Saturday 15 December 2012

Christmas Convalescence

Whilst the Office Clique has been busily readying itself for the Scarcely Containable Excitement of the departmental Christmas "Not" Lunch, I have been planning a whole series of alternative festive Yuletide celebrations to make up for the fact that I shall not be joining them.

I have arranged several lunches with people I actually like, volunteered to sell raffle tickets at the theatre company's pantomime, and best of all the community choir has been booked to fundraise for the local hospital by singing all the carols we have been rehearsing for the past two months.

Wassail Wassail !

Except that things do not go altogether according to plan....

I spend the weekend in Scotland enjoying my mother-in-law's 90th birthday celebrations with Husband's entire family; but on the Sunday evening I start to feel a bit queasy. 24 hours later, I am floored by the worst virus I have had for AGES.

The following day I stagger into work. This is not because I am being a martyr, but because the very next day our quarterly office-wide meeting is being held - attendance: mandatory - and if I simply ring in sick, it will give the Jackals an excuse to embark upon a Gargantuan Bitchfest Orgy. So I float wanly in and out of the office sweating unattractively, muffle my sneezes unless one of The Pawed Ones is in the vicinity (God forbid I would inflict this virus upon any of the Decent People), and only when I feel that I am actually going to faint do I knock on the door of the only managerial representative on the premises (Deputy Boss - lovely man) and explain that I have to go home immediately.

Now there was a time, not so long ago, when I would have carried on working no matter how ill I felt. I have worked through:

- migraine
- flu
- bronchitis
- trapped nerve in back
- torn calf muscle
- severe acne outbreak caused by injudicious use of some weird kind of skin peel product
- labyrinthitis (admittedly, lying on the bathroom floor with my Blackberry, as I was unable to move my head without being sick...)

But anyway.
You get the general picture.

These days however, I am a normal employee!! Yes, the type who stops working when she is ill, because she has taken the trouble to flick through the organisation's Code of Practice of Absence Management (latest version straight off the press, January 2013....) to double check that despite her longish absence earlier in the year due to "work-related stress", she can take another 3 days off with impunity and without triggering a First Stage Absence Review.

I have vague plans of spending a day recuperating, and then towards the end of the week buggering off to the V & A to catch the "Hollywood" exhibition before it closes and lunching on their nice salmon stuffed with cous cous....

But my vague plans go awry.
Because - dammit - I am really REALLY ill.

So I end up having to cancel: 2 Christmas lunches, selling raffle tickets at the pantomime, and worst of all singing at the hospital with the choir. Which (pathetically) makes me want to bawl my eyes out.

But it's not all bad. In the midst of my 3 days dozing on the sofa in my pyjamas, lacking even the enthusiasm to boot up my laptop, Tweet or blog, I suddenly remember what to do when life starts to go a bit crap. Yes! Break into the Emergency DVD Stockpile !!!

So for anyone else out there with the misfortune to be laid low with seasonal flu, I prescribe the following which are absolutely guaranteed to lift your flagging spirits as high as the star at the top of the tree:

"The Nightmare Before Christmas"
"The Grinch Who Stole Christmas"
and "The Polar Express"  

"I feel you, Christmas,
I know I've found you,
You never fade away...." !!

Gorgeous.

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