I am extremely ill. I have a runny nose, a sore throat, a nasty hacking cough and every few minutes my eyes fill with water: all the ingredients you need to make a convincing Lemsip commercial for the television. So of course all you women out there will now expect me to claim that I have flu. But I don’t. I have a cold.

Flu, I’ve always thought, is a working class invention designed specifically as an excuse for not going down the mine that day. “I’m not coming to work today because I have a cold,” sounds a bit wet and homosexual. Saying, “I can’t come to work because I have flu”, sounds more manly and butch.

But you may as well say you aren’t coming to work because you’ve caught cancer. If you have flu, the American navy will come round to your house, inject you with plasma and take samples of your liver to their biochemical warfare centre in Atlanta.

And when they’ve gone away, men in nuclear spillage boiler suits from our own Ministry of Defence will want to know if you’ve had any contact with Chinese chickens or Vietnamese swans or German soldiers. And then, when they’ve gone away, you will die. Flu is nasty and claiming you have it when all you have is a cold makes you look ridiculous.

Mine, of course, is the worst recorded cold in the whole of human history and I am defying medical science by being here, at my computer, writing this column. Technically I am dead.

Legally you would be allowed to remove my organs and give them to a poorly child.

And as I sit here, shivering and tense with a headache and a tickly cough, I can’t help wondering why there is still no cure. And whether or not we might be on the brink or creating one . . .

For hundreds of years people thought the cold was caused by being cold. “You’ll catch your death out there,” people in 18th-century blizzards would say.

It was in the 1920s that we understood the cold to be a viral infection, a nasty little blighter that invades your body, multiplies and then causes you to sneeze so that millions of its brothers can shoot up the noses and through the eyes of everyone within 5ft.

Since then, we’ve been to the moon, invented the personal stereo, devised the speed camera and created the pot noodle. But still no one knows how to keep the cold virus at bay.

Aids came along and within about 10 minutes Elton John had set up his charity and was rattling the ivories from Pretoria to Pontefract so that now, while there’s no cure, there is a raft of drugs to keep the symptoms and effects at arm’s length. But the cold? Not a sausage.

In 1946 the British government began something called the common cold unit, based close to Porton Down in Wiltshire. It conducted endless experiments until in 1989 it was shut down. And sitting here with two bits of kitchen towel rammed up my nostrils, I rather wish they’d kept it going.

The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an immensely well funded organisation. It’s here that they work on ebola and proper flu and all the really nasty viruses that could wipe out the world if they ever got on an aeroplane. And do you know what advice they have for those who don’t want to catch a cold? Wash your hands with alcohol.

I’m beginning to wonder if the sort of scientists who might have been engaged in defeating the cold are now being swallowed up by the exciting and glamourous green movement; that the very man who might have developed a cure for the cold is, as we speak, sitting on an ice floe off the coast of Canada watching bloody polar bears.

Or perhaps he was thinking about taking up medical research but thought that rather than spend his life in a chilly lab in Cardiff with nothing but a pot of viruses for company he’d be better paid and happier if he went to Soho instead to be an ad man for Lemsip.

I worry about this in the same way that I worry about the loss of Concorde. It has not been in man’s nature to just give up on a project, but we really do seem to have given up when it comes to the cold.

Scientifically, it’s not that hard to beat. Back in 1999 British researchers worked out a way to stop the viruses infiltrating human cells in a test tube. But when it came to replicating the tests in the human nose, they all seem to have given up and gone off with Greenpeace to drive rubber boats at high speed round Icelandic whaling ships.

There is, however, some hope because apart from the Groucho club, where people have colds in the summer, most people only catch a cold in the winter. So what we need to do is get rid of it and that, thanks to global warming, does seem to be happening.

In the last weekend of October I was sitting outside in the sunshine wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Only now that the wind is coming from the north have the viruses invaded my nostrils.

If, therefore, we can push the winter so far back that by the time it comes along we’re already into the spring, all should be well. To cure the common cold we simply need to get rid of its breeding season. This means producing as much carbon dioxide as possible. Yup. The cure for the common cold may well turn out to be the Range Rover.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone