We’re not sure whether it’s Swine Flu (or Pigs’ Disease, as my partner insists on calling it) but we’ve both got it. We’re isolating ourselves from the world until the worst has passed.

The Dreaded Lurgy struck just after we’d scheduled a night out with the gang, to farewell one of our number who’ll be away for the next four months. (Bye-bye Jan… have fun… we’ll miss you.)

We think we caught it from one of the aforementioned gang when he came to dinner. In a job where he deals with the public, he can’t help but be a magnet for their germs. Last week when we saw him, he’d almost recovered from a bad head cold – one in a series. 

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus H1N1 is a novel strain of influenza. That’s ‘novel’ in the sense that it hasn’t been around before. Consequently, nobody is immune to it and there’s no vaccine to protect against it. It’s thought that it spreads through the coughs and sneezes of those sick with it.

The symptoms of Pigs’ Dis… er, Swine Flu, are similar to those of ordinary flu: fever, cough, runny nose, sore throat, chills, headache, muscle aches. They sounded manageable enough. But then we were told that it could segue into nausea, vomiting and – at its worst – pneumonia.

Add a headache caused by congested sinuses to those real – and potential – symptoms, and it’s enough to convince an overactive imagination that a dose of the snuffles is actually much worse than a mere cold. The challenge is not to panic.

As a card-carrying member of Hypochondriacs Anonymous I find that difficult, especially at 3a.m. when my own snoring, along with throbbing sinus pain, awakes me to the fact that I’m feeling lousy.

Still, it’s not so bad. We could be living in the city where daytime noise would rob us of a restful morning of doing not very much at all – in a warm sunny position, with a book – followed by a lunch of medicinal soup and a restorative snooze.

Perhaps health authorities should close down the country, or even the world, for a week. That would give everybody a chance to limit the spread of the disease. But I don’t suppose that’ll happen.

In the British tradition of keeping a stiff upper lip (albeit a chapped one), we shall ‘keep calm and carry on‘… doing nothing.