Tuesday 11/08/09

I am almost certain I haven't got AIDS so either my immune system is faking the symptoms or I have genuinely caught it. I only recovered form swine flu 5 weeks ago and I've already been struck down by another cold. They say that there are only a hundred or so different mutations of the cold and once you've had one you are immune to it and cannot catch that particular strain again. Fortunately that means I am likely to have contracted, recovered from and acquired immunity to pretty much every cold virus by the age of 24.

It is true that I bring these illnesses on myself. Swine flu was caught at Glastonbury, which doesn't have a reputation for being sterile (apart from Status Quo's set... boom tish), so I couldn't really complain, after a week using only wet wipes and not changing my underpants, about spending the following few days in bed as the room span around me.

Now I'm ill having caught a debilitating cold at the only place less clean than a music festival, a student house. While sharing a house with the Young Ones would be dirty, it wasn't soley the environment that finished my prematurely geriatric body. Over the course of less than 48 hours I ate more fast food and drank more alcohol than I have managed all year.

We only arrived in Huddersfield, where Cramer's buddies live, at 9:30 pm Friday evening and within an hour we had a buzz going, thanks to some turbo catchup drinking, and were happily digging into our delivery pizza. The beers continued to flow until around 4am at which point I don't remember going to sleep, a full 22 and a half hours after I woke up for work the previous morning.

Saturday wasn't much healthier. The better part of 5 hours sleep meant it was to Wetherspoons for an early morning coffee before barbecue for lunch. This is when vegetarianism probably saved my life. I'd be dead, or at least have a cholesterol number approaching my IQ (and an IQ declining toward my cholesterol figure), after this weekend if I'd consumed the meaty version of the meals I managed. Saturday night emulated Friday only swap the delivered pizza for a sit in McDonalds meal, which I continue to visit despite being ill when I had their chips in Wycombe. More booze glugged and I woke up groggy Sunday morning, when we visited the Chinese for an all you can eat buffet. I wouldn't be lying if I said I was sweating during that.

How students manage it is baffling. If bachelor degrees took 4 years rather than 3 years then nobody would graduate because everybody would have been killed during their course, thanks to a diet of fast food and faster drinks. I feel like I nearly died after a weekend of it, and I have a lazy stress-free 9-5 job. It's like an even more dangerous version of Supersize Me.