…is apparently what that OH’s family used to call it when you’re so full of cold that all you can do is groan. I have no means whatsoever of verifying this behavioural characteristic of wildfowl.

Almost as soon as I returned home from yesterday’s garden party, I started sneezing; my nose because blocked and my throat was sore. I ruefully put this down to a mixture of hayfever and an allergy to the brick dust that has saturated the air in our house since last Friday and Saturday, when the builders were demonlishing doorways and windows out of our walls. I feel quite resentful of all the dust but at least I know it won’t be long before it’s banished forever.

I took an anti-histamine and tried to settle down to sleep. Clean sheets are always comforting and soporific I find. I ignored the hot flushes I was having: probably hormonal or because I’d just had a cup of tea or something.

But I couldn’t sleep. Even having doubled the recommended does of Piriteze (don’t try this at home, kids) the symptoms did not abate and by this morning, also a fast day, my throat felt like a nutmeg grater had been doing the jive in my throat. I just about managed Oscar’s training class and then flopped on the sofa, exhausted and with a fever. I think I have some sort of feverish cold virus.

It’s a big singing week for me: I have a lesson and choir practice on Wednesday and a concert with a few top B flats on Saturday, so I hope that if I rest a little, it will have eased by then. I am very glad that MsDD made the supper – she’s glad to have learnt how to make ratatouille – and that the Boywonder took Raffles to his training class tonight.

I am neurotic, though, and now fretting about passing the virus on to MsDD, who has an important annual audition on Wednesday, and I can’t pass it on to my singing teacher.

So, in between micro naps on the sofa, I watched a little Wimbledon tennis, which made me think of my mum, who was even more glued to the television screen than usual for these two weeks of every year. The television was switched on at lunchtime  – which I was never allowed to do – and there she sat, completely oblivious of time and becoming snappish when I came in from school ravenous. How I used to resent tennis on television and little did I anticipate how much I enjoy watching tennis now.

We have been to Queens Club a couple of times and last year we were successful for the first time in the Wimbledon ballot but managed to see only ten minutes of play on Court 3 before the heavens opened. Well, we hung around all day, drinking overpriced, watery Pimms and sharing a strawberry now and then. I even bought a Wimbledon sweatshirt to fend off the shivers. The Boywonder texted me intermittently with his own commentary from his fabulous vantage point in front of the television at home.

In the end we gave up and went home, but later heard that play had been resumed for 50 more minutes just after we left, meaning that no refunds were payable. We are officially fed up with paying huge amounts of cash for tickets to sit cowering in the rain and cold on the off chance we’ll see some tennis. We didn’t even apply for the ballot this year.

Instead I have sat on and off with the Boywonder in front of the television. In our acerbic commentary, we are like Waldorf and Statler of the Muppets.