Still coughing after all these days

Travel I bought The Times along with my Guardian this morning. Yes, developed a conscience for bumping up the compact's circulation, but there was a free dvd of The Last Emperor and I'm weak. It did also have the attraction of a new travelogue from Michael Palin, who in a wierd kind of freebee inspired co-incidence has been back in China with a photography friend. It's an excellent piece of writing, especially if you pretend that Palin is reading it in your ear in that lightly authoratitive style he uses in his television voiceovers. For various reasons the second and third paragraph resonated:

"Only a week before leaving to meet up with him in Hong Kong I contract a fierce, persistent, phlegmatic cough. To the Greeks, phlegm was one of the four humours, bodily fluids which defined a certain physical and mental condition; it represented inertia and indifference. This was not the right frame of mind for the journey ahead, so before boarding my flight to Hong Kong I arm myself with an arsenal of linctuses, antibiotics, inhalants, soothing oils and a bottle of Ivy and Thyme Complex (highly recommended by a neighbour from Sri Lanka) which I hope will deliver a knockout punch to whatever is lurking within."

I haven't tried any of those, although I took some asprin earlier and I'm somehow currently drinking a pretty poor cup of tea from my Guardian mug which is probably some kind of karmic retribution for propping up the Murdoch fortune. But really this has gone on far too long! In between sentences then I was making a noise not unlike a hippo choking on a mud pie...