Graham Carter - the voice of age and experience

THIS week’s column is dedicated to all those people reading this who are, like me, suffering from a nasty cough.

(Is there any other kind?) I’ve had mine for about three weeks now, and if I tell you I am a bit fed up with it, you should understand that I am only giving you the polite version.

And as if having the damned cough isn’t bad enough, there is plenty more you have to put up with.

For a start, mention your cough to anybody else and they will always, without fail, tell you there is a lot of it about, regardless of whether there is or not.

And anyway, even if there is a lot of it about, is that supposed to make me feel better?

Then there is the infuriating modern tendency for some people - and surprisingly this isn’t confined to women - to accuse you of having ‘man flu’, which they tell you with a smile, as if they are being really original and humorous.

Well, nobody is claiming it is flu.

I have had flu, so I know. The last time, about 10 years ago, it put me in bed for a fortnight, during which I barely had the energy or the will to lift my head off the pillow.

But just because it’s not flu and “only a cold” that doesn’t mean it doesn’t ruin your sleep pattern, drain your energy, or that there isn’t a big cumulative effect. It drags you down.

And if there is one thing more persistent than a cough, it’s a wife who thinks she can cure it.

So every day my wife and I have a conversation that begins with her telling me to “go and get something from the chemist for that cough”, and ends with me explaining that after 50 years of looking for a cure, I have come to the conclusion there isn’t one.

Over the years I have tried everything on the shelf at Boots, along with whatever I find lurking in the back of the medicine cupboard at home, plus honey and lemon, but nothing ever works. Not even alcohol.

In the end, though, I bought a bottle of cough mixture to settle the argument and - guess what?

It didn’t work.

On the bright side: I did get to take a trip down Memory Lane, because the taste immediately took me back to my childhood, when it was my mum, not my wife, loading the spoon and telling me to open wide.

It looks exactly the same as it did then, and it tastes exactly the same. The bottle is the same shape, too, while even the design of the label is in a retro style.

And that’s interesting because, if you think about all the other amazing advances in every other branch of medicine, and huge leaps forward that have happened since my childhood, the science of cough mixtures is surely the only one in which there has been absolutely no progress.

It doesn’t work now, and I am pretty sure it didn’t work then, either, despite our mothers’ promises.

But I am not after your sympathy.

Save that for my wife, who is so tired from being woken up in the middle of the night by my coughing that she has developed a funny look in her eye.

“Remember the emperor Caligula,” she told me, last night. “He came up with the perfect cure for his cousin’s persistent cough, which was to cut off his head, and I am thinking it’s worth a try.”

“That’s a bit extreme,” I protest.

“Not really,” she replied. “There’s a lot of it about.”