THE one good thing about the flu epidemic that I can see is that it gives us something else to talk about rather than the weather.

I mean for months now all we have been able to talk about is the weather. Mainly the rain.

I've found myself becoming totally obsessed with rain along with everyone else.

I understand that Eskimos, or more properly the Inuit people who live in the frozen north (Inuit is a good word to learn, it's sure to come up should you be on 'Do You Want to be a Millionaire). Anyway, the Inuit have several dozen words for snow.

Fascinating that, because to us snow is, well, white and a bit cold. But apparently the Inuit can poetically describe snow in dozens of ways, and every other Inuit knows what they are talking about. Which just goes to show what living in places where nights last six months does to you.

Rain, now, that's different. We have a fair number of descriptions for rain. Driving, cats and dogs, showers, downpours, torrential, spitting, and in Cornwall, sideways. And then there's that sort of fine rain that wets you more than any other rain. Just try explaining that to a foreigner when they look outside and see a fine misty rain and you tell them it wets you more than the sort of rain that happened yesterday which resembled people throwing buckets of water over you.

The trouble is, I keep saying these things, which is worrying because I normally get very cross when people moan continuously about the weather.

My son is the sort of person who irritatingly reads out the temperature charts in the newspaper listing temperature and rainfall in other parts of the world. Last year, when he was staying for a week, I got to the point of nearly force-marching him to the car and threatening to drive him home again when he told me for the ninth time that it was hotter in Prague than it was in Callington and we were only two degrees warmer than Siberia.

So I'm quite pleased to have something else to discuss, even if one does have to listen to everyone else's flu symptoms and whether they've got a tight chest or a loose chest.

We've all had it at home, and in fact the other morning the house sounded like an orchestra warming up to perform some kind of coughing symphony. Even the grey cat joined in with one of those dry coughs which usually heralds the depositing of something fairly disgusting onto something fairly unwashable. In this case he seemed to merely being chummy and entering into the spirit of the cacophony.

When I was a child the thought of getting flu terrified me, mainly because my grandmother was always talking about the great flu epidemic of 1918 when, according to her, little children dropped like flies. Mostly those who refused to wear a liberty bodice and didn't button up their overcoats properly.

At the first sign of a cold my grandmother would go into action to ward it off and prevent the dreaded flu gaining a foothold which would surely be followed swiftly by the grim reaper.

In those days nobody bothered to make medicine taste nice. No old nonsense about strawberry flavoured syrup and little tablets tasting of nice fresh orange juice. Medicine tasted like it looked - long boiled creosote. Then there were the various concoctions to inhale - involving an enamel basin, a large towel and grandmother's hands on the back of your neck to keep your head over the basin of steaming smelly liquid.

If I was really lucky she would spot a roadmender and make me stand over his vat of boiling tar, breathing in the fumes which were supposed to be good for you. If tar was off the menu, it would be a dollop of Vick up each nostril.

Other preventative measures included cod-liver oil, which even the orange juice you took it with didn't improve and I suspect one of the reasons we are not a fish-loving nation is because a large percentage of the population were forced to swallow that hideous fishy stuff as children. I bet the French, who so adore fish, were never made to gollop down liquid cod.

Come to think of it we have always associated fish with illness and served it more as a punishment than anything else. Why else would those recovering from some malady be put on a light fish diet, which usually consisted of boiled white fish, usually cod. It may have started off as white, but by the time it arrived on the plate it was pale grey with little flecks of black skin sticking to it, and often smothered in a totally tasteless old army blanket of white sauce.

But I digress.

Having survived the cures and probably staved off the dreaded flu, you were usually then subjected to the 'fresh air' treatment, which meant being dragged out of the house for a walk in all weathers because fresh air was good for you whereas reading a book by the fire wasn't.

I could never really work out why fresh air was so good for you and yet a light draught wasn't. 'Shut that door there's a terrible draught', adults would yell at you if you left the door open a tiny crack. The same adults who that same morning had pushed your unwilling frame out of the door into the teeth of a howling gale. And there was also the puzzle of keeping warm. You endured hours of nagging about wearing your gloves and scarf and buttoning up your cardigan and donning layers of itchy underwear. Then come the night you were expected to clamber between icy sheets, like slipping between two fillets of frozen plaice, in an unheated bedroom

Fires, of course, were coal and only lit in the sitting room. A fire in the bedroom was usually only lit when you were really ill and in fact if you woke up one morning and found someone lighting a fire you usually thought your hour was up.

Colds were not all that bad because once it was established it was only a cold the old 'feed a cold and starve a fever' adage went to work and there were plenty of substantial stick to the ribs foods, with bacon and onion suet pudding, jam roly poly and baked rice with jam pudding, and my grandmother's favourite cure of home-made lemonade.

I look round our poor coughing shivering household armed with its potions and pills and salves and bottles of sweet tasting medicines flavoured with cherry and banana and orange; where everyone talks confidently about flu jabs and post viral symptoms and immune systems and vitamins and I think that nothing much has changed. We can't beat the common cold.

Fortunately nobody makes cod liver oil any more.