Drive Your Plow headlined the Windmill last night. This isn’t really the piece I wanted to write about Drive Your Plow—they’re a wonderful band—but I don’t know what I’d say in another piece about them besides that they’re a wonderful band. Music and scents are difficult to describe, I’ve learned. I’ll often go to their gigs alone so they probably think I’m a psycho anyway.

Go, if you can, inside the image I captured for you above. A tall man has shaken a camera at you—he wants passage. He asks if you can still see. After the bridge you see him put his lens cap on. He doesn’t move, but the music’s good so you don’t care. You will write about the injustice tomorrow. You’re drinking and they’re playing your favourite song. There’s karaoke after the set, the violinist says. You’d planned to leave but you buy a half-pint. It's a journalistic half-pint. The karaoke is a joy—you buy a full pint. Another. And here it is—Paddy, the drummer, is performing a power ballad you don’t recognise and you realise that you have the lamest chronic illness going. There is something wrong with you and you will sneeze through everything you love. You knew this already, of course, but there is something visceral about a sneeze (and the second sneeze, and the third sneeze) that sometimes when you’re drunk you forget. You head to the bathroom and they’re out of bog roll. You find—on a high, stickered shelf—a second roll, but this is a low triumph. You Uber home (already a defeat) and you’re sneezing—sneezing and snotting over some poor man’s car. You feel low, yes, but there is something pathetic about it all that makes you laugh.

Sadness is an aesthetic condition. Blue is such a lovely colour. Solitude at least suggests a strength, a disregard, and when the solitary admit that they are lonely the corners of one’s mouth curl down—but in pity or sorrow, not disgust. Sorrow is a lovely word. Snot is not. The deep caverns of depression entice, melancholy allures. Sickness is bone-ache and chunder. It’s bogs and snot and pores, at least for me. For me it’s blowing your nose in old t-shirts. I have chronic rhinosinusitis, at least that’s what my ENT says. They tried to tell me it was hay fever for a time; I insisted that I come from the land of pollen and this couldn’t be the case. After great distress a man called Irfan got some instruments up my nose and went to work. He rescued me from a great pit. During this time I learnt that humans have more than one sinus and that my condition has something to do with a meatus. See what I mean about optics? ‘Meatus’ does not inspire or move. My nose doesn’t really work, that’s essentially the problem. It’s usually too busy on the fritz to do normal nose things like smelling or breathing. I get through a lot of Sudafed.

Not being able to breathe is one thing but one day you start to believe it, you can’t breathe—in this city, on this island—and things get tricky. This is where Irfan found me and now I can breathe again, albeit with more steam-baths and mometasone furoate. I love breathing. My life is not hard. Of all the gruesome things about my condition perhaps the most gruesome is its label of chronic illness, which, while technically correct, does feel like stolen valour. Imagine you’re drinking tea and you sneeze and you spill the tea and now there’s a mess and you’re angry but there’s no one to be angry at and then you’re either angry at a sneeze (ridiculous) or yourself (moreish) so you put it away and clean up the tea. Frustrating? Yes. Debilitating? No. Ridiculous? Immensely. The nose is a ridiculous organ and sneezing is a ridiculous action. The nasally, octave-higher voice of the significantly congested is a ridiculous one. The constant drip is disgusting, yes, but ridiculous to cite as a cause of agony. It is frustrating for all of one’s perils to be so silly. I would imagine, however, that it is more frustrating to be debilitated.

The Chinese treated congestion with tea for thousands of years. Maybe in a roundabout manner this is where I got the idea. They brewed tea from Ephedra, which they called Ma Huang. The Americans later brewed tea from the same plant—they called it, amongst other Mormon names, whorehouse tea. Supposedly a rootless infusion of the plant could treat venereal diseases. Ma Huang might have been of use to the Chinese because it contained pseudoephedrine, now sold over the counter as Sudafed. Ma Huang and Sudafed are linked in the present day not just by their content but by their extortionate cost—the only ephedra tea I could find was £24.99. To my knowledge this is because many species of Ephedra contain ephedrine and ephedrine products were banned by regulatory bodies like the FDA over health concerns, including but not limited to bouts of psychosis (is this not the point of tea?). The particularly dear strain I found contained Ephedra vulgaris, which—due to a narrow mind—sent me right back to whorehouse tea. Had I studied Latin at any point I’d know that vulgaris simply means common or ordinary—the prudishness was our doing—but it is of course the root for vulgar, and vulgar for us means to make explicit and offensive reference to sex or bodily functions. I am very much in the business of making explicit and offensive reference to bodily functions, just not the kind we’re prudish about. Sneezing and snotting is vulgar business.

I started drinking tea properly after I lost my sense of smell. It was a way to take care of myself. I’m aware that I missed a boat there, it doesn’t take a mormon to tell you tea isn’t much to the nose-blind, but sometimes fate has it that my airways clear and I can experience it fully, aromas and all. Still, even when I can’t, I take the time to arrange the leaves and prepare the pot. Warm tea was once taken to treat the penetration of low temperatures, curing sickness in an act of balance. Maybe there’s long been cold inside me. Maybe it’s a war, or maybe it is just an act of balance; man and sinus.

But sometimes it is just like shit lycanthropy or a terrible Cinderella story in which I’m whisked off at midnight to be disgusting for a while. That’s kind of it, we’re at the bottom of the issue. What can be done? What am I trying to do? I don’t know if this is an explanation, or some kind of confession—I don’t know what I’d have to confess. I think I am trying to accept—outloud—an ugly part of myself. But in accepting it acknowledge that it’s not even that ugly—it lacks the spectacle to be—it’s just kind of lame. Vulgarity is a lack of sophistication, after all. Perhaps that is what I’m grappling with—I miss superlatives, in the description of tea and otherwise. People suck at describing how teas smell. And I love to complain, I think it one of life’s great joys. At least when something is difficult it’s a story. Even the most aching heartbreaks make for great stories. I don’t think the struggle of man and sinus makes for a great story. And the vocabulary of illness is too bodily and evocative, it’s true—either too grim or too silly. But surely more have felt sick in the way I have—if temporarily—than have been sad the way some have? I suppose I’m not the arbiter of who’s felt what. The vulgar is common. Ordinary. Everyone has their thing, mine is more mucous. I’m embracing the green.

‘But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it’, writes Maggie Nelson. She prefers blue. She says, at most, she ‘abided by’ green. Perhaps I’ll discover the difference. Sorry Plowheads, I do really like the band.