GIRL TALK: Column

Life's banalities prove nothing to be sniffed at
I'm often asked how on earth I keep coming up with something new to write about every single week year after year. And to be honest, I often wonder this myself.
The reality is that after more than three hundred columns, a surfeit of 200,000 words no less, a girl might reasonably be expected to have run out of words all together.
In actual fact, I have found over the passage of time that the more I say, the more I can say.
This will, of course, be no surprise to any man living in silent contemplation with a member of the fairer sex, who would conclude, given half the chance, that the possibility of any woman running out of words is about as likely as life on Mars.
But it is perhaps a more peculiar talent to be able to make something as personal and complex as last week's life story of my mother and her new 70-something-year-old groom take up the same column inches as today's topic which is about my blocked nose.
I'm aware that there is most likely very little interest in my blocked nose among the general public. In fact, it's a fair assumption that even those near and dear to me would rather listen to Air Supply's Greatest Hits instead of me honking away on yesterday's hankie.
But when you feel like a fat elephant has crawled into your Nasal passage and taken up residence, it is hard to focus on anything else.
What started as a small sniff and murmur of discontent has swelled, like my red nose, into a full-blown personal drama of the sort which is entirely the preserve of someone who has never had any real issues in life to gain perspective from.
Lying awake in the wee smalls after all manner of pills and potions failed to facilitate normal breathing, I felt so peeved at the situation that I was compelled to share my thoughts by posting a status update about my blocked nose on Facebook.
It was the sort of post which on any normal occasion makes me incandescent with rage - right up there with mothers who tweet about the progress of their children's potty training or others sitting at home who feel suddenly compelled to share with the online community that they just enjoyed a particularly nice lamb chop and are thinking of following it with some icecream. Or maybe not. Or maybe.
Needless to say it was not the sort of post which had my Facebook friends on their edge of their seats with anticipation ("would her nose unblock?) nor was it imbued with any sort of wit or literary craft.
The blocked nose had brought me low and I no longer cared what impression I made among my 300-odd virtual friends, I just wanted to share my pain.
The next morning after I waded through the flood of wadded tissue paper surrounding the bed and mainlined Codral Cold, I checked my Facebook profile.
I was staggered to see the post about my nose had elicited a record number of comments from friends - both real and of the Facebook variety (those whom you have no idea who they are in real life but a sense of politeness has compelled you to accept into your online life regardless).
Helpful suggestions, old wives' tales for home-brew remedies and best wishes for a speedy recovery followed one after the other, generating almost as much interest as my friend's post seeking tips for how to toilet train her 2-year-old.
After dedicating long moments in the past crafting the sort of witty and quirky posts of which any literati could be proud, my blocked nose post showed that it is not the clever and inspired that bonds us together and inspires connection, but the banal and mundane trials of life to which we can all relate. Quite frankly, said the subtext of the responses to my sinus crisis, the real is preferable to the clever.
And so, here I am, not just posting online about my blocked nose but writing about it for the newspaper. No doubt polarising readers and generating complaints about the waste of newsprint expended on publishing such self-indulgent and utterly unworthy material.