Around the beginning of my second year at university, a meningitis epidemic swept the country. My mother gave me a newspaper clipping listing some of the symptoms which I stuck on my wall for future reference. A month or two later I became very ill. As I had work to be handed in shortly, which had to be done on the university computers, I had no choice but to drag myself onto campus, rather than staying in bed as I should have done. I imagined it was just some bug that would pass in a day or two, but checked against the meningitis symptoms just in case. I had a few of them, but probably less than half, and they were the sort of symptoms you get with most bugs - dizziness, headaches, a sore throat. I decided I hadn't got meningitis.

After a couple of days of this, I got a phone call from my dad. We were talking about the possibility of it being meningitis, and I assured him that I didn't think it was. "Anyway, you don't sound confused," he said. "That's one of the major symptoms."

Now, since coming down with whatever I had come down with, I had done a lot of very stupid things. This is not uncommon, but I usually limit myself to one or two a day. I had of late far exceeded my usual rate of stupidity. For instance, I had a bowl of nuts and raisins which I had spilled on the floor. I collected them back up, but the floor hadn't been vacuumed for some time and I didn't want to eat them without giving them a wash. So that evening, when I climbed in the bath, I poured them in with me.

So far, all well and good, and surely what any sane person would have done in the same situation. But these weren't just nuts and raisins - they were nuts, raisins, and chocolate chips. Which have a tendency to dissolve. I don't think I need to spell out the rest of the story. Suffice to say, I was a lot cleaner before having the bath than I was afterwards.

This and other similar incidents seemed to me to suggest a good deal of confusion, and consequently, when my dad told me that this was a major symptom of meningitis, I suddenly became convinced that this was what I had. Several university students had contracted meningitis in recent months, and most had died within two or three days. At this point, I had been ill for three days. I decided that I was about to die.

I took it surprisingly well. I'd had a good life, and lived to the grand age of nineteen. Most people consider this a young age to die at, but there they make the mistake of averaging the life expectancies of everyone who's born for their yardstick. But this is a very small and very fortunate subset of all those people who could have lived. As a good close approximation, no one has ever been born. I feel sufficiently lucky to have made it into that vanishingly small elite that an early death compared to its other members honestly didn't bother me very much.

Saying that, I was very glad a few days later when I got better.

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