There was a time when things were better. It was just a few weeks ago and I was in good spirits despite the bleak February weather that blew our fence down and whipped my car around as I drove to Oxford. “It was so windy on the way over here,” I quipped, “that I saw a hen lay the same egg three times.” I retweeted Paul Bassett Davis: “High winds, and I’m worried about the trees in my garden. They weren’t there last night.”

There were many responses I could have had to the bad weather. I could have explored how changing weather patterns are part of global warming and doing irreparable damage to our planet but I feel I know that already; I could have tried to put the fence back up myself but anyone who knows me already understands that would not end well. Consequently, I made jokes and Tracey rang a man about getting a new fence.

In terms of disruption, the blown-down fence is a walk in the park compared to the present, a throwback to better times, a vision of utopia for now I have a cold and it is a MAN cold and it is more disruptive than anything that wind, rain or snow can throw at me.

It arrives on Monday. I don’t know I have it yet but a trip to the toilet tells me things aren’t quite right, a second visit acts as confirmation and a third announces itself as a sort of digestive apocalypse. I am, of course, in someone else’s house when this happens.

Nevertheless, I tell myself it is nothing and go to work. I get through the day uncomfortably and have a fitful night of bad dreams and trips to the toilet. Throughout the next day I find I have an enormous appetite and I feel sick if I don’t eat very regularly. I give into food and have my fill and the dietary apocalypse happens again. I am, of course, still staying in someone else’s house.

More days pass with little sleep and so much time spent in the toilet that I have actually made a dent in Dominic Sandbrook’s latest book (as well as getting a workout by lifting it up). We are back in the moment when Britain joined the EEC but it seems the British voted for it in a moment of economic desperation and if asked again 18 months later, the vote would probably have gone the other way. I think of the dreams so many of us had of expanded European identity back in the 90s and I flush.

Friday sees me working from home but I achieve very little and the room spins a little. The tummy issue has subsided but now I am coughing quite a lot, which isn’t a big problem until I go to bed, at which point I cough even more so I tell myself not to cough and at that point I am pretty much coughing all the time. Unable to sleep I finish a thriller I have been reading for some time and discover that it was the wife having an affair with Bill who arranged to have the husband killed. That much I had figured out but the role of the ice cream man was appropriately chilling. I cough some more and take a swig of Night Nurse which results in six hours of being half awake and half asleep, a state of semi-consciousness in which nightmares follow me into the waking world as I fill the air with alternate musical mixes of snoring and coughing. I am, of course, in the guest room and fortunately the neighbours are away.

At one point I sit bolt upright, persuaded that I have stopped breathing and quote Edgar Alan Poe: “Sleep – those little darts of death, how I loathe them.” I drift into sleep again but awake in a panic, convinced that I am supposed to be speaking at someone’s funeral today but I can’t remember who. I trace the memory back, recalling that I was asked to speak at this funeral by Jack and Victor, from television’s Still Game. As they are fictitious characters I relax and realise it was all a dream.

It’s Saturday and I get up slowly for an ill person duvet day in which I watch Harold Lloyd accidentally poisoning his mother-in-law with chloroform in Hot Water, a gentle comedy about married life from 1924. Later I move on to Shane. At the end he still goes away, riding over a Techniclor mountain.

Now it’s Sunday and I have passed another fitful night. I skip church and load up on Lemsip whilst watching Harold Lloyd running across the top of a train that is going into a tunnel, a spectacularly dangerous stunt, the sole purpose of which was to make people laugh. I decide I am well enough to go out so I find myself in Waitrose where operating a self-service till has developed the kind of complexity that I would associate with the discovery of the Higgs bosun. The task defeats me and I return home aware of the horrors of the last few days – the raging headaches, the waking nightmares, the persistent coughing and sneezing – and I express to Tracey my hope that she doesn’t catch this bug. Next Saturday, we are supposed to be going on a theatre trip and something like this could really spoil it.

“It’s just a cold,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

And I believe her.