Dental hygienists must have really good immune systems

Because there's no way I'm paying the cancellation charge for today's appointment.

I've brushed my teeth, but I can't brush my sinuses or the back of my throat. I feel awful; my lips have started chapping. I woke this morning to weird, swollen, red nastiness. Also, my stomach has a headcold too. I think that's unfair. But not as unfair as having to spend ages fiddling around in my mouth trying not to catch plague.

Linnea is a trifle under the weather. She has spent the morning more or less stationary, never a good sign, tucked up on an armchair in front of first a Baby Einstein DVD (CBeebies was too much for her) and then CBeebies. She's eaten almost nothing and drunk pints.

Emer is napping, which is fabulous, and exactly on schedule, too. Neither she nor Rob have any signs of this cold, which is great.

I'm fighting my way through the kitchen with a machete, these days, and as fast as I push the chaos back, more pops up ahead. But I think it's a little better every day. Certainly I get more and more rubbish out. Must get to the glass recycling this weekend. It occurs to me to wonder whether the new evil Tescos has a recycling centre. The hospital that USED to be on that site had one. But they had a path lab too, and I'm fairly sure Tescos hasn't.

Argh argh argh I should never watch commercial TV

I have been privileged to see an advertisement for a microwave cheeseburger product.

A man and a woman enter an apartment in the late evening. He offers hesitantly to take her coat. She, severely dressed in a black coat and clutching a black bag, with black hair pulled tightly back from her face by a Proper Hairdo, not just a ponytail, says, somewhat coldly, "Just coffee," or something very like it.

He goes to the kitchenette bit to make the coffee, and sticks a cheeseburger in the microwave. It starts to turn, he turns to look through the hatch or doorway at his guest on the sofa, and it's revolving too. I can't remember whether the cheeseburger or the sofa finishes revolving first, but anyway, it ends with him biting into a fast junk food snack hot from the microwave, and the sofa spinning round in the same microwave timeframe to reveal the severely clad woman now undone and undressed and wanton, reclining on one side on the sofa in sexy undies, all with no more effort on the man's part than he took to make a cheeseburger to satisfy his appetite for food.

I'm not quite capturing the immediate and complete comparison of the woman with a junk food product in terms of availability, entitlement, etc.

AGH.