Friday 8 October 2010

At last! A cure for the common cold that really works!

A great way to deal with a crisis is to be slightly ill when it happens. Then you couldn't give a damn if you just die. While everyone else gets on their heads and spins round in a panic, you sit, and watch, rheumy-eyed and unimpressed. The screams are muffled. The implications of the broken jar of Ebola and imminent nuclear strike fail to penetrate your cotton-wool brain. "Do I care that I'm bankrupt, my house has burnt down and I've accidentally uploaded footage of myself treating a carpet of hamsters like bubble wrap? Yes, but only because now I don't have a couch and all I want to do is lie down. I've got a completely blocked nose."

For its duration, illness makes you aware of your body. You only know you have a throat when every gulp is blocked by a boiling pebble. Eyes. I didn't know I had eyes until they started bulging out of their holes and watering constantly. And drugs are a paltry treatment. Are they really the best we can do? Even our tiny-brained, brow-heavy forebears ate stuff to make themselves feel better. Witch Hazel, that sounds about right. And bear nuts, two an hour, no more than 10 in a 12 hour period.  But we're ages later than them. We're advanced. And we're still just swallowing stuff to make ourselves feel better? Rubbish. I want the young and foolish, now, to offer me their throat and eyes. Their healthy, young throat and eyes. We will simply exchange them until mine are well again. Then we will swap them back. All for a very reasonable fee, enough, say, for them to buy some paracetamol, with a little extra on top for a Hotwheels or a Bratz.

And think of those under-worked, struck-off surgeons, desperate for a little bit of pro rata slicing to keep them in bibs and wetwipes. Well now they have a chance. You simply locate and buzz the nearest donor on your FrankenMine App, go to the Medibooth on the corner and voila, one general anesthetic later you have a brilliant, healthy new hand, leaving a pecuniarily-enhanced needy person with a sprained wrist to work off. It's only for passing illnesses, though, like a common cold. You can't take a child's heart for keeps, just because yours is a pressed leaf in two litres of stiff chip fat. We're not dropping death bombs into the open wounds of the poor here. It's ethical, this, it's not black market.

Of course we'd all end up looking like big Mary Shelley fans, and have to undergo what in reality would be major operations for minor, temporary ailments, but do I care? No. I have a slight cough.

For you!

For me!
For us!
For you.

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