SUNSHINE SUPERMAN

We all grow old and subsequently we all die. 'Nough said.

When Terence Tinnigan and his wife Elsie (nee Brannigan) caught colds last summer they both thought they were going to die. Terence was convinced, because the nature of his sneezes created so much havoc and general chaos, what with tissues flying every which-way and the front room (where he lay, gasping and exploding and huffing and puffing) getting coated with a thin viscous layer of snot.

"I'm dying," he moaned at Elsie, "I know I am, this is more than a cold, it's more than man-flu, it's the prelude to me meeting my maker, and he won't like it, me with my nose dripping and dribbling like this and with my sins still in me!"

Elsie had yet to catch the cold so she lacked sympathy like women can who see their spouses for what they really are, feeble sufferers in a world of suffering.

"You're no more going to die than I am," she scoffed. "You're as fit as a fiddle underneath that cold, and nobody ever heard of a fit man with a cold doing anything as draconian as dying of it, and anyway, you don't believe in no Maker!"

When she said you're as fit as I am the words were to come back to haunt her the very next day because she started that new day with a cough and a sneeze and a drip-drip-drip from her nasal orifice, and a headache and that wretched feeling you get all over when you're convinced you might be dying of a cold.

"I'm dying," she moaned at her loving husband.

"Join the dead, then," he responded.

"You mean the nearly dead?" she asked, dripping onto the top sheet via a large nostril that insisted in leaking all over the place.

"The definitely dead," he told her. "I had one of those dreams last night, you know the sort, when you think you're dying, and mostly they come to an end when you wake up, but this one didn't. It carried on until I actually died, so now I'm dead..."

"And talking?" she mocked him, sneezing into a tissue from the box next to his side of the bed. "I've heard of talking in your sleep, but talking in your death? There never was any such thing, just you go and ask Father Abraham if you're not so sure."

"Father Abraham's a Christian and he knows nothing," moaned Terence. "Deluded, that's what he is, so if he says I'm not dead when I know that I am then he's wrong."

"I'm dying, too," she moaned.

The next day when she woke up she told Terence that she was dead.

"I've had that dream of yours, and I'm dead too," she said, spluttering.

"That's the two of us, then." he moaned. "Two of us, dead as dodos. Oh,mercy me. Mercy, mercy me!"

When the bedroom door opened from the outside two minutes later (at least it seemed like two minutes) they both felt shocked. After all, it was their bedroom and strangers most certainly were not expected.

"Hey! Who are you?" demanded Terence.

"What do you think you're doing? Thieving swines!" roared Elsie in her best matriarchal voice.

"Did you hear something?" sneered one of them men.

"What sort of something?" asked the other.

"Like voices? Distant voices? Talking voices..."

"Nah,” responded the other. "You've got ghosts on the brain."

"Mebbe. Come on, then. Let's get these old farts boxed up and to the chapel. Then we can have a pint down the Sunshine Superman. It's you're turn to pay!"

"What did these two die of, then?" asked the other.

"Life, I reckon. They've just got to be older than the hills. Come on then! Let's get 'em boxed up!"

And then they went, heaving a pair of nice pine coffins whilst Terence and Elsie asked themselves what in the name of the Almighty might be going on in their cosy little bedroom on a summer's day in June.

Meanwhile, outside, the snow piled up