You are intelligent, charming people with discerning minds.

You don't need to hear any more about a) how skint I am (I have finally concluded that none of you are going to be sending me envelopes of cash — presumably because excessive tipping would cause me to get above my station and believe I could fob you off with trivial ramblings instead of the carefully-researched nuggets of pure insight you receive now), b) how the answer to all Britain's problems is a government comprising John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Gryff Rhys Jones and Fern Britton before she went all skinny, or c) my incurable tendency to start a list of three points without any idea what the third one will be.

However, I know that as the high-quality Herald and Gazette consumers you are (you're also devilishly attractive, while we're at it), you appreciate that in some states, the human psyche is incapable of doing anything but complaining. Complaining and eating peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon.

So you won't mind if I abuse your position for just a few minutes.

Ahem. I am ill. I am a mucus machine.

Half my nose is peeling off.

I sound like a country singer, and am deriving my only pleasure during the moments I'm not mopping or embalming my various ailing extremities from singing Stand By Your Man to the kitchen pot plant.

I have also, as a result of being too snotty and irritable to brave the January sales without committing some foul crime with a half-price stiletto, been sucked into the wonderful world of medical consumerism.

It's a bright, shiny world and everything smells lemony. Thus far, my army of pharmaceutical pals includes:

Olbas Oil, the dad of the bunch.

Olbas Oil has history and gravitas — it smells like it might have built the pyramids, watched coronations, fought wars and cleared the blocked nostrils of suffragettes while chained to the railings.

Unfortunately, it also requires you to adopt one of the least flattering faces known to man, that of the alternating nostril-closure and grimacing inhale.

Thus, Olbas Oil wants you to drive away all your friends, never venture into a public place for fear of nostril-based ostracising, and stay ill under a duvet on the sofa forever. It's a callous one.

Halls Soothers, the glamorous auntie of the cold-relief family.

They're fun, they're glitzy, they turn flu into a day at a theme park.

The three minutes spent sucking them is nothing to the hours of blissful fun you can have afterwards, picking the bits out of your back teeth and wondering when you'll start to feel better. Which is never.

Soothers thrive on being cheaper than Strepsils, whose once-every-four-hours restriction strikes faint fear into even the most gung-ho of lozenge users – what would happen if I overdosed?

Would I achieve a state of dangerous throat smoothness?

Is that what happened to Joe Pasquale?

Then we come to Lemsip, the steely, multi-tasking matriarch. I have never quite shaken off the effect of those adverts from a couple of years ago, about the cocky bloke from marketing stealing your job unless you knock back some Lemsip, throw off your dressing gown and sprint into the office, back flipping and performing a killer presentation to the theme of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now.

I don't have an office job, a cocky bloke in marketing to steal it, a dressing gown or indeed a Queen CD, but I will brew Lemsip with a religious fervour nonetheless, in case I should acquire all these things overnight and wake up to find them cruelly revoked again because I'd opted for the Boots own brand.

What we have learnt today, then, is that while you folk may be discerning, intelligent and attractive, I am the kind of snotty, peeling, grumbling mess who believes everything Lemsip adverts tell you and assigns family roles to the items in her medicine cabinet.

Another carefully-researched nugget of insight next week, if I make it.