James Griffin: A-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down

Opinion

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, swine flu isn't/wasn't the global nightmare-Armageddon-apocalypse scenario it was first painted to be by the world's media.

Unless something has changed remarkably in the scant few days between me writing these words and you reading them, I'm going to presume the planet is essentially in the same rather shoddy state it has been for a while now, rather than coughing up phlegm on death's door. And if I'm wrong, I'm sure the inaccuracy of this column is, by some considerable margin, the least of anyone's worries.

Personally I won't miss this latest pandemic scare - or "hamdemic" as it has been labelled in some quarters. I certainly won't miss the pervading sense of paranoia; wondering if each sneeze and every snuffle is the onset of something malicious, rather than just New Zealand's natural propensity to get hay fever.

Mind you, having said that, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in the way people looked at you and then took a little half-step back if you blew your nose after telling them you'd just got off a plane from Los Angeles. I guess everyone finds their own silver lining in the dark clouds of global catastrophe. One thing I will miss, after we've consigned swine flu to the big bottom drawer of global panic labelled "bird flu" and "Y2K", is seeing quite so much of Health Minister Tony Ryall on television. It's not that I was listening to anything he said, you understand, it was the stripes that got me hooked on Tony.

Stripy blazer over stripy shirt, with a stripy tie thrown in for effect - none of the stripes remotely complimenting the other. To me, it was a great pity that Tony Ryall did most of his pandemic work sitting at a table, talking seriously to the press, framed in a close-up to make everything seem even more serious than it turned out to be.

Thus we were robbed of the opportunity to see all of him standing up, hopefully adding some nice pin-striped trousers to the spicy gumbo of stripyness that is Tony's style. It would have been awesome and would have completely taken my mind off any pandemic. Either that or my TV would have exploded. Alas, this opportunity to strobe-out with Tony seems to have passed. The only compensation for this loss of great TV viewing is the knowledge that there will definitely be a next time.

Another pandemic will come along to get us all excited and scared and stocking up on tinned food. Whether or not National will still be in power and Tony will still have his job or whether he's moved on to polka dot-themed outfits is very much in the lap of the gods. And of the viruses, of course. So where will the next virus come from? Which unfortunate creature will be name-checked in the next influenza scare? Monkey flu? Panda flu? We better hope it's not sheep flu, otherwise this country is well and truly down the global toilet.

Or will the next influenza bug hit us from a completely unexpected direction? Being sneaky little buggers who mutate all the time, will those sneaky viruses find new and devilishly sinister ways to wage war on us humans? The coffee flu, for example, could decimate large portions of the population and leave Ponsonby Rd devoid of all life, a ghost street where once there was the sound of frothing lattes. What about a Paul Henry flu? He already causes flu-like symptoms in many people.

What if he actually evolved into a giant virus and became the agent of contagion, somehow spreading his viral evil across the airwaves, into our living rooms and then into our respiratory systems? Far-fetched, possibly, but frightening once you start to think about it. Or what about a flu virus that is spread by the use of the very hand-sanitiser that is meant to curb the spread of the infection?

All that needs to happen for this to become fact is for the influenza virus to mutate a love of irony into its cellular make up and we, the human race, are screwed. But here and now, in the brief and rapidly passing age of boring old swine flu, that's pretty much it, I suppose. Another near-miss for the human species and now we can sit back and wait for whatever it is those nasty mutating viruses have planned for us next, so stripy Tony can leap back into action. I can hardly wait. Still, at least it took our minds of the recession for a bit, didn't it? Thanks for that, you pigs.