The sheer hell of this year's flu ...by a survivor

I thought nothing could be worse than the swine flu of 2009. Aptly named, it felt as if a tubercular two-tonne hog was sat on my head, breathing its porky poison into me. What made it all the more disgusting was that I couldn't stop thinking that some microscopic sliver of pig DNA was slithering around inside my cells, turning me into a porcine hybrid. Zoonosis gives me the ick. It's just too sci-fi. My horror at the pandemic was driven more by the thought of what some dude in Wuhan had done to a perfectly innocent bat, than humanity's possible extinction.

However, swine flu is now yesterday's lurgy. This year's flu makes it seem like baby-sniffles. I don't know what species the 2025 monster jumped from, but it makes pigs look like weak sauce. Maybe it was Godzilla. Perhaps Satan got the flu and sneezed on Donald Trump during their weekly conference meeting before it passed to the rest of us. It is horrific. I had the flu vaccine and this monstrosity didn't give a tuppenny fart. It rag-dolled me like an angry terrier with a rat for the best part of three weeks. Cases are surging in Scotland. Wards are closing in some hospitals. And we still haven't reached the peak.

I'm just coming out the other side. So I've a few tips on how to protect and survive. I got my flu jab just before Halloween. After my 2009 swine flu horror, I pay to get jagged every year. Until this year, it worked just dandy. There were signs of trouble during the jag, though. My pharmacist has very cool hair, so we sometimes talk about quiffs, waxes and the curse of us both having lustrous locks in our fifties. After he jagged me, I had to wait around for the usual 10 minutes to ensure I didn't cark it, so I picked up our hair-do chat where we'd last left off.

He, however, was more interested in telling me that there was a new flu variant about and the vaccine wasn't designed for it. The vaccine, he explained, was cooked up in the lab before this new variant got going.

Here's the science bit: mut