When sickness prevails...

...the advantage of being freelance and home-based is that you can keep working. No one will know or care if you are in your dressing gown and look like death on a plate served up with a side order of greasy hair and blotchy skin. As long as you're able to sit upright, use the keyboard and put your best telephone voice on, you can keep working. And earning.

None of this applies, of course, if your illness involves having your head down the loo for the best part of three days.

I had plans for Tuesday - an earlyish train to London, a couple of meetings with Useful People, and friend's book launch at a pub in the evening, followed by a night in a hotel and an earlyish train home again on Wednesday morning. On Monday it was clear that I was too ill to travel and - possibly - that train travel could either have worsened my own health or endangered someone else's, give the parlous state of train toilets these days. So I cancelled everything and consoled myself with the thought that I could get some work done from home anyway.

Alas, it was not to be. Too weak to do anything beyond feebly attempting to surf the net in between bouts of reacquainting myself with our bathroom tiles, I lay on the sofa to watch daytime tv. This was when I discovered that BBC Breakfast no longer offers headlines at 9am, that the morning schedule is littered with tedious property programmes and that having one's toenails yanked out with hot pliers is probably preferable to watching Loose Women. I was only consoled by tennis at Queen's in the afternoon.

Feeling a lot better today, I'm now playing catch-up and can't put the necessary phone calls off any longer.