Smother me in Vicks and pour me a Benylin

As you may or may not have worked out from the post title, I'm nae weel. I have a cold. Or the flu. Or a raging fever which is almost certainly leading to my imminent death, depending on the level of hypochondria present at any given moment.

The one good thing about my tragic affliction is that I've now gotten around to finishing a couple of books I've been "reading" (i.e. started, got distracted, in danger of forgetting what had gone before - a short attention span is a terrible thing) for a while: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats. Possibly my favourite bit in the latter goes as follows:

I'm not sure at what stage during the day we spent together Guy decided that I wasn't an Islamic terrorist. Perhaps it was when I discovered that his daughter danced with Richard Gere in the movie Chicago and I screeched, 'Catherine Zeta-Jones was brilliant in it!'
Even a deep-cover al-Qaeda terrorist wouldn't think to go that fey.

A less-than good side-effect of the sniffles is that my sleep patterns are now totally awry. I was already heading for a direct day-for-night swap in any case, so I'm not sure what I'll end up with now. But never mind, as long as I actually get some sleep, the hour at which it chooses to bless me is not that important.

I usually drift off to sleep with the radio on - which reminds me, I've got a rant overdue regarding a certain hokey American fellow who befouls Saturdays on BBC7 - and I hope that Sunday evening on Radio 4 had some feature or other relating to Eastern Europe, itchy wool, beds, and/or tin baths. Though come to think of it, I've had the tin bath section of that dream before.

It's a real thriller: I'm shopping with my parents, and I spot some cheap tin baths. The cheapest of the lot is shaped like a shell, higher at one side than the other, but when I try it out for size, it has so many awkward contours that it's pretty much impossible to use. The other bath to catch my attention is a lovely blue colour, and has a semi-hooded top, kind of like an old fashioned pram shape. Unfortunately, this design is peculiarly short, meaning that you have to sit with knees bent, all the while risking bumping your head on the hood. Fascinating, no?

And just in case anyone is wondering (well, you never know), the shopping trip then extended to a series of beds made by assorted Eastern European firms, all of which were extremely uncomfortable. Espscially the ones made with rough Bulgarian wool. One of these days I'll have a dream where something exciting actually happens...