On sore throats and other big crises in my life

After the big Saturday dinner, where all of us, especially those of us connected with the banking or the automotive sectors, manfully refrained from jumping off the balcony, I awoke on Sunday with a slight hangover.

As is usual when I complain about hangovers, I am treated to a little discourse on the evils of drinking and how abstinence is the best policy for middle aged people with high triglycerides and an aversion to exercise.

Actually, I think I'm discourse resistant, just like those jolly old germs who turn penicillin resistant, and the old helpmeet had better think of a multi-pronged course of treatment, but this time, one really did feel under the weather. In addition to a hangover, I have had a sore throat.

Not since my childhood have my tonsils really mutinied in this fashion. It is agony, I tell you. It is five days now and I'm still eating semiliquid gruel.

My dad, who is also my doctor, has put me on antibiotics strong enough to wipe out the entire microbe population this hemisphere but the little mites are hanging on, determined to fight every inch. He is optimistic, though, and tells me that it's much better now. It still feels like it has been treated with rather rough hands and lots of sandpaper.

Perhaps I had better give up drinking after all. .... Sob..!

An unfortunate consequence of all this is that I am unable to talk much. It hurts like the blazes. And being a garrulous kind of bloke, whose existential principle is "I yak therefore I am", I feel a bit like the naval ships hanging around mutely around the Gulf of Aden while the Somalian pirates hijack all those ships, because they're not allowed to chase them and shoot them down.

Anyway, all this "moun" is forcing me to use the substantially rusty equipment in my cranial cavity to think. And it is not thinking pleasant thoughts. The economy scares me. Especially the prophets of extrapolation. You know the guys. When oil was $70 a barrel, a prophet said it would cross $100. It did, and got the said prophet a lot of headlines. Then all prophets jumped on to the band wagon and decided to outcry one another, resulting in predictions of $200. And now that it has taken a U turn and is heading resolutely south, the same guys now feel that it will go down to $45, $40, $35, $30 and so on, till very soon, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members will be paying people to lift oil from their countries. Same with real estate prices, the stock index and all commodities.

In all this gloom there has been one bright ray, courtesy a very witty friend. We were discussing Omar Khayyam the other day and since both of us are rather fond of the chap, were quoting rubaiyat at each other, he more than me because of my @#$%^ tonsils. My favorite one is

A book of verse, beneath the bough
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
O Wilderness were Paradise enow

Or words to that effect. Well my friend, call him X, asked me to name one thing that connects "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou". I racked my brains, and gave up. His answer? "Yeast"! Cracked me up, I tell you!