Infection

I may be getting a cold. It’s a bit hard to say at the moment because I’m not what you call a morning person, and the symptoms of just being up for the first couple of hours are fairly indistinguishable from slight illness, from, for instance, the beginnings of a cold. I could test the cold hypothesis by having a strong cappuccino but I’m a bit of a health freak and I only have one cup of coffee a day. I learnt the technique from my step father. When he was eighty seven and had long survived being given six months to live (seventy one, lung cancer gone metastatic - he did give up smoking) his doctor told him he ought to cut down his alcohol consumption to just one drink a day. A month or so later I went down to Cornwall to keep an eye on him while my mother was having a retina reattached. The first evening I went into the kitchen and he was standing by the sink with a large full wine glass containing, nominally, his Gin and It. It was a lesson in titration. He took a swig, shivered, topped the glass up with water, took another swig, shivered slightly less and so on until there was enough room for the vermouth, then retired to the “drawing room” to sip the rest.
“What was going on there?” I asked, and it was then he explained about doctor’s orders and the one drink a day. I didn’t say anything about the doctor not necessarily seeing one drink in terms of half a pint of gin. My stepfather only lasted another seven years. I’m not surprised.
On this basis I limit myself to just the one cup of coffee a day, at around 10 am. It’s like rocket propellant. It’ll be time to switch the machine on soon.
Until then I won’t know whether I’m getting a cold or whether it’s just the symptoms of it's being 9.21 a.m. - nine minutes before I switch the machine on to warm up.
The reason I think I’m probably getting a cold is that I went to the dentist yesterday to have the impression for a crown done. The received wisdom is to go to the youngest dentist you can. They are just out of dental school and have learnt all the latest techniques, and will be keen to get things right and make a good impression. Recently my wife had an emergency appointment and the dentist was so young that she had a picture of her pet rabbit on the wall. Presumably it was a rabbit blessed with the same sort of longevity as my stepfather. But I go to the senior partner and we are on fairly good chatting terms which means in part him talking me through what he might do and what he’s actually going to do and why his chosen path might or might not be a good thing. So before I sat down he told me he had a cold and he hoped I didn’t get it. Well, I thought, masks, rubber gloves; possibly not.
(It’s OK, the espresso machine is on now. Twenty nine minutes to go.)
I was there an hour. At some point we had moved from global warming - the dentist's wife was going to get a Prius, the Toyota hybrid, seventy miles to the gallon - to next April’s changes to NHS dentists’ employment terms (which I won’t go in to, but sound like short term New Labour wonkery). At one point of great tragedy and drama he wandered away from me entirely and I think rather lost track of what he was doing because he then decided that the temporary crown he’d put on was rubbish and he’d do it again in a slightly different way. But I did notice that his mask had slipped down and he was gently rubbing his nose with his finger - nothing gross, no latex up the nostril, but definite contact.
My wife has an important job and is very good at being tactfully but unquestionably authoritative. I am the reverse in every particular. If I had been my wife the dentist, senior partner or no, would have scrubbed up again quickly, efficiently, cheerfully. But I’m not my wife. Rather I thought, well yes, if he has to scrub up every time there is the slightest danger of infection he’d never get anything done; and if you start thinking about all the things they put in your mouth when you’re at the dentist and where they’ve been, you’d just never go. Also, though I once held forth at some length about the fish at a restaurant in Carmona, that was in Spanish, and somehow different. I’m actually English, and so I feel, what the hell, I don’t want to make a fuss, and I might get a cold on the bus for that matter, and he’s already miles behind schedule because of outlining the new arrangements vis a vis NHS dentists from April 2006 and having to do the temporary crown a slightly different way, and anyway he’s got his fingers back in my mouth now so the moment has passed.
The coffee machine is a new kind - I avoided the ones that you put sachets of glug in the top, it still uses proper ground coffee, and it froths the milk with genuine, not synthetic, steam; but it doesn't force the water through the coffee by boiler pressure, it has a little electric pump that clatters and hums away. Gaggia it is not and I was a bit pissed off at first because I didn't realise about the pump when I bought it. But as they point out, it delivers the water at a precisely calibrated pressure and temperature. And it does work very well, the coffee just tastes of coffee. It is now one minute to ten and soon I may know whether I have a cold or not.