Cold or hay-fever? That is the question.
It’s not a great question. It’s not even a mildly average one. Yet, every year it seems to rear its ugly head once more and we are left trembling in its wake at our inability to provide an answer sugar-coated in certainty.
The problem – just to clarify – is that the symptoms are remarkably similar but I’m afraid the issue does not end here (however much you might like it to so that you can avoid what’s coming up). One day, when scientists finally cure the common cold rather than spending their working hours discovering how to explode balloons using wine gums, the parity I seek will at last be here and the hierarchy of illness will be well and truly flattened out. Pills will solve all and we will go forth into our lives without even a token tissue tucked inside our trouser pockets. But, until that glorious day arrives, the inequality remains: a cold is an incurable burden that is quite rightly weighing us down and earning us that long-overdue time off work, but hay-fever…well, hay-fever can be solved by taking the right tablets or spraying something up your increasingly-red nostrils, can’t it?
Actually, no. If anything, hay-fever is worse and I would rather settle down with a good old-fashioned cold for a few days than suffer the pollen’s attack. Yet, not only is it something we should be able to control, it’s also the most pathetic fight in the history of mankind…
The Old Testament tells heroic stories of a few hundred Israelites destroying armies of thousands when the odds seemed completely stacked against them, but that’s nothing when it comes to the death-match that is Pollen v Human. We have bodies, we are strong creatures with well-developed defence systems. Pollen is…well, pollen is…(*runs off to Google…*) a fine to coarse powder containing the microgametophytes of seed plants (*thanks Wikipedia*). Or, to put it another way, pollen is rubbish. Pollen is weak, a mere powder floating in the wind. How…how exactly can it win? If that’s not an argument against evolution, I don’t know what is…
The song that gives the title to this blog entry is one of my guilty pleasures from the 90s, by the way, and was always the one I would have chosen had I been given the chance to lead the ‘House Shout’ at my school. Sadly, the opportunity passed me by and we found ourselves singing ‘Wake me up before you go go’ instead. By such decisions are years in counselling made…
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