You cannot sneeze in public any more without risking glares – but I’ve just eaten this bowl of hot wings | Brigid Delaney

It used to be that you’d get a bit of a cold – a wee sniffle – and be sent on your way with a hanky tucked into your sleeve and a packet of Butter Menthols in your pocket. You and your cold would then just go about your day, a little more slowly – the only difference being that periodically you would eject a quantity of mucus through the air, sometimes with dramatic sound effects (“ahhhhh – ahh … ahhhhh – CHOOOOOO”) and the contents of this expulsion would hopefully land in your hanky, which you would then put back up your sleeve.

No one would bat an eyelid as you managed your secretions on the street, in a restaurant, in the supermarket. In fact when you sneezed, people – often strangers – would turn to you and benevolently say, “Bless you”.

They would actually bless you. And you would say “thank you”.

Now, sneezing in public is to risk the glare of a hundred evil eyes. Any mark of sickness – a sneeze, a sniffle, a cough, a splutter, blowing of the nose – is to invite the suspicious question: Are you sick? And if so, why aren’t you at home?

So deeply have we internalised the message of stay-at-home-if-you-are-sick, so conscious have we become of pathogens and how they spread, so hyper-vigilant to Covid and all its symptoms, so fearful are we of getting it, that we now operate in a binary. If you are sick – in any way – stay home. If you are well, you can go out.

But what if you have tested negative for Covid and are just a little poorly? Should you stay home too?

**

I’m waiting for friends at the pub on Friday night, and have just enjoyed a bowl of hot wings. Yes, I am at the end of a minor cold but the bowl of wings is mimicking the worst symptoms of a virus. My nose is running, my eyes are streaming, I may have to sneeze.

But I must not sneeze. If I sneeze, people will think I’m sick. And I’m not sick. Really, I’m not!

My friend Matt arrives at the pub. He goes in for a hug. I step back and make a vague hand flappy movement indicating that the space between us should not be breached.

“Dang these wings are hot!!” I say, pointing at a bowl of gnawed bones.

He takes a moment, looks at me and says, “Have you got a cold?”

I’m still trying to hold in a sneeze. My voice comes out sounding strangled and high.

“C’mon! I’ve just eaten hot wings!” I give him a wounded look.

“You look and sound like you’ve got a cold. You’re clutching a tissue.”

It is true, there is a balled up tissue in my hand – soaked with a mixture of snot and hot sauce.

“It’s the wings! They were messy!”

He looks skeptical.

“Hot sauce stimulates the mucus gland!”

Other friends arrive. I hang back, not hugging them.

“She’s sick,” says Matt. “Stay away from her.”

“I’m not sick, I’ve just had hot wings.”

We are on a big table and my hostile friends place me down at the end – by myself. I cannot hear what anyone is saying.

“Don’t come near me,” they say when I try to come closer.

I keep my distance from my friends and for most of the night I feel normal, not sick at all, not infectious. “If I did have anything – which I do not – this is the tail end,” I say.

They are almost convinced – after all, I have not coughed once.

I move slightly closer. The feeling amongst us is relaxed. My friends are telling funny, gross-out stories about people who turn up to emergency rooms with bizarre things stuck in their rectums. I crane in, trying to hear. Then I can feel it coming on. It seems to start in my feet – a bolt of energy that is trying to move through me. Holding it back is like trying to hold back a tsunami. I will not win. It is a sneeze. It’s a big one.

I step away from my friends. But they are looking at me now, my face contorted with the effort of full body suppression. Blimey – is this a sneeze or is this an exorcism? I turn my back to them and it comes out – “Ahhhhhhh … chooooooooooo!”

No one blesses me. Instead they all start exclaiming, “We knew you were sick!!!!!! It’s not the wings!!!!”

I leave the pub, chastened. I am never going out again.

Just before I leave, we are joined by two others. The next day we’ll all get messages saying that one of these women tested positive for Covid that morning, and we should get tested too. Matt was sitting next to her.

It’s messy, this part of the pandemic.

People have different levels of comfort around wearing a mask, isolating, exposure to other colds and flus, exposure to other people, and ideas around how others should behave. We all have to share public space, and quite rightly people should stay home if sick and infectious. The grey area – if people are well enough to function and socialise but they have a cold, or are recovering from a cold – is yet to be settled. Like so much else right now, what used to be normal (getting around with a cold) has been wildly recast.