FEVERED BABBLING

Still off sick and feeling pretty glum for various reasons this morning here in Little Britain. It's Friday the 13th as well so I should have expected Lady Luck would take a battering.

During the pauses in perspiring in my pit I may get chance to reply to a few recent comments readers have kindly left on my posts. Apologies for the lateness. I think I've at least 'moderated' and published them all. Spam seems to have waned - no more offers of viagra in a new time-shared apartment on Mars - so I may return the blog to instant commenting again soon.

My laptop is playing up though. It takes forever to start when I turn it on. The screen appears, then turns black, appears again, then turns black and then begins that infernal whirling of the buffering ring. Its got worse of late and I'm wondering if my habit of putting the laptop on sleep mode at night, rather than switching it off, may be the cause of these juddering start-ups. I have also been simply closing the lid at night to see if that helped it fire-up in the morning but it seems not. I may not do anything and leave the laptop on all the time now. Do you have start-up problems?

I need help firing-up too. I seem to be getting a new cold every month or so. I've never had as many colds and its really getting on my wick. They are always bad colds too, the ones where you just want to go to bed and sweat. My machine-gun colds coincided with working in education 10 years ago. Encircled by 2000 viral snotty-nosed juveniles is simply too much for my aging immune system. It certainly didn't help when I was diagnosed with Late Onset Asthma about 4 years ago, after exposure to mould in our now-abandoned shed, and the colds seem to have increased in frequency and intensity ever since. Friends and family say 'its not normal' and 'get a flu jab'. I get a free flu jab anyway because of my asthma and besides, these are colds, not flu. I'm not alone though. many colleagues in education get frequent colds and I'm sort of resigned to the fact that its an occupational hazard, albeit an incredibly irritating and inconvenient one as the Martians found out in War of the Worlds! Do you get a lot of colds?

Right, I'm overheating again so its time to retreat to the med room upstairs.