Catching

It's been a weird week, this one: after months of training courses and travel, I came back from Beijing last week to face the prospect of nearly six weeks without having to be in the training room and definitely no travel. I've managed to all-but fill my old passport so I've needed to apply for a new one - consequently I'm grounded in Hong Kong until the new passport appears. 

Faced with six weeks in the office, the prospect of catching up on all those things I've been wanting to do but haven't been able to get to, what's the first thing I do? Get sick and spend most of the week flat on my back. 

I don't know where it came from but I suspect it has something to do with the woman on the MTR on Monday morning who kept coughing all over me. That's the problem with living in such close proximity to so many other people - it's really easy to spread infections. It's one of the reasons that things like SARS and bird flu are so feared out here: crammed face to armpit with other people, it's hard not to catch whatever they've got. 

It came on pretty quickly and laid me out pretty hard. I don't like taking time off sick - a hangover from my childhood, when the basic requirement for being kept home from school was to have a limb at least partially severed. But there was no way I could go in and, realistically, had I done so, I would just have spread it to other people. 

So, for the first time in about ten years, I had a few days off sick this week and I really enjoyed the break. Watched some Bruce Lee movies, slept a lot, ate next to nothing... as fun as it was, I was glad to go back to work!