For me, a change of season has meant a bout of sore throat, sniffles and an unpleasant cough that lingers for days (I’m just getting over one now). Ever since I can remember, September, Christmas, whenever the weather final decides to turn sunny at the end of July – out come the tissues.
Except not. As a man, I have always felt obliged to tough it out, medication free, the way nature intended. So I would endure a few days of an increasingly sore throat (usually reducing me to semi-audible croaking by day three), followed by a running nose (and much back-of-hand wiping and surreptitious sniffing) which inevitably led to a second round of sore-throated-ness, only this time backed up with an attractive phlegmy cough. Lovely.
And then, last year, I discovered a new tactic – overkill. The moment I felt the slightest twinge in my throat, I’d be popping strepsils, sucking down hot lemon drinks, and throwing in a dose of vitamin C for good measure. It was a revelation. Instead of enduring an increasingly unpleasant and uncomfortable fortnight, I had about three days of mild irritation, and then it passed. Brilliant.
Even better, I think that this can apply to other things in life. Too often, we ignore the little warning signs that things are going wrong in our lives – a concerned comment from a friend, the slow realisation that we’ve run the budget slightly too close again, the guilty feeling that we know we should stop before things get out of hand. Like a sore throat, we decide to ignore it, hope it will all go away. But before we know it, one minor irritant has spread, and is causing real problems all over the place. And by now, even if we belatedly spring into action, it’s going to take days of foul tasting medicine and hard-to-swallow tablets to get us back in shape.
How much better it would be to simply nip things in the bud? The next time you feel something going wrong in your life, don’t ignore it, deal with it.

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I think I’ve just seen the two most incredible adverts I may ever see in my entire life (and I’m typing that with almost no trace of sarcasm). In a single outstanding day, scientists have unlocked the secrets of the universe to bring us not one, but two ground-breaking leaps into the future: yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you low-calorie water, and paper so white you can write on both sides. And I promise you I’m not making this up.
Have we really become such a credulous society that we jump at the opportunity to buy low-calorie water? It’s water. Water has no calories. None. At all. You can’t get any lower calorie than that without the drink actively leaching energy from your body. So this is, in fact, water with added calories and a bit of flavour. When I was a kid, we called that squash.
And talking of ‘when I was a kid’, since when is two-sided paper a miracle breakthrough too? I distinctly remember personally using both sides of a piece of paper as far back as the early eighties. In fact, at high school, the RE department would do their collective nut if you failed to use both sides of the paper, most of the margin, the inside covers and the funny extra wide space at the top of every page (this is true). I have paper with me now, and for the sake of accuracy in blogging, I’ve just tested it with a biro – both sides work! But it worries me that somewhere in the country, at around 8:30 this evening, someone leapt from their chair shouting “Write on BOTH sides? Quick, to a stationery super-store!” (or words to that general effect).
So here’s the thing – there are people out there who think we’re stupid. Sadly, some of us probably are (though if you’re reading this, I flatter myself to think that you, at least, are not included in those numbers), but lots of us are simply waiting for someone to give us a bit of a pointer. And too many of us seem to lack the judgement to know which pointer to follow. If people can spend time, energy and money on creating a drink that does exactly what tap-water does but worse, or telling us something that everyone has known for ever (well, since the second century BC or so), then the rest of us better make sure we spend our time telling people about things that really matter.
Jesus, for example. CS Lewis once pointed out that if Christianity is true, then it is of infinite importance. I think he hits the nail on the head. What’s skinny water or front and back paper compared to that? Come to think of it, what’s anything compared to that? If we can spend our time introducing people to the life-changing awesomeness that is Jesus, and helping them walk that path to the end, then what we chose to drink on a hot day pales into insignificance, no matter how many calories it has.

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