…Today I have been VERY VERY ILL.
I have been sick – lots of times.
I threw up four times in fact.
I hardly had any food but drank lots of Lucozade which made up for lost energy.
I gradually felt a bit better but was stranded in bed for much of the day.
I watched Children’s BBC this morning which cheered me up a bit but not much…

Throughout my life I never drank Lucozade when I was not feeling unwell. It was a liquid that I only considered tasting when I was ill. It was therefore unique in commanding the ability to call into my mind, via some kind of over-sweet sensory thread, a tapestry of sickness spooling all the way back to my early childhood. I could not recall a spell of illness without it.

But then, a few years ago, I kept a bottle of it in my fridge for about 12 months, in anticipation of a period when I would be under the weather. Such a period never came, I never drank the Lucozade, it went out of date, but still I didn’t throw it away. It became a sort of anti-sickness talisman; an object whose very presence seemed to guarantee good health.

As such I have now reached a point where I cannot risk tasting the stuff for fear it will provoke illness rather than aid recovery from it.

And I never really liked it to begin with.

Oh pipe down, Daley Thompson.