Whenever I tell people about my paraskevidekatriaphobia, they usually scoff and give knowing smiles to each other, with an implied finger tapping at the temple.

Well, I have good reason for being mortally afraid of Friday the 13th. It began decades ago, involving my friend Jaikishan, a car and a lot of associated factors, and since then I have learned to trust my gutfeel about things like this (big gut, lots of feel .

Usually, I do not go out in daylight on that day. The “daylight” logic came out of the fact that in the days when this happened, I was still in college, and by the time night rolled around, my friends and I were too drunk to care what happened to us. (The “drunk” part ended for me in December 1984, when I resolved to stay away from alcohol because I couldn’t hold it – a promise I have been faithful to all the way till today, and intend to keep).

Anyway, Thursday night I went with Harald to the airport to see Sean off. Lots of people there – and clearly one of them was giving away the bug of death at a discount.

I woke up on Friday the 13th with a raging fever, terrible body ache, a throat on fire and nuclear mushrooms in the head. I wasn’t planning to leave home that day anyway, but *this* was not what I had in mind.

Oh well, I thought, it’s Friday the 13th, it will go away.

Well, it didn’t.

It got worse, then got slightly better. On Tuesday I felt OK enough to go to office, but by 3pm I was ready to drop again. I went back home and have been in bed since then. I hope I didn’t infect half the office!

Today – exactly a week after that miserable Friday – I am much better, which proves the old saying “you can treat a flu two ways – go see a doc, and he will cure it in 7 days, else do nothing and it will go away in a week”.

I am hopelessly backlogged on email, so if you have written to me in the past week and haven’t heard back from me – my apologies. I’ll try and catch up over the next few days.

The weather has been miserable. April showers, high humidity, depressing high temperatures. And add to that load shedding – electricity outage every few hours.

I need a holiday!