I had been dragging flu-light for a couple of weeks; not man-flu but flu-flu. My request to not have to go into the office the two days I should have was granted and I had spent the whole week working from home. I’d been feeling all the usual things you expect to feel when your body is out of sorts; some of this, some of that, a couple of sweaty nights and that nervous cough that never migrated south – thank God – but yet had insisted on sitting it out at the back of my throat and having a little tickle now and then. I’d gone from being a tenor to a gruff baritone with no range and of no apparent talent.  I thought I might lose my voice and I was having a hard time making myself understood.

Cristina has couple of mischievous, adolescent cats (to preserve their anonymity I will call them Thing 1 and Thing 2), adorable in every way and spilling over with character, but understandably prone to hyper-kinetic attacks of “fuck-it-ism”; antics that don’t always ride too well with us other inhabitants of their domain. Careering around the house, always at odd hours and several times a day, in a game of “It” of extreme prejudice, no matter what physical obstacles they might encounter, is par for the course. They were pulling this stunt a couple as I was speaking to a client and one of the two, mid-flight, managed to get himself entangled in the cables of my phone charger and its head-set. The phone was flung across the room, ending up below the sofa, and my head-set, having been ripped off my head, ended up by the French windows, severed from its cable at the root. A replacement for my head-set was duly sent from the office that evening but the phone seemed to have taken a battering and I spent the rest of the week having to hear my customers whine about the poor quality of the line. Compounded to this, there was me with the rasping voice of the possessed.

I had a client on the phone a few days later, a rather trying and impatient pharmacist from France as it happens, and communication was understandably difficult between one thing and another. At a certain point he snapped “look, I can barely hear you, I cannot understand what you are saying to me and you sound a million miles away”. I drew a breath and repeated what I had just said to him, grunting as slowly and as loudly as I could “….CAN…YOU…PLEASE…HOLD…WHILST…I LOOK…AT…YOUR…ACCOUNT”. He immediately changed tone and answered me “ah, yes, of course.” I suppose he then moved the hand-set away from his face but I then audibly heard him turn to someone else, presumably a colleague, and say “is this guy having a dump?”