On Christmas Day I felt a dullness, a something’s-not-rightness. On Boxing Day, this viral overture launched into fatigue and a tightness of chest and a cough that, like the villain in a horror flick giggling while unsheathing the knife, started as a tickle and landed as a punch running from sternum to spine.

Suddenly, I’m in a beach town flat on my back with a chest infection and flu. And my world would be made entirely of those enervated contemplations that usually only ooze from nursing home windows if the town were not celebrating Christmas, the New Year, holidays, summer days, the annual compulsory high. I can hear fun ... out there ... somewhere.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

The sick are illegal aliens during the festive season, unwanted, unwelcome, a problem for winter, for June, not here, not now. They’re hidden away and forgotten so that celebration isn’t damaged by their presence. And to a sick person secreted in a celebrating town, nothing quite makes sense. The gaiety off-stage that leeches into your sickroom – all its laughter, scents, and beats, are a strange music to the........

© The Sydney Morning Herald