Oh, the summer. What a glorious time of the year that is. The sun, the heat, the asparagus… every single aspect of the summer makes me weep with joy.
It’s the summer now. I should be dancing in the fields, smearing clotted cream all over my body, drizzling olive oil over undercooked potatoes, filling jam jars with sand, relaxing in my special deck-chair made by sticking truffles together with bull sperm. But I’m not.
Instead, I’m cowering indoors, blowing my nose, sneezing, sniffing, coughing, beating myself about the head, praying for some Strepsils. Outside is horribly soggy and drippy and damp. If I attempted to take my deck chair out there, the water would cause it to dissolve in a rather pathetic manner, like some kind of evil monster at the end of some kind of fantastic book once the hero has managed to stab it with a gleaming bejewelled butter knife/sword. I’ve got a cold, and the weather is quite dismal.
No, I’m not asking for sympathy or anything. I wouldn’t dream of it. That would be out of order. However, I am extremely unfortunate, and I don’t deserve any of it, and it’s just so unbearably horrible.
But actually I’m quite lucky. A caveman would be rather worried, in a situation like the one I’m in. He or she would assume that such a stroke of bad luck is the result of the gods. “Maybe,” one might wonder, “it’s punishment for spilling nectarine juice all over the newspaper.” Because, you see, I did spill nectarine juice all over the newspaper the other day – very naughty indeed of me.
But I know that it’s OK. I’m not a caveman, believe me. I’m acutely aware that there’s no correlation between my clumsiness with fruit and the weather/health situation (unless I choke on the fruit, or eat too much of it, or douse evil acidic lemon/lime/grapefruit/orange/satsuma/tangerine/clementine juice all over my eyes ). Sacrificing a goat won’t help to rectify things, and nor will doing a special dance. There’s nothing I can do. I just need to sit back, relax, have a box of tissues nearby, and wait for things to improve. They will, I’m sure.
What’s more, sneezing is one of my favourite things to do. It’s fantastic. There is no greater pleasure. This says more about the tragic nature of my life than anything, but come on, you can’t deny that sneezing is fantastic and excellent and stuff.
Unless it’s one of those big ones, which require one to open one’s mouth so wide that it’s very painful indeed. Or worse still, one of those horrible ones, where a blob of mucus sprouts up in your hand out of thin air. They’re disgusting, gruesome, vile, and so on. I apologise sincerely for bringing up (!) the subject here. They’re the work of Satan, every single one of them. I don’t want to sneeze like that. Stop this bout of extremely mild ill health, immediately, The Gods. Now!
Come to think of it, maybe a little goat sacrifice would help. Just a small one. It can’t do any harm, can it? It’s worth a try, I suppose. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
No!
Sundae.