The Chinese do it. And everybody knows they are on to something . The casual nature with which we in Europe and America treat everyday diseases, sharing them willy-nilly as if they were Christmas gifts, is somewhat worrying. Most Chinese wear surgical masks not to protect themselves from others’ communicable diseases, but to protect others from the disease they themselves have. This for me suddenly casts a much more noble light on the silly appearance they have as they go about their daily lives looking like a bunch of deranged surgeons.

Recently I worked on a film shoot at a waste disposal landfill. If you’ve never been to one, they are the most hideous example of human beings shitting all over our planet I’ve ever seen. Mounds of earth are literally piled on top of rubbish every day, in an enormous basin full of hills of previous dumps. The town of Diamond Bar, California, and dozens of other suburbs like it, are built upon landfills. Allegedly they make great golf courses too. This experience had the crew breathing in deadly toxins all morning, until rescued by the local ‘caretaker,’ a man whose life is apparently spent on this site. This brought to light how useless the cheap facemasks that you can buy in corner stores are. Only when the caretaker issued us a much more industrial breathing apparatus, ‘scented for our pleasure,’ did I realise just how noxious the gasses around such a place could be. Fortunately this experience did not leave me in rigor mortis, but another much less dramatic one very nearly did. After an 11-hour plane journey next to a coughing Welsh woman and her sickly children, which not only disturbed my sleep but felt like an episode of a Charles Dickens novel, I experienced a week of suffering what my girlfriend insisted was just ‘man cold’ but in fact felt closer to the bitter last throws of the black death. I cannot help but feel nothing but anger at this woman for doing nothing more to protect me from what she clearly knew was a contagious cold. As a sidebar, why is it that men, who can endure such physical pain, are so weakened by the common cold?

At this moment, I am suddenly very acutely aware of the hypochondria in my family genes that I live in denial of now shedding its ugly head. I used to have a grandmother who would never touch or kiss you when you went to visit her for fear of catch your cold, my father has to have all his vegetables boiled because of his ‘weak stomach,’ and my sister is never 100% healthy. A lot of this is after all just paranoia. Last year, during the N1H1 scare, my stepmother quarantined my brother and sister for a week after their return from an ‘infected area.’ (In this case, the British Isles) The poor duo had to sit in a locked living room watching bad movies for a week, whilst their mother delivered ‘rescue meals’ to them, which she left on the doorstep, wearing a surgical mask, and then fled before they retrieved the food, in a scene not too dissimilar to the film ‘Outbreak.’ In case you are wondering, neither of them, of course, contracted Bird Flu.

So perhaps I am just venting. Maybe there should be a line between the willingness to get infected from your friends and loved ones, but the need to separate yourselves medically from strangers. Which is maybe why I was ok with passing on my nasty lurgy to my girlfriend, but feel that if you are suffering, it is your responsibility to shield your ailments from people around you, or at least make them aware of it, especially on long-haul flights. And so I return to that spluttering Welsh mother: May she rot in hell.