Spanish influenza
Have I been ill! I’ve had Spanish influenza. In 1919 a form of Spanish influenza killed an estimated 20 million people in a pan-European epidemic. You don’t believe me, check it out! More people died in the post war flue epidemic than were killed in the whole of the First World War! The only reason I’m not dead is because some clever man invented antibiotics. Remember antibiotics? Has the bottom fallen out of your world? Take antibiotics and see the world fall out of your bottom! They aint nice but they can save your life!
Here in a tiny village in the Al Pujarra Mountains in Southern Spain, about an hour from Granada, the local doctor immediately recognised my ailments and prescribed antibiotics. We had an erudite discussion about Spanish influenza, how it had killed millions after world war one, and he reminded me that it had also wrecked havoc in the New World where Pissarro slaughtered the Incas with a handful of men and a superbug on his side. The bug is so strong it’s almost impossible to stand up; the thought of fighting is anathema. One isn’t even strong enough to fight the bug, which is why millions have died from it throughout history. Needless to say, I love antibiotics! Right now they’re saving my life!
This is the first thing I’ve written in a week – I’ve been so weak I haven’t done anything but lie in bed. I’ve eaten nothing and lived for the week on water. A friend came by and took me in her car to the doctor’s place. Starve a fever feed a cold is the old saying; well I sure did that. I lost four kilos in the last week, which for those in the “new world” who know nothing of contemporary weights and measures is about nine and a half pounds. I was a skinny guy to begin with – now I’m really skinny!
It amazes me that America, which had its own revolution based (in large part) on the French Revolution, didn’t abandon the system of weights and measures it inherited from its old colonial masters. America has a decimal currency, yet its weights and measures are based upon an archaic English system whose antecedents are lost in the fogs of time. Hello America! Wake up? Join the rest of the world! Go metric baby. The metric system is such an elegant and simple system. A litre of water at sea level weighs a kilo! A tonne of fuel (for example) comprises a thousand litres and weighs a thousand kilos. Try working out what the fuel weighs for your aeroplane when you measure the fuel in gallons! I bet there’s not one in ten thousand Americans can tell you what a gallon of ANY liquid weighs! In the metric system water freezes at zero and boils at 100 degrees centigrade. Simple. China and India are going metric! The EEC is metric! If Barrack Obama wants to position the United States competitively for the 21st Century he should immediately begin the necessary steps to convert America to a decimal system of weights and measures.
Meanwhile, my temperature’s back to 34.5 and I’m feeling better.
© Sam Cutler 2009.
