THIS BOOK IS FULL OF LIES:
As coughing, sneezing and nose blowing become the soundtrack to city living, there’s no doubt that winter has returned. Once again it has brought its partners in crime along too – colds, flu, viruses and bugs. The other way of keeping people as far away from you as possible (the first way of course, is being really ugly and having no personal hygiene).
I really love winter. I think most people do. Except I imagine, the girls that go out to ‘WAG’ clubs, babes. You know the ones – fake tits, fake hair and fake tan. They must really hate it because their wardrobes only consist of micro mini dresses and 6-inch stilettos. Every weekend when they get ready for a night on the town, their health is compromised. Will I catch pneumonia/won’t I catch pneumonia? Will I slip in a puddle and fall to an untimely death/won’t I slip in a puddle and fall to an untimely death? Half of them don’t even own coats – it must be terrible.
But for non-wag wannabes like me (and maybe you) winter is MUCH better than summer. We get to wear more of our clothes all at once. Us girls get to tuck our jelly bits in with tights pulled right up to our necks, boys get to wear tea cosy hats with a purpose and we can use the weather as an excuse to stay in and bake cupcakes instead of forcefully going to anything and everything all in the name of networking and looking buff. I mean, who said baking gloves couldn’t be sexy anyway?
Aside from all this good stuff though, winter also has it’s parring points and after having spent the last week linking a hot water bottle, getting high off Olbas oil and eating liquid meals that don’t involve rum, there is nothing the world needs more than a cure for the common cold. (Ok there probably are things the world needs more but still). Ah yes, the common cold, the slag of all viruses. Spreads faster than your local Jezzy and gets you not only hot under the collar, but hot under every other piece of clothing too.
No one is safe. At some point over the next few months there will be a time where you realise that trying to look sexy when your nose is redder than Rudolph’s and running faster than Usain Bolt is quite impossible. There will be a time where you’re trying to have a conversation with someone whilst hoping that the dry bits from your lips wont flake off and blow onto them. There will even be a time where you’re just trying to look…relatively normal instead of half dead, but all of these are out of reach because colds are like the screw face of all diseases. Everywhere you look someone’s sporting one and whether you like it or not before you know it you’ve got one too. That shit’s contagious.
(I want one of these…)
They say that there is no real cure for it. Apparently cough medicine doesn’t cure coughs (it just makes you feel a bit drunk so you don’t realise you’re coughing but once it wears off your ribs are in for a beating). They tell you to drink lots of fluids, they even say that the most effective thing to make you feel less like death is actually chicken soup. (Wouldn’t it be good if Chicken Cottage had a fried chicken soup special this time of year?) In China they tell you to drink a ginger based cocktail of poison, in Germany they encourage rum infused chamomile tea but here at Hot110 we have our own methods to avoid and cure the curse, of the common cold:
- Public Transport Pars – It would be good if we could avoid using public transport aka the breeding ground for these viruses but alas! As most of us can’t afford a personal chauffeur it is unavoidable. To make your journey more pleasurable, be sure to cough and blow your nose really loudly – that way you actually give people a reason to kiss their teeth and cut their eyes at you.
- Wrap Up Warm – You’ll know you have enough garmz on when you’re walking like you’re constipated and can’t bend your arms. (Unless you’re a wag because obviously, you don’t own clothes that cover more than your special place…if that).
- Sweat It Out - Go out raving loads…skank till your feet bleed and sweat the bugger out. Alternatively (and perhaps preferably), taking a hot bath will also have the desired effect.
- Starve A Fever, Feed A Cold – Eat loads of fried chicken. Simples.
- Finally… – The most effective way of avoiding the common cold this Christmas is…well…there isn’t one. Embrace the Kleenex, phlegm and Vicks vapour rub and use your watery eyes to get what you want, use you sneezing get a few days off work and your headache as an excuse to moan endlessly about everything wrong with the world.
Maybe colds aren’t so bad after all…
