I've been taken out by Freshers' Flu for the past week or so, and it hasn't been pretty. First came the telltale cough and hacking up colourfully marbled gobs of phlegm every morning. Then the sniffling and the burning
sensation in the back of my nasal cavity whenever I breathed in. One day I woke up with a temperature exceeded only by that usually experienced by
your average rotisserie chicken. When I managed to haul my delirious (carc)ass down to the campus clinic I was told that there was nothing they could do and I should self-medicate for at least three days before coming back to interrupt their treatment of
People Who Are Ill For Real. On my miserable way back home I encountered no small number of fellow coughers, snifflers and citizens of delirium. Why is it called Freshers' Flu when at least half the uni population comes down with it? I wanted to do something - touch fists, or thump chests - in show of solidarity, but the truth is that in these disease-ridden times it's best to keep your hands to yourself, and chest-thumping can lead to undesirable consequences of the mucous variety. All that aside, I wouldn't have minded so much staying in bed and drinking endless cups of hot tea and having naps whenever I fancied it. There was, however, an essay to be written, on 18th Century English literature, no less. Always a pleasure, never a chore, I can assure you. Being a firm believer in the philosophy of last-minute panic essay writing has never been easy, but this last one really pushed my faith to the limit. After banging away at the keyboard for half the night, you reach that point where you simply can't extort another word out of your drained, hoarse brain, but you still need another nine hundred more to fulfil the word limit. Your body is up in arms and there's a full-scale mutiny going on,
pushing you back into beds of surrender. When you're out of coffee, out of chocolate, out of cigarettes, making sentences is hard. Making sense is harder. Now, imagine all that, only with a raging temperature and a dripping nose, punctuated by fits of debilitating coughing. Doesn't sound fun, does it? Well, it wasn't. After all that, after collapsing into bed, after hammering out a half-strangled, disjointed ten pages of feverish essay, I woke up the next day, realised that I'd slept past my alarm, slept past my essay deadline, and felt even worse than I had the night before. I glugged half a bottle of cough syrup and dizzily sank back into sleep, where I stayed for the greater part of the following three days. Ah, uni life just doesn't get much better than this. Suzanne Could you be a student diarist?
If you hail from North Yorkshire or are studying in the county and think you could squeeze out a few hundred words about once a month (more if you want to!) get in touch with us by emailing northyorkshire@bbc.co.uk | 
