It’s grim, all this waiting. This has been a plague house for one week, a house of permanently locked lavatory doors and pitiful keening – but still the bug hasn’t got me yet. One after another the kids have succumbed, always stricken at precisely 1am and left wan and incapacitated for 24 hours, the throwing-up business spectacularly and vigorously reflexive. I can’t work out why I’ve been immune. Maybe it’s the cigarettes and the Jack Daniel’s (my new year’s resolution was to increase my intake of both – which has taken some doing). Or maybe it’s just biding its time, cooking up something spectacular.

This is the norovirus, or winter vomiting disease, a nasty and fecund little thing which arrived unbidden via my youngest son eight days ago and has hung around our post-Christmas debris ever since, slyly introducing itself to each family member in turn. The same virus which has affected, by simple extrapolation, some 250,000 Sunday Times readers and is threatening havoc in the health service.

An almost perfect creature, the norovirus, in Darwinian terms; sufficiently brief and mild in its effects to convince us that we shouldn’t worry too much about the risk of contagion, that we should just get on with things and suffer the consequences.

It is entirely open-minded in its mode of transport: it’ll hop from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, or it will bide its time on the carpet or on the sofa, maybe watching daytime television, waiting for you to sit down. Or it can be, as the scientists put it, aerosolised: sprayed towards you at high velocity from a close friend or relative. The most successful bugs are those which do not inflict too much trauma upon their hosts; so give it credit, the norovirus is an überbug – it knows its business.

Which may be more than we can say about those entrusted with the task of combating its effects. When my son’s mother rang NHS Direct with his symptoms, she was told to take him to hospital, where there were lots of big signs saying: “People With Winter Vomiting Disease – Go Home Now You Morons,” or words to that effect. A bit of “joined-up thinking” wouldn’t go amiss, would it? I wonder how many others have rung the hotline and been offered similar advice. I assume the hotline people worry that they might get sued if they say something like “just lie down and sweat it out and drink lots of water and whatever you do, don’t go near a hospital”.

Meanwhile, I wait, feeling ever-so-slightly excluded. Some 2m British people have copped the full weight of norovirus in the last few weeks; it’s a great coming together of the nation in misery and anguish, the medical equivalent of a Live Aid concert or a World Cup performance from England. Bring it on, caliciviridae. I can take it.

A female bouncer at some repulsive nightclub in Bournemouth has just won £6,000 from a tribunal because her boss referred to her as a “breeder” – which is apparently derogatory gay slang for a straight person. It derives from the fact that straight people can have children.

Gay people can have children too, these days, but not in the same way, I understand. They need to fill in forms and stuff and prove that they’re nice people.

Homosexuals who choose not to adopt but instead take an afternoon off to impregnate a woman somehow are called “gay breeders”. I don’t know if gays refer to their parents as “breeders”, or how their parents would react if they did.

I hope this won’t seem homophobic, but gay people seem to spend an awful lot of time making up slang terms. There’s “lipstick lesbian”, for example, which refers to that extremely select group of lesbians who are not actually hideous. And “pomosexual”, which is someone who, like, rejects all oppressive gender labels, in a very real sense. And, best of all, “water chestnut”, which, for reasons that elude me, refers to a Japanese male homosexual. Just be careful next time you’re in a Chinese restaurant, you breeders: who knows what you might be ordering.

My smashing idea for the circus

Staggering somewhat bleary-eyed into the living room on the morning of January 1, 2008, I switched on the television to see what was new with the world. And lo, there were Kate and Gerry McCann staring out at me from BBC News 24. I watched for a few minutes trying to work out if there had been some crucial development in the case that I had missed, but it seemed not. Nothing whatsoever had happened, in fact.

Later there was film of that troubled Appalachian dingbat Britney Spears acting like a mental in the back of an ambulance and I turned the television off. As that modest and likable sage of our times, Bono, once put it: nothing changes on New Year’s Day. It could, however.

If we all smashed our television screens with a club hammer the first time that Britney, or Lindsay Lohan, or Amy Winehouse and her idiot husband, or Moss ’n’ Doherty appeared, then we would have a much more agreeable year. And be spared paying the licence fee as a bonus.

Like everyone else, I pray that Madeleine McCann will be found safe and well and that, in the meantime, the whole ghastly soap opera ceases to be the media’s preeminent obsession.

A tip for those with doubtful disability

Some half a million young people claim to be too sick to work and are in receipt of state benefits for their ailments. Of those, the majority are pretending to be doolally while the rest put on a bit of a limp when the woman from the work and pensions department comes around. The number under the age of 35 claiming disability benefits exceeds the number out of work for legitimate reasons, such as idleness or stupidity.

This is a consequence of the mental health charities forever insisting that we are all crippled or bonkers in some way, that disablement is a valid lifestyle choice and that no stigma should attach to those who have no legs or howl at the moon. Well indeed – and the message has got through: our young people think of disablement as both fashionable and lucrative.

They need to be disabused of this notion. Next time you see a young person in a wheelchair, tip it over and drag the occupant down to the nearest job centre, lecturing him or her all the while on the dignity of labour.

Those new energy-efficient light bulbs the government is forcing us to use will kill you if you eat them, apparently, which is bad news for lunatics. Also, if one breaks, you must evacuate the house on account of the seeping mercury vapour, invest in breathing apparatus and call round the council workmen. How many men does it take to change one of the new light bulbs? About 10, and they all might die as a consequence.

Still, as your skin sloughs off and your kidneys seize up and your brain dissolves, you can be cheered to know that as a result Britain is 0.001% closer to achieving its target for a reduction in carbon emissions. Every little helps, even poisonous light bulbs which don’t work very well.

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