Cold.

That is to say, it is cold, and I have a cold.

Somewhere between 3.30am last drinks on Monday and 8am wake-up on Tuesday, my immune system went on strike. Consequently I've spent the last three days huddled under blankets, sipping tea and clutching a hot water bottle and dosing up on pseudoephedrine. Oh, except for when I sat under a marquee in the bitter cold with Seb outside the Exhibiton Building, that is. I think one of my kidneys may still be frozen solid. And when I had that meeting, and today when I spent three hours with Helen in the concrete-floored, unheated gallery she is babysitting...

Anyway, cold and flu drugs always give me certain Pollyanna-ish tendencies, and so I've been trying to enjoy the physiological effects of being sick in an attempt to make the best of the situation. Cold sweats? Why, it's just like I've met a boy that I like! Dizziness and hot flushes? Hello, imaginary seventh glass of wine! Waking up three or four times a night gasping like a fish out of water, unable to breathe? Eh... not so much.

On some feverish level, I do appreciate the visceral qualities of being sick, the way that a change of two or three degrees of body temperature can skew so dramatically the delicate balance of all of our composite elements. It makes me better appreciate health (although, of course, with a multiplicity of possible modes of physical being, some would argue that 'health' is simply a spurious and commercially-driven First World construct [and I would say to them "pah! I anticipate you in parenthesis."]). In any case, there's something quite lovely and Victorian about the delicate shivers that flutter down your spine, and the swoony passing from consciousness when you finally rest your woozy head on a pillow.

Still. Three days of the dizzy blahs are quite enough for me. I would like to get better, please, body, so that I can get back to contemplating other, less mucus-related embodiment issues, such as whether Property dualism is congruous with a belief in basic neuropsychology, or whether you can be too fat for a haircut.

Otherwise, I might need some better drugs.