I had a huge load of streaky, orange snot come out of my nose this morning. The kitchen towel I blew the snot into probably thought Christmas had come in May. Although I have no idea what the kitchen towel thought when I dumped it on the pile of them, like it was a used tissue. Probably some variation on fuck you I would imagine.

Then after that, I was sneezing out clear, glue-like spraying splat-threads of snot all day, sometimes loaded with globes of yellow, once another huge green slug shot out of my nostril accompanied by a sound like a blocked coffee filter trying to come to life a few times but failing.

The whole experience wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but I seemed to develop a kind of faint pink, hairy scaling on my top lip which I didn’t like, also a sort of light red coloration around the circles of my nostrils, which made me look as I though I had an addiction to cocaine. I’ve never touched drugs in my life. And anyway it isn’t the sort of look one aims for when dressing for work.

It was just a chest infection. I had no idea that I had a chest infection until I started sneezing multi-coloured meteors with clear trails into hand towels, but there you go. Such is life. I usually get chest infections in the winter months. What usually happens is I go to bed one night in December, forget to wrap up warm, don’t fully realise how cold the night is while I am asleep and then wake up with bubbles of dull yellow at my nostrils. The bubbles don’t go away for about a month.

Chest infections take a lot longer to shift than colds. I was taking hayfever tabs and Sudofed anyway, just because I know that I don’t respond to pollen well. It was probably the arrival of a good cloud of pollen over night that has done it. The pollen overwhelmed my strengthened defenses and clogged up everything, like fat nodules glomerating around the heart of an excessively fat person. It makes breathing while walking harder.

Anyway I have been taking these hayfever tablets, the ones in the supermarket, but they don’t do much good until you have taken two of them, then another two in the middle of the day when the first two wear off. In addition to the two Sudofeds that are supposed to stop mucus build up. The box says you are only supposed to take ‘one a day’ of the hayfever tabs, but that is a joke the packagers are playing on the consumers. I’ve been taking two every morning for a week now and nothing happens, except I eventually feel like I’ve taken too many pills.

The other thing the hayfever tablets do is mess up when I actually need to go to the toilet. I’ve had this before. I don’t feel particularly rancid for days, particularly, then suddenly – out of the blue – I literally have to go to the toilet, it’s like it is a sudden mad imperative to lay a cable otherwise I will fucking shit myself.

I’ve never actually shat myself when I get like that, but I can remember two close calls, one last year and the other probably a couple of years before that. The earlier occasion I had to collect some post bags in the morning from another building down the road from the one where I work, and I was trundling this trolley full of post bags up the hill and suddenly, when I was just about half way back, I had an urgent, liquid need in my arse to spray some brown cement, right now. I made it back, just about anyway.

The second occasion was nothing like as unpleasant as the first – I was talking to someone else, basically going over a photocopying job that I’d agreed to do earlier in the day, and then suddenly, out of the tubular firmament, there was this sort of internal rumbling and and a quick, desperate panicked feeling in my lower stomach. I made the the rescue, obviously, but it was a close call.

Anyway supermarket hayfever tablets are the absolute shit, and I mean that.