Say whaaaaaaaaaaaa'?

Every now and then a news story comes along which is obviously more interesting than all the other media preoccupations du jour, but oddly not treated as such.

So it was in September, for instance, where the news didn’t so much ‘break’ as ‘softly crumble’ that liposuction fat can be easily converted into stem cells. Why aren’t people more excited about this? Here we have a chance to cure leukemia and America’s obesity problem in one fell swoop! And yet the response from those who set conventional news agendas appears to have been one big yawn. Bizarro.

And a similar thing is happening right now. Drifting off to sleep last night, I found this story tucked away in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it corner of yesterday’s Guardian. Allow me to summarise: a landmark judgement has ruled that the media will be allowed to attend the hearings of a secretive court about whether “a young man with an international reputation should have decisions made for him by others”.

The ruling is being hailed by media wonks as a victory for transparency and journalistic access and…oh, pardon me, I appear to have nodded off.

It is bleeding obvious that the most fascinating aspect of this report is: WHO IS IT???

He is described in the judgement as “famous”, but the public is unaware that he is suffering from a condition that makes him “unable to manage his own affairs”. WHO IS IT??

Can everyone please stop tweeting about the head of the BBC claiming tuppeny-ha’penny on expenses for a watering-can and focus on this infinitely more interesting issue? And yes, yes, it is obviously grotesquely insensitive and repugnant to speculate on this unfortunate young man’s identity, so if that sort of thing turns your stomach, kindly look away now.

Does anyone else think it might be Prince Harry?

Cry Me A River

There is water sluicing through the roof as I type. It is dripping in a slow but methodical fashion from a rather discouraging gash in my ceiling which has opened up in the last few days and now seems to be steadily widening.

At first I attempted to control the leak by placing a rubbish bin under it. But the drip slyly changes direction approximately once every two minutes, evading capture. After half an hour of scuttling back and forth, bin in hand, eyeing the ceiling with a crazily fixed intensity in order to plot and thwart its leaking arc, I abandoned my Sisyphyean efforts.

The sound of the water hitting my carpet, in huge, despondent plops, is not a joyful one. It is a bit as if the flat itself is weeping. And who can blame it? I would also have a serious case of the cries if my ladybits were being excavated to house a soon-to-open late-night shisha bar, as is the unfortunate case on the ground floor below, but that’s a story for another night.

I’m not asking for your pity: I’m saving those supplications for my elderly Chinese landlady. (Although the last time she was called to the party, to rescue us from an overflowing toilet, she opined that it would do us good to pick up the basics of plumbing as necessary preparation for “housewife job”, so I am not holding out a great deal of hope. No doubt she will see this as a golden opportunity for me to learn the ropes of a bit of light structural engineering.)

I merely wish to make the observation that my life is not one of undiluted glamour.

This fairly obvious point struck me with thunderous intensity as I was trudging home from the cinema tonight, shortly after another Damascus-style revelation. The first was that the taxi-driver who ferried me home late last Wednesday night overcharged me by something in the region of 200%. But then I recalled the possibility that he may have levied what one might delicately term a “vomit surcharge”, and so I shall charitably call us even.

But the second epiphany – that my life is not one in which, say, Anna Wintour might find herself comfortably at home – was rendered starker by tonight’s cinematic offering, which in a heroic act of steely will I maintained wakefulness throughout. The film in question was An Education, which tells the story of a young girl’s battle to choose between the hedonistic abandonment of a love affair with a glamorous older man, and the possibility of winning a place at Oxford if she just buckles down and gets to grips with her pesky Latin conjugation. I believe this is the point at which a more considerate blogger would insert some sort of flashing spoiler alert, since I can inform you that she chooses the man, loses everything, and then gets it all back. On Her Own Terms.

Bravo and jolly well done to her! I was, of course, rooting for the pedagogic path throughout. I nodded furiously when her various ever-so-slightly-lesbianic teacher/mentors extolled the peerless virtues of higher education. I punched my little fist in the air when the protagonist dutifully spelled out her hard-earned conclusion, that “there’s no shortcut to the life I want”. It was all I could do not to leap to my feet and deliver a standing ovation during the concluding scenes of her cycling amidst the dreaming spires with implausibly shiny hair and a pleasingly weighty book-bag. As the credits rolled, I was filled with contentment for a narrative satisfyingly resolved in everyone’s best interests, with Hedonistic Evil firmly subjugated to Educational Good’s superior might, and everything just peachy with the world.

It was only as the lights went on and I began to deposit the punters’ discarded ice-cream pots and smuggled-in sticky beer cans in a black rubbish sack that it slowly began to dawn on me that something might not be quite right. This feeling of stirring unease stayed with me as I locked up the toilets, exchanged farewells with my co-usher, an Eritrean refugee, and signed out my time-sheet to register a solid 5 hours’ toil remunerated on the minimum-wage pay-scale.

Only in the course of my walk home did these sentiments cohere into something approaching crystallisation. And when they did, boy, was I pissed.

“I’ve been duped!” I cried out to no-one in particular, or I would have, if I were a character in a 50’s caper-movie.

I was seized by an urgent desire to run back to the cinema, clutching a megaphone, and re-broadcast the film with an accompanying soundtrack of my screeching “Don’t do it! Choose the rich dude! The only life that your Oxford education provides a shortcut to is one that involves a roof with a hole in it!”

But I didn’t, of course, because access to the projection-room is far beyond my professional remit. Also, the abundance of late-night shisha bars gracing Kilburn’s High Road do not offer megaphone rentals as part of their utility package, although I have reason to believe that they are open to discussions about contract-killings, so it seems an arbitrary point at which to draw your service boundaries.

Instead I came home to assess the spread of my bedroom’s new lake, and started googling ‘dry-stone-walling for beginners’.

After all, they do say that knowledge is power.

I Demand Your Inattention

One of the gilt-edged leaves of my glittering “portfolio career” is that I work in a cinema. Fortunately it is a small independent theatre, so there frequently aren’t many punters, which means that on most nights I can help myself to one of the expansive back-row “lovers’ seats” without a dividing arm, fold my legs over the chairs in front of me, and take a cosy little sleep.

But these sleeps aren’t that ‘little’, actually. I am in an expert position to inform you that films are getting longer and longer. These days, by the time the lights go on and I stumble out bleary-eyed to resume my professional duties, I have essentially fulfilled half my recommended night’s sleep quota. And I’m talking about the actual passing of recorded time, not the experiential dimension of it (whereby forty-five minutes of some French auteur’s latest celluloid spoodge-deposit equates to one minute of Masterchef).

I was musing on this the other day while reading an article on the top ten most popular Youtube clips of all time. The list surprised me, topped as it is by “home video of toddler Charlie biting his brother’s finger”, which I cannot claim to be familiar with, and featuring a glaring absence of cats. None. Not even that one who eats noodles with chopsticks. I wonder if this was some kind of sub-editing mistake by the publisher of the list, as we all know that filmed cat antics are basically the giant purring motor that sustains and propels the interweb as we know it today.

You may also be interested to learn that 22 million people have to date viewed “a clip featuring a man with a massive jaw and no eyes”, which is approximately 21 million more people than can tell you the name of the current UN Secretary General. Maybe if Ban Ki-moon had a massive jaw and no eyes, he’d get more hits. We could also call him 'Moon-jaw' then, which might be fun.

It is clear that if, as Neil Postman suggested, we are indeed “amusing ourselves to death”, our last recorded splutters will take place over a crumb-littered laptop keyboard while the Sneezing Baby Panda clip plays on eternal repeat. And no judgies from this corner: I say we could do worse than pick the sneezing baby panda (4th on the list) as the emblem of our time. Of the 44 million recorded views of that particular clip, I am personally responsible for roughly a third. That thing is just cute in a whole different way.

But I find this interesting because the Sneezing Baby Panda clip lasts a wholly satisfying 0.16 seconds, whereas my full-length feature snooze in the cinema tonight stretched to 2 hours and 15 minutes, which appears to be about standard for today’s major releases. How can this bizarre discrepancy in what we demand from our entertainment in time-allocation terms continue?

I say it can’t.

I don’t know about you, but the internet has reduced my attention span to that of a goldfish whose typically minuscule goldfish concentration-powers have been diminished yet further by a rare form of goldfish ADD, and then curtailed even beyond this by the effects of repeatedly battering his tiny head against the side of his tank.

I know I’m only addressing myself at this stage, anyway, since I lost the rest of you to Youtube at “home video of toddler Charlie biting his brother’s finger”.

The internet has only had the chance to work its insidious rotting effect on my mush-like frontal lobe for the past 14 years. I first started “surfing” – and how ridiculously archaic that metaphor is now – in 1995. I discovered today that in 1995 there were only 635 websites on the internet. Which begs the question: how come one of them was devoted to an algorithm which generated “hilarious” excuses as to why you hadn’t done your homework? That was definitely the first site I discovered. And how apt, looking back: whatever dotcom start-up was responsible for that was eerily prescient as to exactly what type of content would be in most demand on the internet.

After getting bored with the homework-excuse website, I got a penpal. I picked him off some weird dot-matrix listserv. His name was Per, he lived in Sweden, he was about 45 and in retrospect probably ‘grooming’ me, to employ the technical paedophile term. Ah, sweet memories.

But anyway, 14 years is all it’s taken to turn me into someone who tires of a topic after roughly the time it takes to watch an infant panda sneeze unfathomably cutely. The internet is forty years old this year: by the time the next forty rolls around, we’ll be like the rabbits in Watership Down, incapable of counting numbers beyond two.

So it only remains to me to wish you a very happy birthday, Internet. Wait - didn’t I start off talking about the state of cinema today? Ah, fuck it, I’m over that.

Are You There, Bec? It's Me, Master Bates

Last night I got a series of phonecalls from a man energetically masturbating while a porn flick played in the background.

You may be confused by the words “a series of” in that sentence, but the truth is I couldn’t stop myself answering the phone, time after time.

Partly, I was spurred by the same motivation that keeps people watching Lost: that deepseated belief in the possibility that it’s about to get more interesting. And judge ye me not: I say if you lose that shred of childlike optimism, that faith-sparkling cornerstone of your very humanity – well, then, should that dark day befall me, cut me open and use my robotic innards as spare vacuum-cleaner parts.

Also, I was fascinated by his multi-tasking wizardry. Imagine the relentless focus it must take to maintain a rigorous self-pleasuring action while simultaneously dialling a nine-digit number and engaging with pornographic material! Call me workshy, but that strikes me as downright exhausting. That many competing distractions would’ve made my head explode into fleshy pieces from overstimulation, like an epileptic at a live taping of the X-Factor.

Not that I was giving him much in the way of erotic fodder. It must have taken a rich and vibrant inner world for him to replace my irritable “Mum, is that you?” repetitions with the mental image of some fishnet-clad hussy getting cosy with the phone between silken sheets.

But the main reason I kept on answering and listening intently was that I was struck by the possibility that I might be able to pick up a clue to his identity or geographical position from the ambient sound of the call. Like a specific and highly-localised form of birdsong in the background, which would enable me to whack my thigh and cry “By gum, the Knsyna Loerie! You’re nabbed, son!”

Even moving past the fact that this scenario involves me morphing into a TV detective from the 60s in Yorkshire, I do recognise that there are certain logical impediments to this plan. Primarily, I can’t tell a birdsong from a police siren. Secondly, even if I had identified the sonorous hoot/tweet/cackle of the Knysna Loerie, how would that have helped me? The only people I know who live in Knysna are my friend Kirby’s parents, who after lengthy consideration I have crossed off my list of suspects as they are quite busy running a vegetation-export company and don’t know my phone number.

Also, I must reluctantly concede, as maddeningly desirable as my dulcet tones are, it probably wasn’t someone sitting in Knysna. Long-distance rates are sheer bloody murder, aren’t they? Daylight robbery. Unless you can find a way to telephonically harass someone via Skype, in which case the element of surprise is somewhat lost (“Please add wank_call_69 to your contact list!”).

So in the end I gave up, turned my phone off, and allowed him to reach his shuddering climax to the sexy purr of “The caller you have dialled is not available”.

But it reminded me that I should do as my mother does and keep a small police-regulation whistle within reach of the phone at all times. God knows why she initially found it necessary to launch this counter-offensive on obscene callers, as I cannot imagine she is in high demand on aural-jerk-off listservs. But at one stage during my adolescence, her eagerness to bring out the whistle was such that in *any* ambiguous telephonic situation (such as, say, a stranded daughter phoning tearily from a crackly call-box) she would grab the whistle with unseemly glee and blast it down the line like a Bafana Bafana supporter with a vuvuzela after a goal.

“Such filth”, she would say afterwards, snapping the phone back on to its cradle smartly.

Such filth, indeed.

Lady Looks Like A Dude

Caster Semenya. I can’t remember when last I was so gripped by a news story. Oh yes, it was two weeks ago, when newspapers reported that Sam the koala, who became the anthropomorphists’ pin-up of choice after the Australian bushfires, had tragically died. From chlamydia.*

Well, Sam, just because you’re young and cute and can sip adorably from an Evian bottle doesn’t mean you can fuck your way through the Outback without protection. I vote for Sam as the poster-koala of all future STI awareness campaigns.

But anyway, so Caster Semenya, the South African “female” who romped to an insultingly easy victory in the 800m event in the World Athletics Championships, is now suspected of being “male”.

And, in truth, the part of me that isn’t in an imaginary but magical life-partnership with Judith Butler, can see where they’re comin’ from. Lady *does* look like a dude.

When I use the word “lady”, I’m quoting from the outraged statement of the South African Football Players Union, who questioned: “Why does IAAF only choose Semenya out of all the ladies at the Championships?” Yes, quite. This is an important political point, SAFPU: *all* so-called “women” should be under suspicion, not just those who know how to flower-arrange and write thank-you notes on monogrammed cards and dismount gracefully from a horse-drawn carriage.

SAFPU’s statement is just a drop in the ocean of the media outpourings devoted to using Semenya’s case as a useful way of exposing the complete inability to separate the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, to discuss gender issues in any kind of coherent or meaningful way, and a frightening indicator of how hidebound we still are by what constitutes appropriate behaviour and appearance for a “man” and a “woman”.

But if you wanted to read about heavy stuff, you’d be on perezhilton.com. Let’s get back to the cheap jokes.

Fortunately (from the perspective of comedic fodder), the South African Young Communists’ League has also weighed spectacularly unhelpfully into the fray:

"The [Venus and Serena] Williams sisters were never subjected to such public humiliation as is done by the international athletic body. Is it because they are of American descent?"

Er, no, it’s because the Williams sisters don’t look like the Wayans brothers.

Semenya’s case was also done no favours by a phone interview given by her father, which I listened to on Youtube two days ago that now seems to have been mysteriously removed, in which he launched a passionate defence of her ‘femaleness’.

With one problem.

No doubt simply due to not being an English first-language speaker, he repeatedly made reference to his daughter using the male third-person pronoun. “It doesn’t bother him,” he announced earnestly. “He knows he is a girl.” D’oh! I smacked my forehead so many times during the interview that it’s left a permanent dent.

Newspaper articles in the UK – unless you count those from The Guardian, which inevitably called Germaine Greer out of the underground bunker she shares with The Pregnant Man to comment immediately on the impending gender apocalypse – have focused on intense scrutiny of her appearance.

“Semenya has a delicate dusting of facial hair,” one published.

And? I myself am cultivating a very distinguished-looking goatee at the moment. My friend Sim is also available on request to tell you about the woman she saw on the Tube once, who casually opened a voluminous bag to pull out a Wilkinson Sword and a mirror in order to begin painstakingly scraping at her beard.

But at least on those grounds we can surely rule out the possibility of fraud by design. If the South African Athletics Federation wanted to disguise a man as a woman for medal-winning purposes, they could do it a helluva lot more convincingly. Like giving Caster a long blonde wig, and some falsies, and a smear of lipstick.

Hell, they could even get in the guy the ANC uses to disguise Julius Malema as a human.

Also, if I were Caster Semenya, I’d respond to the IAAF’s concerns that I look like a man by voicing my own concerns that IAAF president Pierre Weiss looks like a fatter and more dishevelled version of Hercule Poirot, but I’m not about to suggest that he be stripped of his post and gets down to solving the mystery of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance using only his leetle grey cells.

The battery of tests lined up for poor Semenya by the IAAF include, other than the requisite poking at her genitalia, a full psychologist’s examination. Judging by the IAAF’s sensitive handling of the “gender verification” case thus far, one can only speculate what such an investigation might involve.

“Okay Caster, I’d like you to give us the recipe for a creamy roux. And what ingredients would you add to this vinaigrette to produce the desirable level of piquancy?”

“Caster, if you look at this screen here, there’s a picture of a half-naked fireman protectively cradling an infant. Can you produce a visible mixture of tears and arousal?”

So she's fast, she has a 'tache, and her speaking voice is a bit like Barry White's after a night chainsmoking. Chances of her being female seem about as high as those of a fuzzy marsupial dying of chlamyida.

*http://www.thelondonpaper.com/thelondonpaper/green/news/bushfire-survivor-sam-the-koala-dies-of-chlamydia, if you query this

When Good Neighbours Become Good Friends

It's Friday night in Kilburn, where I live, which means the air is thick with marijuana and congealing blood and the gentle lullaby of police-sirens will shortly sing me to sleep.

Ah, Kilburn. And people ask me why I don't move back to South Africa! Why on earth, when I can experience most of the attendant personal safety risks and absolutely none of the quality-of-life benefits right here in NW6?

Kilburn has a particular atmosphere unto itself which I find difficult to express using the clumsy tool of words. If you were here I'd employ a mixture of tap-dance, capoeira, and hand -puppetry to convey its heady ambience.

It's supposedly a neighbourhood rift asunder by gang violence. That's what our co-bartenders tell us. We were fascinated - particularly Cristina, whose dark past as a Chicana gang-girl occasionally manifests itself in her ability to spell out the word 'Blood' using only her fingers and thumbs. It's really accurate, as good as reading the text in Times New Roman font 18. Again, you gotta see it.

Anyway, tell us more, we said. Who are these gangs?

"Well, there's the Irish," our informant responded. What are they like? we pressed. What do they do? "Drink a lot, and sing sometimes", he answered earnestly, at which point our credulity dissipated, since this seemed more like a valid ethnographic precis of a national character than some terrifyingly niche gang initiation rite. What else do they do, this fearsome posse? Eat lots of potatoes? Believe in leprechauns?

A sozzled Paddy crooning 'Molly Malone'. I'm shaking in my boots.

So we scoff at the notion of Kilburn as a gang-land, with expertise hard-earned on the streets of LA and Hanover Park respectively. (For 'LA' and 'Hanover Park' you may want to substitute 'Gig Harbor, Seattle' and 'Rondebosch' respectively, but the point is, we know our Crips from our Bluds, our 26's from our car-guards.)

But Kilburn certainly has a dark underbelly. 'Underbelly' is not strictly accurate, actually. Just 'belly' would probably cover it. A few months ago Cristina had to step over a stab- mangled corpse on the street on the way to Tesco, which was inconvenient. And two weeks ago a man punched me on the High Street at 10am on a sunny Saturday morning.

I hadn't been expecting it, really. Neither had I been "asking for it", as yet another bartender colleague helpfully suggested. (It was probably one of the Irish. After all, I *was* draped in an Ulster flag loudly talking smack about Ronan Keating at the time. I should have checked for his secret shamrock tattoo.)

I wheeled round to face my assailant - a perfectly-normal looking middle-aged gentleman - in shock. “Soooorrrrryyyyyyy,” he sneered, in approximately the same tone in which you deliver a parentally-enforced apology to a sibling you have just viciously pinched on a car-trip, and then add under your breath: “that you're so STUPID”.

This hurtful episode has played on my mind somewhat in the subsequent days. Naturally, a number of vivid revenge scenarios have presented themselves. In the main one, I turn to him and say in a cutting yet composed manner, "Oh, *I'm* sorry, because I didn't realise we'd all agreed to entirely abandon the social contract which pettily deters us from randomly assaulting fellow pedestrians en route to an optometrist's appointment! Since we're all done with that, I trust you don't mind that I'm about to take a dump on your shoe."

Anyway, it brought home to me the alienation of deracinated urban living for us peripatetic expatriates. Because no-one helped me, you see. I feel strongly that if I'd been living in some cosy community-orientated olden-days society at least a baying crowd of vigilantes would have run him down and hacked him to death with their bare hands and farming implements. Where's mob-justice when you bloody well need it?

In the wake of this incident I have thus been considering trying to get to know our neighbours. It seems wrong that we live our isolated little pod-lives, like battery-hens, barely exchanging a nod on the stairs, when we could be getting together for jolly evenings of Scrabble and kangaroo courts.

Our neighbours directly next door seemed most promising. They are a - pardon my French - homosexual couple. One of them is a wealthy ageing German gent and the other is an unemployed young Philippino man, but I have absolutely no reason to believe it is not a relationship premised exclusively on a set of shared interests and a deep emotional connection.

For a while Cristina and I became convinced that they were running a drug-empire from their flat, due to the fact that every single day they receive multiple intriguingly-shaped packages in the post (which is deposited in a communal receptacle) marked 'adaptor'. How many adaptors can two people need, we wondered? And if you knew you would need 60 different plug-points in a single month, wouldn't you just bulk-order them to save the inconvenience of discovering at the end of every day that you needed yet another for the morrow? In short, dear reader, we smelled a rat, and not just the one which routinely shreds our cereal boxes in the kitchen.

So we launched a daring investigation, which saw me steal one of their packages and bring it up to open with Cristina. With hands trembling in anticipation of the heroin stash we would uncover and then sell to the Irish, we tore the parcel open. And discovered: an adaptor.

Never ones to allow a surface reality to mislead us, we then proceeded to smash the adaptor open in order to reach the priceless contraband which surely lay beneath its smug, plug-like exterior. And discovered: some tangled wires, as fitting the circuitry of, well, an adaptor.

Then we felt a bit bad for having stolen and destroyed their adaptor, and sheepishly left it next to the kitchen bin for the rat to munch on.

Since we resigned ourselves to the probability that they are not, in fact, international narcotics-smugglers, and instead just gays with a lot of appliances, our desire to befriend them has waned somewhat. So I am turning my attention to the neighbours opposite, whose roof garden is at exact eye-level with my bedroom window. This is occasionally awkward, as I am wont to parade around in a state of undress while miming to Bonnie Tyler with a hairbrush, but I feel like they have a LOT more to be embarrassed about.

Like the early-90s techno they blast at the flimsiest pretexts for celebration (a sunny day; a night undisturbed by an Irish drive-by spud-hurling). Or the tumultuous relationship one of the Eastern European inhabitants carries out with her (presumably English) boyfriend entirely telephonically.

"HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" she howls through heaving sobs, gesticulating wildly with a cigarette while striding back and forth upon the roof, cellphone pressed to her ear. "HOW? HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" She's doing it right now.

Upon reflection, perhaps the couple below them, whose kitchen I gain an unobstructed bird's-eye of from my current position, would be more fruitful material for a lasting friendship. They too are a gay couple. We know this because a few months ago Cristina's boyfriend saw, from the vantage-point of our bathroom, one of them administering a diligent hand-job to the other. Right there in the kitchen.

We really must have them over for wine and canapes. Assuming the Irish don't get to them first.

How Swine Flu Ruined My Sex-Life But Taught Me Valuable Lessons About Humility And Grace Towards Lepers

I have swine flu. Right now, as I type these words, I have swine flu. I can see you, fumbling to spray the screen with some biohazard-nuking aerosol. But don’t worry. I am typing this alone in a hermetically-sealed chamber far away from you. Thank heavens that the internet has made it possible for plague-vectors like me to tell you my thoughts without actually breathing my diseased spores on you.

There’s no Tamiflu for me, alas, as I have no “underlying health problems” and I don’t fall into a risk group (the very old, the very young, the very pregnant, although I damn near lied about the latter to get my hands on the drugs).

See, word on the street is that Tamiflu is amazing. Apparently it turns you around in 30 minutes flat. I’ve become a leetle obsessed with Tamiflu, in its glaring absence from my own illness-wracked life. I picture Tamiflu’s gleaming capsules entering my flu-ravaged body and going to work like mini-Asterixes, spearing those fat little swine wherever they find them and roasting them on a spit for a giant feast.

I phoned up my doctor’s surgery in a bleary haze on Friday morning.

"I'm feeling fluey," I told the receptionist. That was enough, like the code they use at shopping centres to warn staff of a bomb threat: "Doctor Sands is in the building”.

“We don’t want you coming in,” she said sharply. Perhaps a little too sharply, I mused, after hanging up the phone. After all, there’s a fine line between ‘justified caution in a global pandemic’ and ‘just plain hurting someone’s feelings’.

A doctor phoned me back. She sounded young and nice. I described my symptoms, she asked a few more questions, and concluded with a diagnosis of swine flu – as firm as one can be when examining someone over the telephone. I could’ve told her I had also grown a curly tail and was prone to uncontrollable oinking fits and she’d have had to take my word for it.

“But you’re not really that sick, are you,” was the tendentious line of questioning that followed the diagnosis. “I mean, it’s not like you’re in bed.” I could practically see her tightening her grip around the box of precious Tamiflu clutched in her fist.

“I am in bed, actually,” I replied, offended. “I’ve been in bed for two days. I only leave my bed to use the bathroom.”

“Oh, so you can use the bathroom unassisted,” came the response. Squeeze that Tamiflu a little tighter, Doc. “So it must be quite a mild case.”

Okay then. Try telling the people around you: “Oh, I’ve got swine flu, by the way – but don’t worry, really a very mild case.” Watch how fast they spit out the Coke you’ve been sharing with one straw.

My girlfriend, who has been what the NHS call my ‘flu friend’, texted some mates to tell them she was running late for dinner with them because she had to bring some paracetamol to my swine flu sickbed. (Paracetamol: the pauper’s Tamiflu.) “Dude,” came the response from Friend 1, “I’m really sorry she’s sick and all that, but can we maybe cancel tonight? I’m not gonna lie, I’m a bit freaked out at the thought of those germs.”

Puzzled, she phoned up the normally more sensible Friend 2. “Swine flu??” were the first shrieked words out of Friend 2’s mouth, replacing ‘hello’."You have swine flu under your roof?"

Er, thanks. That’s me you’re talking about. Needless to say, her dinner invitation was retracted.

My girlfriend has been saintly about mopping my brow and cooking me broth, or at least heating me up Sainsbury’s broth. But it is a little disconcerting how she follows me around, ostentatiously scrubbing everything I touch, using antiseptic wipes from a little packet. And every now and then she finds something new I’ve dared to touch, and then all hell breaks loose.

"You touched the tap?" she’ll shout from the bathroom. I assume she has a little ultraviolet torch now, to detect where my diseased fingers have been. "I have to use the tap too, you know!"

"Well, you want me to wash my filthy infected paws, don'tcha?" I mutter back. "What should I use to open the tap, my elbow?"

"Yes," she’ll shout back. "As long as your elbow is covered by a sleeve."

It all makes me feel a bit like an eighteenth-century leper.

And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s apparently swine flu etiquette to call up everyone you’ve so much as smiled at over the past week, to let them know that the germs could be coming their way. Emailing the parents of a three-month old baby I’d spent the previous evening cooing over, I felt like I was some syphilitic gigolo phoning Maria Von Trapp to tell her I’d given her crabs. Irrationally enough, there was real guilt and shame there.

Perhaps it’s because of the virus’s name. We all know H1N1 (its technical appellation) ain’t going to catch on any time soon, and there’s something about ‘swine flu’ that just sounds so dirty. Like you really have been rolling about with actual pigs – as many would-be comedian friends will point out to you, should you contract the flu. “Pigs are not just non-stop makeout machines, you know,” wrote one wit on my Facebook wall.

At least my friends believe I have swine flu. I phoned up my mother in Cape Town to break the news to her as gently as possible, so as not to cause her unnecessary grief and alarm.

“Nonsense, my dear,” she said briskly, as if that were the end of that.

"But I do," I insisted, sounding more like a petulant teenager with every syllable. "The doctor told me and everything!"

"Such rubbish," she replied, clicking her tongue in irritation. "You are probably a little bit liverish."

I embarked on a long and aggrieved explanation of Occam’s Razor and its application to medical diagnostics in this instance, but there’s no arguing. The problem, I gradually realised, is that she doesn’t believe in swine flu.

Heaven forfend it does not take her daughter’s fluey corpse in a body-bag to teach her what’s-what about modern epidemiology. Heaven forfend.