In which I am laid low by the Lurgey

Monday 12th - Tuesday 13th November

The Lurgey is a widely recognised medical condition. On the scale of seriousness, it lies somewhere between A Cold, which is a moderate inconvenience, and Man-Flu, which as everyone knows is a killer and against which the chances of survival are perilously thin. Men tend never to catch A Cold, or if they do it will barely manifest itself, the symptoms being little removed from the usual personal habits of the adult male (sniffing, coughing, occasionally wiping the nose on the nearest available bit of rag, selective hearing loss and a tendency to fall asleep on the settee). Man-Flu, by contrast, can result in almost total paralysis for a period of several days BUT - and this is a very important BUT - it only affects men who have someone to run around after them for the duration of the illness. Without the presence of a nursemaid, there is simply no point in having Man-Flu, and this is something that the virus seems able to detect as it has been scientifically shown to avoid infecting men who might have to just get on with it and look after themselves. This leaves us with The Lurgey, which comes in a variety of recognisable forms based on the relative quotients of Snot, Thick-headedness, Sleepiness, Deafness, That Weird Hot/Cold Shivery Thing and Need For Soup.

It usually takes a pretty heavy dose of Lurgey to keep me of my feet. I have before now gone into work suffering from fairly serious cases of The Lurgey because I've never believed in taking a day off sick unless you are actually dead (and in any case, if you work in TIE you have no choice. I did - once - miss two days of work on a TIE tour, but that was Man-Flu and it was literally two days before I could get from the bed to the telephone to call a doctor, and then becasue we weren't local no doctor would agree to see us). The downside of this incredible fortitude is that I will almost always contract The Lurgey the moment I have a day off. True to form, I had two days lined up on which I wouldn't have to work, and would be able to get all my TTP homework done. But no, sensing a brief respite from the grind, my carcass let down its defences and in came The Lurgey. result: Two completely wasted days of sleeping on the sofa and sneezing a lot.

But on Tuesday night, I had to get up and leave the house, as Brian had tickets for Kate Nash at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Kate Nash is very close to Brian's heart, not least because he discovered her before almost anyone else, and first saw her playing live to an audience of about six (that's six people, not an audience of six-year-olds. Though more of this later). I'd heard the album and been pleasantly surprised but this was my introduction to Kate Nash as a live performer, and she's become a bit more popular, to the tune of packing out the Shepherd's Bush Empire, which is pretty good going. Once we'd arrived and were having a medicinal beer, we began to notice that those packing it out were almost exclusively about twenty years younger than us, and as we waited for her to appear we fell into playing a desperate game of Spot Someone Older Than Us. I think we got two. Luckily, the Nash was so good that we stopped caring that we were the only people there who weren't teenage girls or music journalists and I was very glad that I'd fought off The Lurgey sufficiently to make it. Great stuff, it was. Completely wasted on the young and healthy.