Vier Stücke für Tympanum (Mässig - Sehr langsam - Sehr rasch - Langsam)

My cold began its work by making some of the wines at last Tuesday's wine club taste odd. The illness tightened its phlegmy and vocabulary-dissolving grip through the week, and on Friday it was some effort to drag myself out of bed at 3.30pm to get a taxi to Kirsty's (a short walk away), as I had the girls for the weekend.

It was a weekend of minimal parenting designed to promote healthy autonomy, as I lay sweating and shivering upstairs. The girls rose to the occasion, foraging for tinned soup and making scrambled eggs. I came down on Saturday and couldn't help but find the stack of burnt saucepans endearing.

At 4am on Sunday morning the infection decided to move to a more convivial home, in my middle ear, where it caused the sudden onset of an earache and tinnitus which drove me to ring the doctor at lunchtime. At the hospital that afternoon I was angling for some analgesics sufficiently strong to be of recreational value. I reported the degree of the pain with forebearing and understated language which I hoped would cause him to impute a greater distress than that which I was experiencing. But he wasn't having it, and sent me home with some penicillin and no painkillers stronger than paracetamol. At Kirsty's I made the girls egg, beans and chips, and finally, on Sunday evening, Kirsty and boyf came home and I could go home to bed.

That night, I was startled to hear a loud noise in my affected ear, like someone squirting the last of a bottle of Fairy Liquid into it. A strange music developed, like some avantgarde work for solo tympanum using extended techniques. After a pause, the next movement consisted of a low buzzing, like a Stylophone stuck on its lowest notes. This was followed by some rapid ear farting and a return of the principle theme--the low buzzing--inverted and in retrograde (with variations it would be tedious to rehearse here), in classic dodecaphonic style.

I lay there giggling with the absurdity of the performance. It's a shame I couldn't have recorded it because I could have passed it off as a new work by the previously unknown Romanian composer Otitis Media, and maybe got it on Radio 3 at midnight, where it would have been heard by a dozen gay men and an amanuensis.

I was not to be allowed to rest for long. At 8am a croaky Kirsty asked me back, as both she and daughter Jenny had caught it. It's Tuesday evening now. I've been here since Thursday (as Kirsty had wanted to see a film) and it's starting to feel a little like that period between Christmas and New Year again: too much family and not enough air.

However, there is an exciting prospect looming on Tuesday. For many years I have wanted to visit "The Kabul of the North", "a depressing post-war New Town consisting of nothing one would wish ever to see again," where "you know things are bad when Asda's the local nightspot."

Using such testimonials I've persuaded Trina to come with me for a day out round Cumbernauld's Brutalist slabbed supermarkets, fag-moated betting shops, and wind-whipped underpasses crackling with the snap of cheap sportswear round fecund ginger-dotted loins. However, as part of my new spirit of reluctant and begrudgingly given compromise, I've agreed to indulge Trina for an hour or so, who has declared more of an interest in Kelvingrove Park and the Botanical Gardens.