I had the flu recently. Me and half the population if you went by the numbers the hospitals and the HSE were putting out there. It should be stated from the off that the flu is not a bad cold, something that might elicit a pitying look and advice to stay warm and in bed and resting.
Okay, staying warm and in bed and resting works for pretty much anything. I accept that. As advice goes, it’s annoyingly effective. But going back to the whole flu being a kind of bad cold kind of thing, suffice it to say that a neighbour came to my door to kindly offer sustenance and informed me, as he passed over some goodies, that he had had the flu when he was 17. This was a man in his 60s. “I still remember it,” he stated matter of factly.
A friend texted to see how I was doing. She’s from Tipp and has occasionally quoted people using a particular phrase. It was my turn, this time around. “It’s a hoor of a thing,” I replied. Some grinning emojis bounced back along with “bad dose by the sound of it”.
I took up residence on the sofa bed downstairs so that I was near the sink to top up my water and could also watch the telly.
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As the days wore on, my television and I developed a bond. This was terrestrial TV. The flu, I discovered, was not compatible with streaming services. Not for me anyway. Mind you, it didn’t help that I managed to lose the smart TV remote down the bowels of the bed. It eventually came to light, but later – days later. I didn’t miss it, though. I discovered that with the flu I needed real people talking about real issues, mixed in with quizzes, sick animals and property programmes.
Daytime TV serves a public function. It is comforting, for the most part non-challenging, and soothing in the best ‘all’s right with the world’ kind of way.
I would start the day with the BBC Breakfast show, which was fine. Perfectly fine. It did, of course, have a touch of forced hilarity when presenters did that off-the-cuff banter back and forth which tended to go into overdrive when the weather person came onboard.
The same happened with Today with Maura and Dáithí in the afternoon, although maybe weather people are just naturally humorous and easygoing and good-natured. Good for them, if they are. I live near the Met office – and, lying on my sofa bed, feeling miserable, I decided I needed to hang out around there more often. Maybe that bonhomie would rub off on me.
Those sick animals took up an hour of the morning. I’ve never been to Chester Zoo, but boy do they seem to have a lot of animals going under anaesthetic for any number of reasons, or getting groomed or shaved or cleaned, or being introduced to members of the opposite sex for the most blatant of procreation purposes. And it was impossible not to root for every one of them, hoping they’d come around okay, or feel a lot more confident in their enclosure, or at least, at the very least, have a little sniff of that new creature over there in the corner.
[ An Irish Diary on the Jacobs Awards and Gabriel Byrne’s service to sheep farmersOpens in new window ]
But it was those programmes about moving somewhere completely different that really resonated. BBC’s Escape to the Country was my absolute favourite. I would prop myself up on the bed and take great pleasure in feeling wonderfully superior to those tired urban dwellers moving to picture-perfect English villages. With a not insignificant amount of smugness, I would shake my head in exasperation at their dissatisfaction with kitchens that took up the entire ground floor of enormous stone cottages, or with gardens that stretched to the horizon while goats and horses and sheep frolicked just beyond the boundary wall.
But, most frustratingly of all, nobody ever seemed to buy anything. They might like a property. They might even go back for a second look, but a voiceover would invariably inform us at the end of each programme that X and Y were still looking or had found somewhere on their own. On their own! Which we wouldn’t get to see! Ah, come on, I’d mutter, slumping back under the covers.
I’m back at work now. Not quite functioning at optimum levels, but getting there. I took to recording some of my daytime stalwarts, but looking at them late in the evening just doesn’t do it for me. Daytime TV needs to be watched during the day.
I don’t want another bout of the flu. Ever again. But when next I feel a little below par I’ll be able to put together a schedule in double-quick time and pass the daylight hours quite happily. Of that I’m certain.
