It’s that time of year again. No, not Autumn. Not Halloween. Not even Christmas shopping.
It’s Man Flu season. I know. I'm sorry.
Listen carefully on the morning train, you’ll hear a distinctly male chorus of coughs. They won’t be serious coughs, there will be no rattling of phlegm, but they will be dramatic. So dramatic, in fact, you will wonder how they even mustered up the strength to get themselves up in that morning.
Still not convinced? Remember when when Marcus from IT Support was grumpy yesterday because he had a “tickly throat”? You got an Out of Office/It’s Possible I May Die Today reply from him today, didn’t you?
Like it or not, Man Flu Season is upon us, and Lemsip are acknowledging this unfortunate yet inevitable time of year with sympathy for both men and women affected by Man Flu - albeit a little differently.
On Lemsip’s Facebook page they’re taken the classic James Brown song “It’s a Man’s World” and turned it into “It’s a Man’s Flu”, with an added twist: you can let your “victim” know how dramatic/unsympathetic they're being by creating your own “It’s a Man’s Flu”, personalising it with his/her photo and name, and pasting it to their Facebook wall. It will even have ‘James Brown’ dedicate the song them by during the songs intro.
There are two version of the "It's a Man's Flu" song - one from a woman's perspective, and the other from a man's perspective.
Here's what Man Flu is like from a woman's point of view...
Obviously it’s quite funny to joke about Man Flu, but it’s not so funny when your poor sick man who is actually sick is accused of hamming it up. And it’s even less funny when you’re accused, like in the video, of being unsympathetic to a, as they call it, “snivelling wimp”.
Desptie the Man Flu videos playing in to gender stereotyping (hello handbag, stiletto and lipstick!) it’s still quite funny. I’d advise only sending this to your partner if they have a sense of humour about Man Flu, if not, you’re no doubt in for a row. And rowing with someone full of Man Flu is not a pretty picture. (Literally. It can get quite sweaty. And snotty.)