Dear Swine Flu. If I can beat Bird Flu, I can beat you

Great news about swine flu isn’t it? I always hoped I’d live to see the human population wiped out by sneezing pigs, and now it’s happening. First the elderly and the infirm will die, then the poor, and then the young; but not me, for a bit at least. These health emergencies really bring out the best in me. After a year of first looting hospitals for vaccines, then shooting any friend who sneezes, and finally, refusing to leave my fortified tower of health, I’ll starve to death because I’ll be Howard Hughes in a Mad Max landscape. Mostly though, I’m confident about my chances of living through this apocalypse influenza, after all, I survived Bird Flu didn’t I?

Christ knows if I’m going to get as feared out this time around, but when bird flu reared it’s beaked head in 2005 and everyone was talking about how the World Cup was going to be canceled and Channel 4 kept on running special reports called things like: The Truth About Bird Flu: You Will Have To Incinerate Your Family Before The Month’s Over, I wasn’t very cool about it.

I was living in York at the time with a guy called James who fueled my fear as I stoked his paranoia. One day, after smoking too much dope and reading Batman: Contagion again and again, our panic got slightly out of control.

With inelegant logic we figured that York would be one of the first cities to be struck down because of all the old people (carriers) who came on weekend breaks from London and coughed all over the Minster. So, rather than die, we came up with a plan to save ourselves. We shared a small flat high up, on a quiet road, and we figured that we could hold up there for a few weeks and wait for the poorly to die out and be cleaned away by the military. First we would go to the dealer’s place and score a nine-bar. Then we’d head to Jackson’s Supermarket and get as many bottles of water, tins of beans and soup, dry pasta, and dried fruits as we could afford after the dope. Then we’d get our girlfriends round, destroy all of our phones so we couldn’t be tempted by pleading calls from friends/relatives (potential carriers) begging to be let into our safe zone. Then we’d sit back, turn on the Playstation, and wait for everyone else to kill each other.

I think we got as far as getting the dope, and I know we got the bottled water cause it sat in the flat untouched until we moved out, but I can’t remember my girlfriend thinking it was a great plan. Still, we all survived that global pandemic, so I’m quietly confident about this one.