Concrete Pencil: Not licensed to ill

Then they go about their business - perhaps fetching you some Maryland Cookies from the corner shop, or looking after the baby, even though today is your turn, your only turn of the week.

Which leaves you in a quandary. You need the Lemsip in order to ameliorate the symptoms of your poorliness. But any breach in your blanket will expose your flank to the biting cold of room temperature. Thus any good work the soft sweet drink may do could be counteracted by the added chill.

One step forward, one step back.

And you want to get better. Just think, you could be back on the train with all those thousands of other people and all their thousands of strains of the common cold, and their flu and their swine flu and their poo hands and their general unwashedness. And you could be back in work, with that glorious air-con, pumping germs and microbes and sneezes and snot around in the stagnant atmosphere. 

And you could find the two fine factors sure to make any human body better quickly: stress and alcohol (preferably double measures of both).

Which is why I need a blanket with arms.

But I will have no blanket with arms. Indeed, I will have no Lemsip, no Maryland Cookies, no leave of absence from daddy-daycare and no time in front of Dave's ceaseless QI.

If you are like me, by which I mean you are an idle person, a lead-swinger, a malingerer, an avoider, a shirker and a general sofa-lover, then you will no doubt share my sneaking love of poorliness. 

If you are a male, in fact, you are probably with me on this one. We welcome sniffles. We lie in bed assessing the badness of a headache, and feel genuine regret when, with a stout bowl of ghastly muesli and a cup of tea, it passes, and vigour returns.

And if you are so constructed, you must feel strong sympathy for the position I am in: I am not the illest person in the house.

I'm not even the second illest person in the house. My wife and my infant child are both far poorlier with some nasty stomach thing. 

And it's not like the good old days, when it was: Come on, who is the illest? 

Any man caught trying to out-ill his child and its mum is on dodgy ground. Meaning any pleasure felt on that sofa will be ruined by pesky guilt.

Even if you have a blanket with sleeves.