My cure for the common cold

You really don’t want to know about my coughs and sneezes, particularly during the festive season, but bear with me because this it isn’t really about my sniffles. My argument applies to everyone, and it’s cheerful.

All of us have a lifetime of experience of seasonal colds and flu, starting with the fact that they don’t always happen in winter. Mine is typical of many. Every year, often about this time, I get a fairly bad cold. Sometimes two in a year. I call it ‘flu’ and women call it ‘man flu’ but let’s not bandy names: it starts with a sudden sore throat and one or two uncomfortable nights. Within a few days this has passed and I feel better — but left with a hacking cough. It sounds dreadful, annoys the hell out of others and lingers for a fortnight or so. Then it goes. I don’t bother GPs with these woes. Like many, I just put up with it, knowing it will pass, and carry on working.

Being of the ‘stuff-and-nonsense’ tendency, I was always vaguely sceptical about theories of ‘catching’ things or how not to. But my scepticism took a knock when in 2000 I spent nearly four months in the French Subantarctic on a huge island where the only human population was 39 scientific researchers, soldiers and technicians, all living cheek by jowl on a small base on the roaring shores of the Southern Ocean. There was no air link, and the government ship only called every three or four months.

It was common knowledge that after the ship had called and outsiders had come ashore, colds and flu often swept the whole base, but would depart within a few weeks. Thereafter nobody would catch anything. The island was thousands of miles from any continent but Antarctica, and the Roaring Forties — winds of up to 150mph — swept through every few weeks, blowing away everything not secured to the ground.