I’M SUFFERING from a non-cold. The initial symptoms creep up on me while I’m asleep and I awake with a burning throat, aching back and the sneezes.

I am keeping count of these nasal explosions, which have occurred six times in the past three days, which to me suggests that I am coming down with something.

But so far it hasn’t shown – the ill feelings evaporating by lunchtime.

There seems to be a lot of this going round – new varieties of the winter chills that are varyingly elusive.

In another case, my boyfriend has been enduring an invisible cold for the past few weeks.

There are so few outward signs of his suffering that I keep forgetting he’s got a cold at all.

The only clue is the faint whiff of Lockets, which follows him round like, well, like a bad smell.

And he occasionally calls out for hot possets, because they serve them in the Box of Delights, which we’re only watching on Wednesdays as that’s the day they originally broadcast the show in the 80s. That’s an entirely different sort of sickness.

Meanwhile, a colleague is performing Google diagnosis on everyone in the office who so much as twitches their nose.

“It must be dengue fever,” she concludes, choosing the most perilous infection on the list.

While most of the nation is fearing swine flu, she’s imagining tropical diseases lurking in the air conditioning.

Her handbag is a portable medicine cabinet, full of tablets escaped from their packaging, which she occasionally mistakes for a lone Smartie.

Whether I am tolerating leptospirosis or a minor case of sniffles, I don’t need a thermometer to tell me I’m feeling out of sorts.

I favour the book form of diagnosis, and I’m not referring to medical dictionaries. Basically, if I’ve not read one for a while, then there’s usually something up with me.

And I haven’t, I’m ashamed to say, got through a whole one since August.

For the two months before that I managed just three, after a week-long holiday in Skiathos when I read six novels – more my usual pace.

I don’t think I have ever had such a period of drought since I started learning to read.

Having spent most of my life with my nose in a book, I am now unable to stick to one.

My reading habits have always been consistent – start at the beginning, read through to the end even if it’s dreadful (skimming if the experience becomes too much to bear), and never, ever read the last page ahead of time.

I used to plough through books one at a time, now I have about eight discarded around the house before I’ve even got to the middle.

Is this the fault of the books or of me?

Have I simply been choosing the wrong ones, or is this a sign of something much deeper?

In desperation, I have taken to self-medicating, trying novels I would not usually choose and force feeding myself non-fiction.

A paperback about Van Gogh’s life in the Yellow House may yet be a cure – I am two-thirds through and still going – but I have to confess I am worried I will never get my appetite back.

I shun tried and tested books, those I have adored in the past, in case my current condition turns me off them.

And I am reluctant to start on the few new books I have purchased, just in case I struggle to finish them.

What the solution is I don’t yet know, but it’ll take more than Lemsip.

Maybe a posset would do the trick after all – at least I’d have to read the Box of Delights to find out how to make one.

READ more of Laura’s columns at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lauradavis

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