The dreaded pre-winter lurgy has arrived on the Mail's editorial floor.

In fact, if you ripped out all the technology and the modern office furniture it would (slightly) resemble a plague hospital at the time of Pepys.

Knots of hunched scribblers with dark rings under their eyes and dry, hacking coughs moan about what they have done in past lives to deserve this curse.

Small queues form near the cold water tap and tatty hankies are pulled slowly from pockets to mop dripping noses.

It is almost a welcome distraction from the fever to compare the difference in the victims' sneezes.

Chief sub-editor Ann McVea's is somewhere between a cough and a fully-paid-up sneeze.

Sub and columnist Stan Ellidge's effort sounds like a high note played on a tin whistle while business reporter John Simpson's blow-out is an impersonation of what would imagine o be the noise made during the garroting of a horse.

Corny's own personal lurgy was not helped by stepping on one of the many "booby-trapped" Barrow paving stones and half a gallon of icy water shooting up a trouser leg.

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