Dispelling the dread solicitors

OPINION: No no no. The solicitors are back. The old family firm of Mucus, Sputum and Phlegm. I've caught a cold, writes Joe Bennett this week.

No, I haven't. It was the cold that did the catching. I was just frolicking in the ocean of good health, not thanking my lucky stars because you don't if they're shining, then some virus hauled me out of the water and smacked me over the head and the lucky stars went out. Now everything aches. Nose blocked, tongue lolling, eyes like a bloodhound. I'm sick as a dog.

No. I'm sicker than a dog. Dogs are rarely sick. And if they are, they just lick the bits they can reach, which is everything bar their eyes, ears and the top of the head, and then they curl into a ball until things get better. I'd like to do the same but the bits of me I can lick get fewer every year, and I can't roll into a ball. The best I can manage is a sort of foetus, groaning under the duvet with the firm of solicitors and my old mate self-pity. Dogs don't do self-pity. Perhaps because they're so rarely under the weather.

No, dogs, like us, are perpetually under the weather. Under is the only place you can be relative to weather. The weather's a dyspeptic old emperor who sits above and takes pleasure in thwarting us. Picnic, ha. Cricket, ha. Sex in the long grass, ha and double ha. I know a woman who's organising a huge outdoor public event and she is wondering whether to take out insurance against the weather. "Forget it," I said. "The weather just is. Ride with it. That's what dogs do."

No worries for dogs in this world. Where we need coats, umbrellas, gumboots, sun shades, sun screen, fly-away gazebos, air con and houses, dogs need only fur and paws. That fur, those paws, cope equally with arctic snow and melting summer roads. Dogs fit the world better than we do. Why is it then that we live six times longer? The world is not a fair place.

No, the world is a fair place. Barring accidents we get what we want. And if we don't, it's not because fate blocked and thwarted us but rather that we didn't really want what we thought we wanted. If we did we'd have worked harder to get it. We're good at self-deception.

No, we're bad at self-deception. We try to deceive ourselves but in the middle of the night the weevil of self-knowledge emerges and whispers the truth in our ear. Its signs are boils on the neck and insomnia. The cure is scotch.

No, scotch is a palliative. It cures neither the truth nor a cold. I know so. I've tried. This afternoon I downed a slug and withdrew to the pit and curled like a foetus, but the grim solicitors kept gurgling and sleep wouldn't come so I got up again and trotted down to the chemist's.

No I didn't. I drove down to the chemist's, sneezing and swerving as I went like a driver with a hand-held mobile. I expected at any moment to be pulled over and charged with driving under the influence of a phone call.

No, not really. But I was glad when I arrived, or at least fractionally less miserable than I would have been if I hadn't. The nice chemist greeted with the sort of chuckle that you get when you're clearly unwell but equally clearly not dying. "Are you all right?" he said.

"No, I'm not," I said. "Give me stuff, you know, the heavily advertised stuff that dries up this and eases that and dispels the dread solicitors." The chemist asked me if I was planning to make P.

"No I'm not," I said. "I find it makes itself. Especially after beer." Well we cleared that one up eventually, and the chemist told me that what I was after was pseudo-ephedrine.

"No," I said. "I don't want pseudo anything. I want the real thing. Give me a pint of ephedrine, good apothecary, to sweeten my solicitors."

"No," he said. "We don't sell ephedrine. And as it happens we don't sell pseudo-ephedrine any longer either, because of P labs run by thugs who failed School Cert chemistry. Only goes to show that education works better if there's a cheque attached."

"No," I said, "I don't believe it. Are you telling me that because some lowlifes buy the stuff in caseloads and turn it into dope, you can't sell upstanding citizens like myself a single lousy packet to make the afternoon possible?"

"No," he said, "I'm just telling you we don't stock it any more. But we do stock the new alternative."

"No, really?" I said. "You mean pseudo-pseudo-ephedrine? Does it work?"

"No," he said. "Not very well."

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

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