Here’s an admission: when I was little, I used to pick my nose and eat it. Now that you’ve had a chance to scream in disgust and vomit everywhere, I’d like to move on to the reason for such an admission: I firmly believe that I have a highly boosted immune system, meaning I tend not to suffer as much as most people when the common cold comes around.
It’s a logical thought process. Nasal detritus is simply common bacteria encased in biologically self-made mucus, eventually solidified. Note that I’m talking about what are commonly referred to as bogeys, rather than the ooey-gooey runny kind of nose gold. I suppose it’s the mucus part that disgusts people, but I’ve swallowed my own saliva before when it materialises in my mouth and I’ve ingested a bit of my own blood before when sucking on a paper cut-afflicted finger. The mucus isn’t really that much different. At least that’s what toddler-me believed and how today-me has decided to rationalise toddler-me’s behaviour.
Having willingly ingested tiny amounts of bacteria in my developing years, I’ve come to latch on to the idea that my immune system has built up some kind of defence against foreign cultures (by which I mean harmful bacteria rather than other countries’ practices). Maybe it’s some kind of placebo effect, but it seems to get me through.
As a result, when faced with the common cold, I’ll tend to feel a bit of a sore throat for a day, before coming down with a case of occasional cough, followed by mild sniffle, ending another day or two later with tickly throat and simply get on with my life. For other people, however, the effects appear to be far more drastic. People often go through endless days of sneezing, dribbling, stuffiness, dizziness, tiredness and the general feeling of a cloaked and hooded figure lightly tapping at the door with the point of a scythe.
I suppose the point of this whole ramble is that if you suffer particularly badly from common illnesses, maybe you should’ve eaten your own nose contents as a child. It’s not too harmful – hell, if anything it helps to give you a superpower! A pretty mundane one, but a power nonetheless. What if Superman had to go and defeat some evil genius who also just so happened to be a large manifestation of a nasty strain of the flu virus? “Oh, sorry, can’t sabe de day today. I’mb all bunged up and stuck in bed. Damb you biology!”
I never really get music videos these days. For a song laden with electronic buzzing and droning to a fairly mid-tempo beat, I’d expect to see a darkened room, flashing lights and maybe a bit of glow-in-the-dark face paint. Instead, the paint we get is black and smeared anywhere else but the face. Add to that some shaven heads, interpretive dance, sand wrestling and a fair bit of standing around and you get something that just proves I don’t have what it takes to be artsy.
I never really listened to Goldfrapp before either, so this new bit of stuff came as a rather pleasant surprise, followed by the nasty shock that now I’m going to have to carve out some time in the future to go back and visit the previous material. And, to be honest, it’ll probably be a while before I even get there; I still haven’t made my way through Bowie yet.
Goldfrapp – Anymore
Jamie Walsh 
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