We've all been to them — retirement do's where management drones on about how, during more than 50 years of loyal service, Bert, Dick, Harold, Mavis, Marjorie, Agnes (take your pick) has never taken a single day off sick...

Well, big deal! All I can say is, thank God Bert, Dick or Agnes finally slipped off their corporate coil, 'cos I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to work next to them.

Why? Because no-one's that healthy, which means at some point during their working lives, these fine, upstanding, gold-watch-awarded retirees will have wheezed, coughed, spluttered, dribbled, drooled, sweated, bled and run for the toilet — all within just a few feet of their put-upon colleagues. I mean, can you think of anything more selfish?

When you're sick, you should stay at home or face quarantine at work — you know, a whole floor or wing of an office screened off for those who insist on dragging their lesion-scabbed bodies into work.

You see, I've never understood why it's considered so heroic to crawl out of bed, stinky, drizzled in a sheen of sweat, aching in every muscle, with clammy palms and a glistening nose, only to find yourself heralded when you clock-in at 9am as the living, (barely) breathing embodiment of the free market economy.

To me, you're just someone I have to sit next to and whose phone I may have to share.

In fact, when I think of those holidays of mine ruined because two weeks before, when diagnosed with Plague, you still insisted on turning up, weak, fragile and frothing at both ends, I wonder why I didn't finish Nature's job there and then instead of letting you join me for lunch in the office canteen.

And these last few weeks I've noticed, Oxford has itself become infected.

For instance, in the Oxford Playhouse recently, those hacking and sneezing in the aisles easily outnumbered those of us who weren't (indeed, I could barely hear the actors on stage for all the 'tishooing' erupting around me).

And on numerous buses, fellow passengers sitting behind me ALWAYS, it seems, boast colds or stomach cramps (how do I know they have cramps? Because their warm, almost 'damp' breaths reek of pub toilets).

Now, before there's a county-wide epidemic, maybe we should all take a fresh look at illness. Being sick is nothing to be ashamed of — after all, it happens to every single one of us, and normally involves excessive production of mucus or bile (both, if you're really unlucky).

At home, you can be cared for. We, as your work colleagues, will bear you in our thoughts and wish you well. And, as far as your loss of productivity at work is concerned, it's nothing more than a momentary blip in your employment record.

But if you TRULY care about your employer, just remember that every person you sit next to, attend a meeting with or cadge a lift from, is likely also to become sick, experience shivers, and perhaps worst of all, feel pressured by your example to struggle into work. And so the cycle continues...

Dammit, where's your sense of public-spiritedness? Can't you get it into your thick heads that no-one (apart from management) respects the brown-noser who, fresh from the operating theatre, wanders into work, Metzenbaum scissors still dangling from their wound.

Better to just take illness on the chin and stay away.

It's far less antisocial and gives you a chance to catch up with Jeremy Kyle and Trisha Goddard.