PeriodOne

I’m feeling better. And one of the serendipitous side-effects of being bed-bound and in possession of a laptop and wifi is the possibility of stumbling across breaking internet phenomena at source, rather than finding out about them only to be told by, say, your Mum that she is already on Twitter / has an avatar / has been Rickrolled etc. Of course, the downside is that a genuinely fresh trend will in all likelihood fail to blossom to glorious ubiquity, but that’s the risk the avid internet pioneer faces.

David Mitchell, a British comedian and writer of wholly unparalleled genius (I wish he was my friend, but he has inexplicably yet to get in contact), has built a substantial broadcasting career on an uncanny ability to explicate the irritations and frustrations of being alive. He isn’t the first and won’t be the last to entertain in this fashion, but, at the moment, he’s certainly the best.

In a recent column for the Observer, Mitchell discusses the nature of posted comments on the ‘net, a favourite grindstone with which Mitchell fans will be intimately acquainted. Therefore, the gist is fairly obvious: Web 2.0’s capacity to give voice to the opinions of all and sundry, whilst being ‘democratising’, simultaneously offers a far-too-public platform for the deranged, frustrated and enthusiastically impolite. A wonderful, lovingly compiled collection of these kinds of comments (the majority of which, tragically enough, come from my erudite countrymen and women in the UK) can be found at ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com. This brilliant, brilliant blog collects its material exclusively from the BBC’s Have Your Say user comments section, and browsing for longer than a couple of minutes leaves one in that curious position of crying with both laughter and despair at the nature of humankind. Try doing THAT with a tummy bug.

Anyway, aware as I am that this very entry is beginning to take on the unstructured nature of many of the comments I am so roundly criticising, I’ll come to the point. Refusing to give in to the moronic onslaught, yet aware that posting intelligent, considered comments as a counter-balance is inefficient as it by its nature involves a degree of time and thought, Mitchell suggests a different strategy: we should stem the tide of idiocy by posting the most gentle, innocuous and universally applicable phrase wherever the opportunity presents itself (the comments section below is naturally a good place to start). And the phrase he advocates: ‘It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!’.

Several hundred people have posted this sentence at the bottom of the Mitchell’s column, and I was initially alerted to its significance when it kept cropping up on YouTube clips featuring the chap himself. However, this is still all very, very new: the article was only published a couple of days ago, hence my excitement that my debilitated condition had led to find something that is yet to ‘break’. But will it? A swift google of “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!” suggests that so far only Metafilter has spotted the trend. But lots of people read that, and at least five people read this, so who knows? Maybe this is the start of something big …

Oh, by the way, one last thing (if you write properly, stop reading now). Please, please forgive my unforgivably teacherly tone here – but it is very important to get the sentence right … there’s an apostrophe in the word ‘can’t’ and the letter ‘o’ is required twice in ‘too’. I know that the majority equate a preference for elegant punctuation and correct spelling with a crime against humanity, but in this case it’s pretty important in order to avoid undermining the whole enterprise. You can’t be too careful …

Oh God, I’m ill. I’m sitting in bed and the only vague entertainment is waiting for the moments of bliss when my stomach stops cramping and the nausea lifts for five minutes. You know you’re ill when the mere sensation of air wafting against bare skin – normally gently refreshing – makes you feel so weak and vulnerable that you feel you might just collapse on the spot. Every trip to the toilet – and there have been a few – is a grotesque battle between the urgent needs of my crippled digestive system and the desperate messages from my brain telling me that if I move I will certainly definitely die. Thankfully I live alone; no-one must bare witness to the injured-puppy whimpers and moans of a 29 year old limping five metres to the bathroom.

Just as bad is the unbearable state of the ill brain – a fever destroys the bits of it that make concentration, and hence pleasure, possible, but leaves the parts that coordinate boredom completely untouched. So the crushing, aching tedium (I’m not blessed with a massively long attention span at the best of times) is all-enveloping. Unable to swim to the surface by reading a book or watching a film, the brain drowns in awful, sickly grey nothingness. Urgh.

We all TRY to appreciate our health when we have it. But it’s like asking yourself to be happy you haven’t got hangover, or give praise that you’re not currently stuck in a traffic jam. Even if you do it, it’s never really genuine. It probably can’t be. And yet every now and again, and with increasing frequency as we age, we find ourselves so angry at this healthy nonchalance. I was feeling fine two days ago. I’d give just about anything to feel that way now. Asked at the time, I wouldn’t have even acknowledged the ecstasy that is being healthy. And I know, or I can imagine, that should I in the future succumb to a genuinely serious illness – which will eventually happen, we all die and not that many of us peacefully in our sleep – I’ll think back to bed-bound-blogging with a weird tummy and swirly-whirly-head-feeling and beg and hope and pray that I could be back here. Which does make me feel a bit better.

But sod it, I’m ill and I’m on my own and I’m not in the mood for existential, long-term positivity nonsense. This is horrible and I want it to stop and that’s that. And I’m annoyed that my addled brain keeps telling me to put an apostrophe in the word ‘ill’. Like that makes sense: ‘Oh God, I’m I’ll’. Urgh, again.