Man Flu

So… years of living in the UK and its miserable winters was one of the factors which pulled me over to Spain. Over the last ten years of living there, every winter without fail I had one cold after another and I was spending four solid months living in fog and drizzle and coughing my guts up. I was getting to thinking that one day, the coughing would carry me away.

And a word to the wise, if there is a worse smell than that of wet dog – it’s wet chickens…

So, when He suggested that we move to live in the Mediterranean, I agreed to come.

Now Spain, regardless of its reputation for being hot and dry, gets plenty of rain. But whereas in the UK  rain is something that falls all year round in week after week of endless gloom, drizzle and fog; in Spain, when it decides to rain, it falls all at once… And also contrary to rumour, the rain does not fall mainly on the plain. You get it in the mountains too, where I live. Trust me, when ten inches of water dumps on you over two days, it feels a tad damp.

But then, unlike the UK, the sun comes out and the skies are blue and everyone’s smiling.

So, when we decided to move here, I had visions of cold/flu free winters and months of not coughing at all.

I arrived in Spain in November. Driving down through France in the middle of a gale, I’d hoped to arrive to sunshine. Instead, it was overcast, cold. I couldn’t get into the house…  The water was turned off… More of that another day…

But the following morning, the sun arrived, I was walking through old-town Gandia in my tee-shirt (surrounded by old Spanish ladies wearing boots, woolly pullovers and three layers of shawls) and thinking that life was good. HE arrived a week later, and that was great.

Then, the week before Christmas, our first house guest. HIS son joined us, having travelled on the plane from Gatwick. And he brought a cold with him…

Cue tissues, vapour rub and lemon tea. Fortunately, with the garden groaning with lemons, the tea is no problem at all.

Here is an example of one of my ‘Lemon Tea Trees’. Once the sniffles and the sneezes have gone their way, it mysteriously transmogrifies into a ‘Gin ‘n Tonic Tree’

Anyway, the following year, having bought a house for renovation, our home had its guts knocked out. Walls came down. Electric and pipes were stripped out and replaced. Old fireplaces (weirdly with no chimneys) came out. New fireplaces went in (with chimneys)…

… and, planning being what it is, two weeks before I’m expecting my Christmas guests, I was living in a building site with no plaster on the walls, iffy electricity and a water supply that went on and off as suited it.

So, I sent a wailing cry to my builder, explaining that my sister was arriving in a few days and… Helpppp….

He turned up that afternoon with a team of eight. Forty-eight hours later, the entire house had been re-plastered. Lounge, offices, bathrooms, bedrooms – everything bar the kitchen.

So, the house no longer looked like a building site. But – it’s mid-December, and my home has just had several tons of sand, cement, plaster and water stuck to the walls. Every occupiable room is seeping damp and radiating fog.

The weather is too cold to dry the house out and locally has turned ‘mountain-misty’. The only heating is the wood-burning fireplaces. I have gas heaters running on bottles, but they produce little heat and lots of water when they burn. And electric heaters just knock off the supply

Three days later I started coughing.

I stopped coughing around April, when the Summer Heat arrived and the house finally dried out.

Now, last winter there was an outbreak of a really ferocious version of the flu over in the UK. And a visiting guest brought it over with him. Not his fault: he was perfectly healthy when he arrived, but on the flight over, it’s anyone’s guess what you’re breathing. Three days after Guest left, HE and I both came down with the regulation sore throat, aches and pains and the rest,  and this time it was a shocker. It knocked us both out for nearly two months.

So…

Decision time…

This year I declared a moratorium. No guests during the UK flu season.

And it worked. I spent, for the first time in more years than I care to think about, the months of October to January free of sore throat, wheezing, coughing, runny nose and all the other crap that I’d come almost to take for granted

Until my sister came to visit two weeks ago.

Four days after she left, HE came down with a cold. And I followed two days after that… So we spent a pleasant few days in bed sharing the throat, the nose and the fatigue

EDIT: Sorry my mistake. I came down with a cold. HE had man-flu. But that’s life isn’t it 😉