Few things suck quite as much as being sick when you’re on the road. I managed to catch a cold in Istanbul, and it’s managed to reach that really unpleasant stage where my nose runs constantly. I must have really looked poorly, because even my slave-driver of a client suggested that I should probably take myself home and get an early night (mind you, it was already 7:30pm, so it’s not like I was working a half-day or anything). I figure giving him my cold will be a sort of parting gift…

Drugged up to the gills!

I’m using up the remains of the cold medicine I bought in Turkey. It seems effective enough, but I suspect it’s actual a combination of horse tranquillisers and morphine, because it leaves me high as a kite. So each morning you’ve got to make that fateful judgement call: do I suffer and sniffle all day with a clear head but a blocked nose, or do I take another sachet of the Turkish cold medicine and struggle through the day with a clear nose but a foggy head?

Not quite Mom’s chicken soup. (Who are we kidding — even she’d admit that she used to heat up a can of Campbell’s!) The closest thing I could find to chicken soup came in a coconut. A bloody coconut.

The second challenge with getting sick on the road is actually tucking yourself up in bed. It’s bad enough that there’s no one nearby to whinge to (in a last-ditch attempt for sympathy, I was even tempted to pour out my heart to the woman at room service, but was thwarted when she misunderstood my lamenting for “one prawn cocktail starter”). No, worse still is the fact that it’s awfully hard to find comfort food when you’re a long way from home. So you either have to drag yourself out someplace (not fun, especially when it’s pouring with rain outside) or you have to settle for what’s on offer at the hotel.