First the laughter, then the tears. It's been an emotional kind of a week, but maybe that's what I should always expect when this living corpse - my body is a temple, yes, but a temple to Satan - is assailed by Bloke Flu, which is obviously so much worse than the mimsy colds that girlies get.

Rat-hunks of phlegm. Great Grand-Guignol globules of something seriously odd - ectoplasm? Might I possess an inner tyre? - raining from orifices, and then, on Thursday, my eyes started doing things.

I blame, first, the lunch. Just 30 minutes I popped in for, to see three old friends in a fine central London restaurant for what can only be described as a junket, replete with fine wines and food, 90 per cent of which I was going to miss by going off to work, in the cold. I greeted and air-kissed, and kept my ectoplasm to myself, and then the damned man got up, and started to speak.

Goodness but he was full of himself. Jiminy but he was dull. Ten minutes passed. No wine. Fifteen minutes. On, on, on. Tiny glances were passed. It was really quiet, very austere, very linen, and only a couple of tables, everyone could be seen by everyone, and then one chap opposite cast a shifty glance around and wrote down, on the back of the menu, the words 'Hind', 'Leg' and 'Donkey'.

And it happened. Happened in a way I'd forgotten: a hot flushed embarrassment from school, and church, and anywhere else you really can't laugh, like funerals. I began to make insane squeaks. Not often, just every minute or so, but trust me it's terrifying: you think you've got it sorted, solemn face, thoughtful grasp on stem of water-glass, eyes in the middle-distance, trying to think of something awful, such as sex with wrinkly napalmed nuns, or Jeremy Clarkson writing a novel, then the involuntary part of your brain lets you down again and a pigletty high C trumps from the corner of your mouth.

I busied my head in my napkin, my glass, my tissues: people tried to help by pouring me more water, but as they passed it over I would feel their shoulders quietly shaking and be off again. Laughter should be therapeutic: this was truly grim. I was waiting, so desperately, for a joke, even something poisonously unfunny, actress/bishop stuff, so I could greet it with a cornucopia of thigh-slaps and possibly get my whole head under the table, but he didn't do jokes; he did 25 minutes. The one saving grace is that he didn't seem to hear Master Piggy: he could only hear himself.

How closely, I wonder, are they related, laughter and tears? I'm not exactly saying that later that night I cried, heaven forfend, might as well change right now into a pinafore dress, but... well. You spend an hour, late at night and knackered, trying to find out on the net who runs our railways, and when the trains run, and why they don't go to sensible places, and then you try to phone a human being, and realise there are none, only other websites. Then you try to remember, all snotty and tired, which rip-off directory inquiries service might help, and you try being given four wrong numbers in a row. And then, please, stagger wearily to the loo, eyes blurring with frustration, and knock the only loo-roll, nicely balanced on the side of the bath, straight into the loo, and spent the night blowing your tender nose on Exchange & Mart . But I was laughing. Honestly, I was laughing.