INFLUENZA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21296, 24 September 1932, Page 6 (Supplement)

INFLUENZA

BY AMORT STRATTON

ITS DISTRESSES AND ITS AMENITIES

Job never had the grippe, or the "flu," *s we call it in describing an ugly ailment by an ugly name. Job suffered from the pains of the vulgar boil and such-like real adversities, the symptoms of which he despribed with horrifying thoroughness. And adversity chasteneth. But the ."flu" is not so much a humbling adversity as a sheer malignant perversity. Nor does it, like some ailments, introduce us to any illustrious fellowship. It provides no glowing thrill such as we might experience if our sickness could be classed among the storied ailments of the great and the good. ''Flu" is just a nasty, common plebeian, sordidly democratic and frightfully undistinguished disorder —as ■declasse as it is distressing. It is no more romantic than Job's boils, though we might easily quote his symptoms as our own. " My bones are pierced jn me in the night season and my sinews take no rest." Ailments oi Distinction I How glorious, in comparison, are other J illnesses! Years ago a certain affliction, accorded the dignity of an operation, became pronouncedly fashionable, as being coupled, erroneously, as we now know, with the name of an illutrious and wellloved monarch. Since those days it has lost its romance and has taken its place among the stock disorders of the unfam.ed and undistinguished. But .the " flu " has not been accorded even such temporary glamour as this and its prosaic distresses remain unhaloed by the acknowledged patronage of the great and the famous. Ailments that are less painful contrive to give us some sense of kinship with great names in letters or in action. Once, you remember, you suffered acutely for a .while. The doctor called your malady by strange modern names, but since your symptoms made you *' ful coleryk of compleccioun," vou, felt the zest, for a moment, of remote association with Chaucer. Theh followed a period of convalescence, which meant that you were well, but that under doctor's orders you left behind you the worries of the home (as far as possible) and went to far regions where you played eighteen holes a'day and at dinner had the appetite and effrontery to ask for a return.

Even pneumonia has its distinctions. You do-not remember as entirely unmixed evil —as sheer, accursed, totally depraved perversity—that sweet anguish when your grosser nature was purged by the torturing disease and your mind, lifted beyond earthly things, listened, transfigured, to the music of the spheres.

But you cannot .thus anatomise the *' flu." It has not even a reasonably standardised period of convalescence. And your only sense of kinship with literature comes when you find yourself left with certain weaknesses that Hamlet attributed to Polonius. Yet it is small comfort to •think that your one associate in all the great world of letters is a doddering old fool and that your affinity with him is based on a wealj understanding, ' Amenities of the " Flu "

However, if the "flu" links us in no iigh fellowship with the illustrious it has amenities not to be despised. For, like all perversities, it has humours of its own. It ■would be in questionable taste to linger at unseemly length on the minor joy you feel at the prospect of indefinite absence from •work, but to me it is a sweet comfort, far beyond the stern solaces available to Job. Nothing at all in the consolations of his Three Friends could bring to Job the contentment to be derived from the knowledge that labour must be laid aside till the possibilties of relapse have been quite successfully outstayed. An amenity familiar to all is the gift dainties brought or" sent by anxious. Mends, pfice the first sharp pangs of pairi have retreated and the early dazes and densities f>[ the mind have cleared, it becomes possible to assume the pose of the interesting invalid and to receive the tribute of neighbourly ovens with something* approaching regal condescension. You recognise, of course, that these gifts represent kindly attempts to stimulate an appetite partially atrophied by sickness. And, since the "flu" has completely atrophied your sense of smell you are able to display a fine catholicity of taste in their consumption. Sometimes, too, these gjfts are decked out with prosy "or with facetious inscriptions which flatter your self-importance and gratify a pardonable desire to be appreciated at your proper worth. •.

But there are amenities of the minor order. To the happily married woman the ''flbkV. antidotes its perversities with something that is more than an amenity. It is rather in the nature of a quiet blessing. We all know the moment when, the first rigours of the malady past, there descends upon us a lassitude in which time ceases to exist. The world of the street and the movie arid the novel, and even of the house, fades away into the limbo of our kaleidoscopic youth. We live in a shadowy half-world, ~ from which there slowly emerges the visions of a gentle husband, soft of band and low of voice, solicitously anxious and tenderly ministrant. The yision settles gradually into blessed reality. In that rnomeut something of the romance of old love trembles about the heart./ The '"flu" is indeed an accursed perversity but—it has its great moments !