WHY MAN-FLU DOESN'T EXIST

Oh! I forgot! I forgot that I get colds one day at a time. Yesterday, the throat and the barrage of sticky strepsils, today the chesty cough.

That means tomorrow I'll be exploding with mucus like a snotty volcano, and my little red face will spend most of the day buried in tissues. I'll probably wake up with a face like a scene from Alien, and a head that spins on the inside as though I've just driven four times around a mini-roundabout.

Now then. Yesterday, while we set up the stage for church and I spluttered like a tommy gun, someone I know (who will remain nameless) had the cheek of describing it as 'man flu'.

'Man-flu', as you know, is a term invented by women to describe actual flu, as they perceived it, encountered by men. The theory is that men can't cope with sickness as well as women, so hilariously, a sore throat or a chesty cough knocks us out of action, where a woman would simply blow her nose, ask what the fuss was, and get on with things.

I don't think there's any scientific evidence for this, ladies, but even if there were, don't you think it a little sexist to point it out?

A friend of mine (a girl) once wisely said,

"There's nothing good or bad that happens - only our reactions..."

Which did get me thinking a lot at the time.

Well, there is no man-flu either then: there's just flu, and whether or not we complain about it from what feels like our death-bed... or we bravely march on with the day. That's it.

If we do manage to soldier on though, lads, like the hearty warriors we are, what should we call it? Presumably, we should call it what it is: a cold, the flu, or (if we want to be as dramatic as the ladies seem to expect us to be) 'influenza'.

Though I admit, it does sound rather Victorian, imposing and serious if you answer the question: "What's up, are you okay?" with "No not really, I have influenza."

So that's why I don't believe man-flu really exists other than a cheekily sexist construct.

If I really had man-flu I'd be whinging about it to all and sundry as though it were the end of the world.

Good job I haven't gone on about it then.