Being ill in the UK can sometimes seem like a blessing. Instead of waking up in 6am darkness and dashing half-naked around a freezing bedroom, you can spend a few more hours nestling into your good companion, the duvet. A morning sick, is a morning free from suffocating yourself with your hat, gloves and scarf-armour, all of which is essential to protect you from the rainy, blustery skies waiting outside your front door. This morning there’ll be no racing to the bus stop as your bus approaches, only to realise you’ve forgotten your umbrella/phone/work ID. You won’t have to arrive to work late and face your boss’s wrath due to subsequent splashing through the puddles home to fetch lost items.
Yes you may be feeling not so hot with that throat/tummy/bladder infection, but conditions are perfect to console your pains. Phil and Fern can keep you company into midday, the ‘Loose Women’ will have you hooked until lunchtime. You realise you haven’t eaten anything and can stick a sick-day pizza into the oven. Another encounter with your duvet takes you into late afternoon and when you wake up, you can lose yourself in a good book as the icy winds howl past your window.
No doubt about it, contracting the latest cold, flu, virus or bug can be quite an enjoyable break from the work-in-all-weather lifestyle inflicted on Londoners, so much so that we’ve all lengthened our bed-rest a day or two after we’ve recovered, haven’t we?
Being ill in Israel however, is comparable to finding yourself in a teen movie, where you’re the geeky nerd that’s been excluded from the biggest party of the semester (to use an American word). For two weeks now, I’ve been holed up with bronchitis, coughing my guts up and I can feel the blue skies taunting me for not being on the beach, in a park or in a café with friends. Not much chance of that when everyone’s avoiding me for fear of catching the lurgies. I most probably contracted it from work, where the customers can’t see through the smoke to read their menus. The bosses are trying to quit their 3 pack-a-day habit and hopefully the fact that they’re killing their only full-time waitress will be helpful motivation.
As Tel Aviv reverberates with movement and sound under the hot sun, I’m stuck with only my television provider, ‘Hot’ and it’s not much of one for us English speakers. All the decent chat, cookery and general daytime TV is in Hebrew so we end up trapped in a warp of movie channels and annoying American news stations. There are no dull skies to help pull our eyelids shut and put our minds to sleep, only restlessness and doubly-long seconds. With the fridge ‘of a druggie’, as one friend once commented and no brilliant fresh soups or ready-to-eat-risottos in Israeli supermarkets, I find myself resorting to hummus and crackers, but it doesn’t have the same comfort-factor somehow. I really must start stocking my fridge up with more than yoghurts, wine and cottage cheese.
Conditions are also not ideal for delving into my books, as the tiled and minimalist apartment lacks the cosy, cluttered, claustrophobic and therefore book-perfect environment present within most UK-dwellings.
It’s no surprise that the UK worker takes an average of eleven casual sick days a year, as reported by Mat Snow in The Guardian Online (March 8th 2008). It is so much more fun to be sniffling in the snow, although at least when I’ve recovered I’ll want to get back out there, rather than having to be dragged from my duvet.
