IT WAS one of 200, I don’t know which, but it laid me low for a few days over the festive break.

Rhinovius, coronavirus, enterovirus, there are so many viruses behind the common cold, it is a miracle that we manage to avoid them for most of the year.

Take the rhinovirus - it is around 20 nanometres in diameter: in layman’s terms, you could line up 50,000 rhinoviruses end to end across one millimetre. Yet this miniscule thing is the cause of such misery. All it needs to do is get up your nose - a typical human cell in the nose is around 20 micrometres in diameter, around 1000 times bigger than the virus - and that’s it, you’re consigned to days of Lemsip, Lockets and Vicks’ inhaler. Your pockets will be bursting at the seams with soggy hankies.

Public Health England last week issued a health alert as a further spell of cold weather rolled in, urging people to take precautions to keep warm and active to stay well.

It’s not that easy. Over the past fortnight, every member of my family has caught a bad cold. My husband spent a day in bed - very unusual for him - it was so debilitating. My colds are not usually too bad, due, I believe, to having the flu’ jab. Many people I know who have the annual booster have commented on colds being less severe.

My cold was manageable, but I won’t be having the jab again: this year it left me unable to properly move my arm for at least two months and it is still not back to normal.

What is puzzling is that, after all this time, there is still no cure for this so-called ‘common’ illness. The first reference to colds as an illness appears in 1537, in the state papers of King Henry Vlll. Yet, 480 years later, we are still suffering.

Colds always strike when you least want them, on the night of the work Christmas do, or on New Year’s Eve.

You can feel them coming, the vague symptoms of light-headedness and a sore throat. We pull out all the stops to stave them off, adopting a diet packed with Vitamin C and whatever else we believe is good for us. Last week our house contained more fruit than a Del Monte warehouse.

But whatever you throw at a cold, it does not work, at least it never has for me. Once it has you in its grip, short of cutting off your own head, there is nothing you can do to stave it off. 

The Queen succumbed this year, missing the usual public appearances at Christmas due to a heavy cold.

We always look for someone to blame - the person you sat next to on the train, someone in the queue at the Post Office, one of your colleagues. “I know who brought this cold into the house,” my nana used to say when she succumbed, giving you a withering stare, “You haven’t got one, have you?”

In reality it’s almost impossible to pin down a culprit - when the first symptoms strike you will already have had the virus for a few days.

On public transport I’m often surrounded by people coughing - many failing to place their hands over their mouths - and use my scarf as a barrier, but the virus is spread as easily by touch, on surfaces such as handrails and doorknobs, where, alarmingly, it can survive on for around 24 hours. It’s enough to make you don a pair of Marigolds every time you leave the house.

I nag my family to wrap up warm, but exposure to the cold has nothing to do with catching one - they are more common in autumn and winter because the weather drives people indoors, where viruses can more easily jump from one person to the next.

But one thing is true - research in the USA found that tinned soup, in particular chicken, really does help a cold. I’ve been plying my family with soup all week and had no takers. More fool them.

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