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Sven regarded me with the same mixture of fear and concern I imagine people in plague-ridden Britain probably had to start faking after a few months. Don't get me wrong, his expression was quite genuine: He really seemed divided on whether to fetch me chicken soup or wrap me in plastic and place me outside with an identification tag.

Sven is my flatmate. He's German. He was holding a box in his hand, and our hallway was full of boxes, because he was moving out. This would probably be the last time I'd ever see him.

"Dude," Sven says

- and, no, I'm not going to go to the trouble of somehow typing his accent into the story. Authors who try to convey accents [and, let's face it, they're always trying to convey Scottish accents] by mispelling words seem to forget the fact that English isn't phonetic. Muh. If you're going to have Scottish characters speak phonetically, you have to have everyone speak phonetically, because no-one, no matter how much BBC they've watched, speaks English the way it is spelled. So by mispelling words to convey an accent, you're kind of implying that they're saying the words wrong in some fashion, when this isn't the case. Just preface the person's words with: "They spoke with a Scottish accent." and throw in the occasional "...he said in his hearty brogue..." every now and then, and let the reader deal with how it sounds in their heads. You know: Reading. So: Sven has a thick German accent. Imagine the most comical, stereotypical, 'Allo 'Allo German accent. That's Sven. You know, you never realize just how much British TV hates Germans until you've had Sven as a flatmate. Almost every hour I've spent watching TV with Sven, he usually ejaculates, at least once: "Oh, here we go! Always with the Germans!" Although we do watch Hellboy a lot.

"Dude, you don't look so good." German accent, remember.

I don't feel so good. My bones hurt. My skin's tingling. Unpleasantly. I've got a fever. I'm slick with sweat. My throat hurts, my nose is a runny tap, I'm coughing uncontrollably. I was alarmed to see blood in my phlegm, and downright terrified to see it in my vomit. In summation (you may have wanted to skip ahead to this part): I'm not feeling my best.

"Sven..."

"Yes?" He puts his box down, and takes a step towards me. Then he thinks better of it and steps back.

"...Sven...How sick do you have to miss one of the first showings of Star Wars?" I've had tickets for months. It's in an hour.

"Dude ... pretty sick."

"Well [cough] I'm sick, but surely I'm not pretty..."

I take a step forward. This is when the world starts to spin. I've got this technique I use to counter the spins. You know how, ah, if you drink too much, and your inner ear just says: "My body's trying to kill itself, I'm abandoning my post to make preparations and say farewell to my family (earlobe, wife; and trachea, son)" and the room starts spinning? Well, what i do is, I find any three intersecting lines. Four is even better, but three are easy to find because every room has several at the ceiling corners. I make the center of these three lines my focal point and I stare at them until the spinning stops. If that doesn't work, I start groaning: "Stop spinning world, please stop spinning!!" over and over. This hardly ever works. In fact, it's only worked once to my recollection, but even if it only has a 10% chance of success, can't hurt to try, right? Actually, if I was sober, a cost/benefit analysis of loudly groaning something stupid would probably result in me not doing it, but that's never been the case.

Until now. I'm sober, I'm spinning, and nothing is working. I fall into the door frame of my bedroom.

"Jesus!" It occurs to me at this moment that people who claim to take the Bible "literally" are full of crap, cause Jesus used analogies all the time. He referred to himself as "The Lamb of God." No-one takes that literally. He would say that all men are his brothers, yet also bang on about how he was everyone's father. That doesn't track, either. I should probably focus on getting well.

Sven finally overcomes his revulsion and grabs me.

"You gotta lie down, dude."

"Star Wars. Ben. Dagobah system."

"Star Wars is going to have to wait. I'm calling you a doctor."

"Awww SNAP!"