The medicinal qualities of snow

Abstract

I think I had a touch of swine flu the other week. Just a touch, you understand—not the whole hog. Even so, my limbs felt as heavy as Parsifal without the attendant mythic vision, my voice descended to sepulchral realms un-trod even by Russian basses, and a backing cough sent my ageing body into the kind of spasms that used to kill Romantic poets and Puccini heroines on a weekly basis. To make matters worse, I am not even joking. It became even more catastrophic when I felt haunted by the pressing need to ‘read, think, and write’, for I was scheduled to submit a paper to antae: A Postgraduate Journal on the Interspaces of English Studies in just a few days.