Cold Comfort

I'm going back to work, after being off sick for three days.I'm dreading it. The Return To Work interview. The form to fill in. The dark mutterings about being referred to Occupational Health. Being informed of how short of staff it made us, how my colleagues struggled to cope without me. And putting "Cold" in the reason for absence. And I've got to go through that twice, at both sites. The implication being that I've been on a three day debauch, a mini holiday.

Whenever I've rung in, my wife has told me: "Tell them it's flu. Tell them it's a virus." I wish everyone would get a sense of perspective. There is an illness called The Common Cold. They can't cure it, but in this country, anyway, you won't die from it. It knocks you out for a day or two, you take Lemsips or Night Nurse, and then you get better. And no, I didn't see a doctor, because all the doctor would sat was stay at home and take Lemsips or Night Nurse.

I wish I could say it was a three-day holiday, but I ended up sleeping for most of that time. I didn't write. I didn't even think about writing. I read very little. I thought I might get to watch some DVDs all the way through, but somehow that never happened, either. One afternoon, I put on Star Wars, my favourite film, the first one, the one which they now call A New Hope, although I don't. Fifteen minutes in, I dozed off, and I woke up in time to see the Death Star exploding.

What have I been doing with that time? Watching Jeremy Kyle and Loose Women. Hardly a debauch. I was tempted to go back into work, except I didn't want to pass on my cold. I used to work with a Jehovah's Witness, and not only would she refuse to take anything for her cold, she would insist on coming in to work with it. Ineveitably, she ran around barking at everybody like a bear with a sore head, she got nothing done, and the next day everybody else had her cold.

Maybe it's been a good thing. I was fretting about coming up with a short story idea for Writing Magazine's horror story competition. And a further idea for a one-act play for the Drama Association of Wales's annual competition. And then a colleague, an artist in his spare time, hinted that he was on the lookout for an idea for a regular comic strip (or whatever they're called these days- pictures strips?). I actually got quite far with that, coming up with a Doctor Who-ish idea. But everything seemed to be taking me further and further from what I wanted to do.

As bad as this sounds, maybe work is one of the things which keeps me writing. I know that, when I was at school, I always thought that I would write a lot during the summer holidays (I decided, for better or worse, that I wanted to be a writer when I was 13). Yet throughout the holidays I never wrote anything. But as soon as the new term started, the ideas came to me. I don't know. Unlike any other art form, for fiction writing, maybe you need to be discontent.