Regular followers of my dismal "existence" may recall last week that I broke off in the middle of a thrilling piece about internet search terms to complain I had some sort of fever and boo-hoo-hoo poor me. Turns out I had tonsillitis. Now, if you're anything like I was a fortnight ago, the mention of tonsillitis right there won't do anything for you. I mean, what is it anyway? A kiddywink illness? Bit of a sore throat? Pah. That's how people who've never had tonsillitis tend to think about it. I certainly did. Whereas now, I can confidently report that it's worse - far worse - than international terrorism and child abuse combined.
Why didn't I know this before? Either there's some sort of weird conspiracy going on that involves the general public collectively underplaying its horrors, or I just didn't listen whenever someone recounted what happened when they had it. I suspect the latter. I suspect each time they opened their mouth I thought: "Boo-hoo, bit of a sore throat, yeah?" in a loop, trying to disguise my contempt as I stared at their stupid babbling face, waiting for my turn to speak. And I think everyone's done this. No one's listened to the sufferers, ever. Not even their own doctors. And that's why we all, as a nation, have failed to acknowledge how nasty tonsillitis actually is. Yup. I blame society. Now, it's possible we never "got" tonsillitis because the survivors' descriptions weren't lurid enough. Let's redress the balance.
It starts with an achy throat. One day I went "ahh" in the mirror, and glimpsed some kind of mouth ulcer at the back of my throat. Urgh, I thought, reaching for the antiseptic mouthwash. That should take care of it.
A week later, a heavy flu-like sensation suddenly descended; a sultry cloud locking itself into position over the sun. I've got a cold, guessed my idiot brain. I lay on my sofa, sweating and listlessly channel-surfing, until I realised I couldn't even follow the plot of Celebrity MasterChef. I crawled into bed at 9pm. Next morning I had to write last Monday's column, but the sweats and shivers were so bad I couldn't type properly. Did I go to the doctor? No. Because I live in London, where to get a doctor's appointment you have to consult Old Moore's Almanack six months in advance to work out when you're going to be ill and book an appointment accordingly. And also because that afternoon we were filming for a TV show I've written. We were shooting outdoors in the rain.
During the shoot, I spent most of my time staring anxiously at a helicopter overhead, convinced it was planning to crash into us as part of some terrorist attack. I'd become feverish and paranoid, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas minus the coke jitters. Meanwhile, my throat throbbed like a beaten stepchild.
That night I thrashed in bed, sweating like a punctured dinghy, unsure if I was still outside watching the helicopter or not. This went on for six hours until I passed out, only to lurch awake 45 minutes later and discover I could scarcely swallow or speak. My voice had mutated beyond recognition. When I spoke, I sounded like Janet Street-Porter slowly listing vowels through a hose.
I went to the mirror, opened wide and peered in. The back of my throat now resembled a sandblasted foetus, or an endoscopic close-up of a diseased bowel. My tonsils had been dragged down a gravel path and slammed in a car door. An emergency appointment was in order.
Two hours later an appalled doctor was gazing into my raging, pustulated throat and bollocking me for not seeking help sooner. Prescribing antibiotics, she warned things would get worse before they got better. She was right. The fever is the easy bit. The throat itself: that's the thing.
It isn't even your throat any more. It's torment in a pipe. Swallowing feels like someone forcing a spiked kneecap down your neck, and for some reason, your mouth decides this represents a golden opportunity to generate gallons more saliva than usual, so you get to experience the joy of agonised swallowing again and again, around the clock. You can't sleep through or ignore it. It's a constant jabbing that slowly drives you mad. Within 48 hours I'd gone feral: staggering around my flat like a confused and angry animal, slapping the walls and howling inside my head.
Not that there's much energy for slapping walls. Not when you can't eat food. Forget solids. Even a glass of water becomes a cup of shattered twigs. Ice cream or scrambled egg: that's your lot. Gargling with warm salt water is the sole thing that buys five minutes of relief. Before you know it, the kettle and sink hold the same significance as a crack pipe. You're constantly Winehousin' for saline.
And it goes on and on, until somewhere round day three, when you're seriously contemplating suicide (anything but hanging, what with these tonsils) the drugs kick in and the cloud starts lifting. And you run out into the street (because you can run again!) and collar passers-by (because you can talk again!) and you try to tell them just how bad tonsillitis is. But they're staring at your stupid wobbling face, waiting for their turn to speak.
If this strikes you as a trivial subject to write about, you're wrong. Really. Bollocks to the rest of you. I could've sat through live 3D news footage of some gruesome bloody war, watching starving women and children being machine gunned in the face by Terminator rebels, and I'd have just shrugged. So what. Stop crying. They're only bullets. Try having my throat. Try some genuine suffering, you pussies.
· This week Charlie watched the whole of Mad Men on DVD: "Highly recommended, although not if you watch it in a fever, like I did, then spend a sleepless night thinking you're stuck inside one of the scenes, with the dialogue looping round and round in your head, even after you open your eyes and kick the duvet off, groaning."
