"The normal condition of mankind," according to the poet A.E. Housman, "is one of just tolerable discomfort". Since my arrival in Germany, however, I have signally failed to meet even this modest criterion of human wellbeing. I have descended into Bunyan's Slough of Despond, or as Keats so aptly puts it: Now, more than ever, seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. My dejection - of a temporary nature, let us hope - arises from an illtimed visitation from what I modestly assume to be the common cold. Everywhere I go, I provoke a regular chorus of Gesundheits and despite a nightly Fluchtachtel (the Austrian "eighth for the road", as they so nicely put it) piping hot with cloves and sugar added, the ailment seems intent on living out its normal span.
Going by its name, of course, one would assume that a cold must somehow be related to the temperature, and indeed our ancestors assumed that one was sure to catch one by getting cold and wet. But medical opinion nowadays is not so sure. It is true that the viruses which cause a cold survive best in a cool and damp environment, and it is also our experience that colds seem to afflict us more in wintertime than in other seasons of the year.
But the high frequency may well have nothing much to do with the fact that it is cold; the ailment may thrive, perhaps, because people find themselves then in close proximity to each other for longer periods than at other times of the year. When we are confined en masse indoors or on a bus, with doors and windows tightly shut, conditions are ideal for the epidemic spread of such a virus.
Studies of the epidemiology of colds have found little or no connection with the absolute value of the temperature, or with damp weather or with variations in windiness or atmospheric pressure.
What has been found, however, is that the frequency of colds seems to increase at times of fluctuating temperature, when the weather changes suddenly from warm to cold, or vice versa. Of course, it is not surprising that colds should peak with a sudden cooling of the weather, but it is strange that they should do so with a sudden warming, as sometimes happens, for example, in this month of May. Either way, in my misery I can identify completely with that ancient synthesis of meteorological ambivalence:
As a rule a man's a fool: When it's hot he wants it cool, When it's cool he wants it hot, Always wanting what is not.