I have a Christmas Sniffle.
It began on Christmas Eve. I started sniffling in the throes of a drinking session, of which I am, of course, not proud. I feel sure it’s not what the big man would’ve wanted on the eve of his birthday, and sure enough, divine justice acted swiftly and resolutely. Within half-an-hour of catching up with some friends from secondary school whom I hadn’t seen in six years, I became intrusively sniffy. I started to speak like someone was holding my nose, such that my lovely long-lost friend Jez asked me if I’d spent a lot of time in Birmingham since I left school. I promised I hadn’t – I had a sniffle.
My sniffle made me oppressively self-aware. At this point, readers may claim I’m overreacting, exaggerating for the sake of it, for fun and in order to have a blog on which I post regularly. Please address any such complaints to hello@joewald.com and I will deal with each one in a vehemently defensive manner.
You see, it all stems from a deeply troubled childhood. What happened? Oh, if you insist, I shall tell you.
In many ways, my father was a good man. He worked lots, drank little, taught me all that a father should teach his son. It is thanks to him that I can fish for my dinner, ride a bike, puck a sliotar, play the piano and truly, unconditionally pleasure a woman. But for all his superficial goodness, something more sinister lay deep within, at his core, rotting him from the inside. My father was a doctor.
Hold your whimpering, save your tender strokes of the small of my back – I am fine. I have learned to live with it, and yes, I am very brave. My father worked at the hospital, where the sick go to convalesce, and anyone might have thought that this would make him worldly and understanding of the many trials associated with the human condition. In reality, it did the opposite. When sickness arrived in my family home, we could trust no one. Fingers would be pointed, accusations of sedition and duplicity banded about, the guilty strung up and publicly denigrated. Basically, come home with a sniffle and you had better have your facts straight. “Who gave it to you?”from my father carried overtones of “Who sent you??”, as if I were not his son but an agent of some larger venereal evil (Coldemort, Blo-your-nose-feld, Kleenex Luthor, other options are available). Sneeze in the house on consecutive days and you risked being waterboarded.
Why did I require an alibi, my blocked nose a backstory? Well, I believe that for my dad, there is no such thing as misfortune when it comes to catching a cold. If I have caught a cold, I must be leading a life of gay abandon, taking flagrant risks and playing fast-and-loose with my own wellbeing and that of everyone whom I call dear. I might as well tell him I’d got sick from licking the inside of a toilet bowl.
And maybe he’s right. If he endeavours to avoid sickness at all cost, does he deserve to have disease brought to his door by his grotesque window-licking progeny? COVID-19 vindicated my father’s neurosis on a global scale. He was social distancing long before it was cool, so the prospect of government-endorsed antisocial behaviour was music to his ears. He was in dreamland.
Nowadays, I shrink from sneezing strangers, abstain from bus handrails, wash my hands with obsessive regularity and see the outside world for the pestiferous minefield that it is. Will I ever truly love? Oh father, what have you done?
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