The holiday illness hypothesis

As surely as day follows night, a crass, insensitive and woefully misinformed opinion piece by Katie Hopkins follows an atrocity and Peter Stringfellow follows a seventeen year old girl around his nightclub, one or both of my children will get ill when there is a school holiday.

I should have known which way the wind was blowing, this time five years ago, when every one of our Easter weekend plans had to be cancelled because the baby had a virulent stomach bug. This was the start of a rather frustrating trend. I won’t bore you with all the tedious details, I’ll just give you a précis of the last two years. In non-chronological order: last Easter it was chicken pox, the last two Christmases, it’s been flu. Spring half term of last year it was the norovirus and this Easter it’s a chest infection!

The youngest was ill a couple of weeks ago but it seemed safely in advance of the holidays and she dutifully recovered. But then her older sister got ill last weekend (the rather alarming sounding) Scarlet Fever was doing the rounds at her school. I took her to the doctor on Monday and she didn't have Scarlet Fever but a vague, ill defined malaise. She’s been coughing all week and this seemed to reach an apex last night with a continuous hack that sounded like something straight out of a Dickensian workhouse. (I'm sorry if this makes me sound unsympathetic; I joke to hide the worry and pain...The temperature reading in the picture shows my other half's temp, BTW, he was monitoring this every hour when he was off sick the other day and texting me the results!)

So today, at 8 a.m on Good Friday, I duly trotted down to the walk-in centre with her. I don't know if you noticed but it was a brilliant, yellow morning.

“I wish it was raining!” Snarled my daughter.

Now, people who have never met my daughter but know me, might think that this miserablist attitude indicates that she’s a chip off the old block. The thing is - she isn't! She’s an extrovert and an enthusiast and (usually) as cheery and ebullient a 5 year old as you’d ever hope to meet. Lack of sleep, feeling run down and missing so much school, must have taken its toll (I know the feeling!)

“I don’t want to go to the doctors!” She said.

“I know.” I said. “But’s let’s just get this bit of unpleasantness out of the way and then we can have fun. We can go to the park...we can watch a D.V.D.”

“I don’t want to go to the park and I don’t want to watch a D.V.D!” She said, grumpily.

I could go on detailing our conversation but I think you get the gist.

Anyway, we saw a really lovely female doctor (I've made my peace with the fact that many doctors seem to be younger than me these days…) Daughter cheered right up and behaved exemplarily. We got given a prescription. We wasted some time in the coffee shop while we waited for the chemist to open. My daughter stung me for a smoked salmon sandwich! (Are you sure you’re going to eat this? It’s very expensive. Reader - I think you can guess how this story ended…) I had a latte and a cheese and tomato toastie (v nice!). The pharmacist told my daughter that she hoped she got better soon. And all the way home I was thinking - gawd bless the N.H.S! (I am an atheist so perhaps this is hypocritical - perhaps I should have been thinking Bevan bless the N.H.S!)

Postscript:

We almost tempted the gods (as in Greek gods - those capricious bastards) by booking a holiday this Easter. It would have involved passports, flights and everything! Thankfully our own laziness and lack of motivation prevented this.

So I've been lurking on Facebook and Twitter today, casting envious and rather resentful glances at other people’s holiday snaps. The thing is, and perhaps this is me changing a habit of a lifetime and becoming an optimist, they’ll be other sunny days! (There will be, right??)

P.P.S I am aware that when I wrote the diary of an introvert the other day that I promised to write something more exciting next time - I'm well aware that this isn't it! But I do need to keep my hand in with this blogging business so, as you may imagine, I'm rather limited as to subject matter at the moment!