Ian McMillan: I’ve got a very bad case of southern discomfort

Well, I’ve discovered a variation on SAD, but with the same initials: Southern Affective Disorder. I’ve just spent a few days in the South and I came home feeling dreadful, but after just a few hours back in the North I felt whole again.

Note to Southern readers: I’m being ironic and I’m gently poking fun. Don’t get your plus-fours in a twist.

So, I went down to London to do a show in a little theatre near Vauxhall. I got the train from Doncaster feeling like a spring chicken but disembarked at King’s Cross feeling like an old hen. It’s funny how sometimes a virus is in the air, just waiting, biding its time for someone to leap on and devour. I was that victim. The virus saw me getting on at Doncaster and got me in its sights. I like to think that, somewhere just below Retford, as the North became the Midlands, the illness struck. I may have even felt a little jolt in my brain, but perhaps that’s just my overactive imagination. The South had struck.

As I walked out of the station to my hotel, I felt really cold. I was shivering, despite the warm sun and the glow from the gold the streets of London are paved with. My teeth were chattering loudly and percussively. I wanted to put another jumper on.

I checked into the hotel and in the lift to my room I became red hot. I was sweating like a prop forward after a hard game. I wanted to take my jumper off and never see a jumper again. I even said to the baffled Scandinavians I was sharing the lift with “Is it hot in here or is it just me?” like I was a character in a film. They just smiled and said: “Fourth floor please.” Blimey, I thought, this hotel’s hotter than an old folks’ home! I sat in my room and sweated. Then shivered. Then sweated. Then shivered. I was becoming a human model of the global warming debate.

The odd thing was, I didn’t feel ill. I just felt hot/cold/cold/hot. I went to the theatre and did the show; the stage lights warmed me up, which was lucky because I was freezing before we started. Then the walk to the tube station cooled me down because I was boiling. But I still didn’t feel ill. I came to the conclusion that I was suffering from SAD, or the geographical variation detailed above.

That night I became delirious and had terrible dreams that I can’t quite remember although I have a vague memory of hot towels and ice creams. The next day I had to nip to the BBC to do an interview about pies and as I sat perspiring in the holding pen I noticed that 80s pop star Howard Jones was in the next seat and Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn was in the next studio. I thought I was still delirious! I got a taxi back to the hotel because my legs had inexplicably begun to hurt and I got chatting to the driver about football and told him I was a Barnsley fan.

He laughed. “Well, I’m a Spurs fan,” he said. “And the best goal I ever saw…” and I said that I knew what he was going to say, but that didn’t stop him describing David Ginola’s goal against the mighty reds in the late 1990s when he danced through the static Barnsley defence as though they were bas-reliefs on a ruined temple wall. The South, you see: even the taxi drivers make you feel poorly!

That night, after the show, my dreams were still hot and cold but at one point they involved Howard Jones, David Ginola and Goldie Hawn taking me to the North Pole and the Equator in a special boat made of ice and fire. I got up at 3am and wandered round the room trying to find a comfortable spot to sit.

So the next night, after the show, I went home on a late, late train and as we left the South behind, the SAD began to slip away and my legs stopped hurting and my temperature began to return to normal. I still felt a bit groggy, probably through a combination of my lack of sleep and my brief proximity to 80s pop sensation Howard Jones, but otherwise I was on the mend.

I slept soundly and woke refreshed. I felt younger. I felt well. I felt, well, Northern. “Did you have a good trip?’ my wife asked. “Yep, but it’s good to be home,” I replied, adding a ‘tha knows’ for good measure.