YOU'LL have to forgive me if I ramble a bit this week, but I've been suffering under the onslaught of some kind of summer flu.

It's a rare event for me, as usually if I do get cold symptoms, I'm sensible enough to contract them in the winter months, when wrapping up warm doesn't look out of place and sleeping in until lunchtime is fine because that's when it gets light.

But I'd forgotten how out of place it is to have the 'flu in the summer.

After all, it sounds ridiculous to say you're "under the weather" when the sun is blazing merrily.

And at least in the winter, there are plenty of fellow sufferers; misery loves company, as they say, and people are a bit more understanding when "there's a lot of it going around".

Try explaining to your nearest and dearest that having the windows open on a hot summer's eve may be all well and pleasant to everyone else, but to you it's like being sat near an open refrigerator in the arctic.

Plus, of course, you have to endure the endless round of "it's probably just hay fever" comments. I say that to people myself, and now I know how annoying it is... well, I'll still say it, but I'll enjoy it more.

You'd think that one advantage of being ill in the summer is that you can get more things done, but that doesn't work out either.

You see, I do get hay fever, so the last thing I want is to be out amid the pollen making my symptoms worse, and thus any garden-related activities are ruled out. Shame, that.

So that leaves all those little jobs around the house.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't need much of an excuse to put off any one of those jobs, so you can imagine how much I can justify not doing because of ill health.

Which means that, apart from occasional trips to the local shop to stock up on decongestants and snack food, I'm free to catch up on my reading. Though I am, of course, too ill to handle anything with really big words.

And where would we sick people be without satellite TV?

It takes far longer to discover there's nothing on 200 channels than it does to check four (why do they never have those great black-and-white movie matinees on when I'm ill?).

Well, I've got to fill in the gaps between Lemsips with something, haven't I?