This is not just flu....

this is M & S flu*

So remember how I said the OH was lergied and had left some of his germs behind? Well he wasn't  just lergied, he had the flu. As,  now, do I. 

You know that flu where you have a bit of a fuzzy head, and feel a bit miserable, so what you do is catch up on all those things that normally just bore you to bits, like putting things away properly rather than in a tidy pile on a table, or the domestic filing, or wash the fingermarks off the glass panels on the internal doors, because however miserable they make you feel normally, you're miserable anyway so doing those things won't make you feel worse? 

This flu is not that flu.

You know that flu where you have a really bad cold and headache and feel a but shivery and so you curl up in front of a box set, or rubbish TV or read a book from the genre of 'popular fiction' and don't feel guilty for not emptying the dishwasher because you're poorly and you can't do it? 

This flu is not that flu.

You know that flu where you wake up in the morning, have a swallow of orange juice, which makes you wince because it's so cold and then turn over in bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, despite having just slept all night, and then you stagger up for two hours and go back to bed because you're 'just so tired'? 

This flu is not that flu.

This flu is a really high temperature , where you honestly think that you could probably fry an egg on your skin but actually you feel like you're in the Arctic. This flu is sweating buckets while you shiver uncontrollably. This flu is trying really hard not to touch anything cold because that will send shivers down your spine and then over the rest of you. This flu is aching in every part of your body, even bits where you are sure that you don't actually have muscles to ache. This flu turns your mattress into a layer of lava and your pillows into wooden blocks. This flu is taking a paracetamol to stifle symptoms,  not in the morning so that you can get up, but at night so that you can get to sleep. This flu is the worst I can remember feeling for a very very long time and given that the OH is still sickening with it and he was two days ahead of me, I'm thinking I'm not going to be feeling a lot better for a while.

* for the benefit of non-UK readers, the British retailer Marks and Spencer, commonly known as M & S ran a series of ads a few years ago for their ready meals which featured glamorous photography, close ups of luscious ingredients, a sexy voice-over describing it all, and the tag line  'This is not just tagliatelle carbonara. This is Marks and Spencer tagliatelle carbonara'. It was supposed to imply that M & S ready meals were the best of the best, although as a friend said to me it generally meant overpriced and in packaging that was almost impossible to breach.