Sod's law dictates...

... that following my last post I have been struck down with the mother of all colds. Have been feeling so rotten, if I were a man I'd be sure to think I had bird flu. (Actually will exempt my man from that comment as he most definitely doesn't do man flu and if he is ever ill has to be forced to lie down to get better.)

Anyway. Said horrible cold has led me to observe a number of things, which suggest some fatal flaws in the catch it, bin it, wash it approach to keeping diseases at bay...

1. As I started sneezing in Sainsbury's on Thursday when all the newswires in the world were going crazy about swine flu , I did try to discreetly sneeze into my shoulder as suggested, as not realising I was going to be so afflicted I'd come out without any tissues. However, this doesn't work when you are overtaken by a series of quickfire sneezes that take you so much by surprise you wouldn't have time to catch them, even if you HAD a tissue about your person...
2. Once I had purchased enough tissues, I thought to keep me going till Christmas, I realised how inherently wasteful the catch it system is. You sneeze into a tissue (if gunfire staccato type sneezing allows you time to), throw it in the bin and before you know it you've whipped through yet another pack of Kleenex's finest. It isn't exactly environmentally friendly. Which generally seems to be the case about trying to wage war against microbes. Spouse came back from a scary talk given by a microbiologist some months ago to announce that from now on all his lab coats had to go on a boil wash at least, or we were all going to die from the terrible microbes attached to the fibres of his coats which had come out of his patients' gobs. This doesn't sit very well with our environmentally friendly eco washing machine which suggests we wash everything at 30 degrees... (I do so love it when two mutually exclusive ideas clash).
3. Even though I spend most of my time at home, do you know how HARD it is to wash your hands every time you sneeze? Particularly when you are firing rounds of ammunition at a rate of about five sneezes a minute. Sneeze. Check. Catch it. Check. Wash hands. Check. Sneeze again. Check. Caught it. Just. Wash hands. Check. Sneeze. Check. Damned missed it. Shit. Forgot to bin the tissue from first two sneezes. Better do that now. Damn. Sneezed again, and didn't have time to catch it in my tissue, or my sleeve. Now hands, nose, eyes everything dripping. Should I just go and stand under a shower of dettol???

And don't get me even started about how hard it is to maintain at night. I spent the early hours of Tuesday morning sneezing every time I put my head on the pillow. If I'd gone to wash my hands every time I'd done it, I'd have probably created a local water shortage.

Still. It's nice to know in these credit crunch times at least tissue companies are going to be making money. In fact. It might just be worth us all investing the little money we have left in Kleenex...