bit of your body hurt Your hair crackled with pain You sneezed blood. Your muscles felt as if they’d been slept on by a polar bear. Your skin felt as if it had been flayed in the manner of Marsyas.
And then there was the coughing Believe me, I know all about coughing When it comes to tussive endeavour, I’ve put in the hours. When they come to write the annals of the great expectorators, I’ll get an embossed first paragraph.

Years of Marlboro Lights have left me with a wheezy sostenuto behind my every attempt at conversation. Chaps with stethoscopes recoil, deafened, from the briefest aural encounter with my manly chest I have spluttered and barked to Olympic levels. But nothing I’ve ever known compared with last week’s coughing fits – the pain, the spasms, the rictus, the feeling that your chest has turned, Tardis-like, into some bafflingly large cavern, every bit of which is being simultaneously abraded by malign demons with Black & Decker sanding devices …I sought solace in medicine. Night Nurse, Day Nurse, Afternoon Nurse, Parallel Universe Nurse, Benylin Tickly Cough, Benylin Chesty Cough, Beechams, Lem-Sip, Leechams Ben-Sip, Nil-Phlegm, Sneez-Away, Toodle-Oo-Flu …

all did nothing except made you fall asleep in the afternoon. The most off- putting euphemism could be found on the Benylin bottle, which promised “to make your cough more productive” Yurgh.I sought solace in meditation. My mind a blank (hardly surprising after two litres of Benylin Tickly Nurse or whatever it was called), I concentrated on higher things – God, nirvana, the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest .. It was hopeless. For some reason, my head was filled with apparitions of horrible people from my schooldays, pointing and mouthing abuse, like a scene from Flatliners So I turned on the television and sought solace in the news.