Summer cold

Is there anything more disgusting than a summer cold? It flies in the face of nature - colds are for winter, not summer. I'm leaving a paper trail of used tissues throughout the house and probably a trail of germs too. The cats love having me home though; I get a lot of cuddles, but probably more to comfort themselves than through any altruistic feline impulse. Gareth Morgan's proposal for us to get rid of domestic cats because of damage to bird-life is not going to happen in this house any time soon, nor, I suspect, in many households. What he doesn't realise is that we would be knee-deep in rats and mice if not for the humble moggy, and rats eat birds eggs and young chicks. To really increase the number of native birds we'd have to re-establish lowland forests,  coupled with an intensive programme of pest eradication that would be on-going. This is too hard-basket; much easier to ban people's pets in a knee-jerk sort of way. It would be nice to live in a simple world where there are simplistic solutions to every problem. But we don't.