A laryngitis pandemic would be the perfect present for a nation of wafflers

The voice came back at the weekend, thank you. And if you were one of the people who telephoned me last week and could hear nothing from my end of the line but heavy breathing, I do apologise.

Laryngitis.

Well, what’s so funny about that? Being without a voice, for some reason, suspends other people’s sympathy and stimulates their humour. If you tell people you’ve lost your leg, they don’t tend to fall around the place.

Tell them you’ve lost your voice, and they go hysterical. Some of them make jokes about your husband and co-workers being grateful to God for your silence, and have a good chortle over that. Some of them just want to hear you trying to talk, and crack up at how pathetic your efforts are.

Nobody takes laryngitis seriously, despite the fact that George Washington is supposed to have died from it. But then, George Washington, aside from being a self-righteous little sod of a toddler (that “I cannot tell a lie, Pa” stuff when he was caught for chopping down the cherry tree) was weird in many respects.

That clenched look he has on the (wonderfully weak, at the moment) dollar bill is because, when he had the picture engraved, he was wearing false teeth with springs at the back to keep them pressed against the roof of his mouth and his lower jaw, respectively.

The springs did a great job. His teeth never parted company with him in public. On the other hand, the springs were so strong, he had to work really hard to keep them from forcing him into an open-mouthed approach to the world like the MGM lion.

Is it any wonder he died of laryngitis? His resistance was probably lowered by fighting his own teeth.

Partly because I wanted to avoid all the jollity surrounding laryngitis, I did try to keep going at work, the first couple of days after my voice handed in its sick cert. The only thing I got out of my heroism was a new nickname. My boss dubbed me the Hoarse Whisperer.

What was weird, though, was how many people whispered back.

It’s an old rule of conflict management, that if you want to calm someone down and stop them shouting at you, what you do is lower, rather than raise, your own voice.

Some primeval instinct forces the other person to lower their voice to match yours, even if they’re furious with you.

I discovered, last week, that much the same thing happens when you’re forced to whisper to another person. The two of you can be discussing something trivial and positive about which there is no secrecy whatever, but if one of you has laryngitis, the discussion turns into something akin to a malign conspiracy covertly conducted in a library.

Mid-week, however, when voicelessness had clearly settled in for the long haul, I gave up and went home.

Trying to shout in a whisper in order to be understood is tiring, and makes you sound like a vacuum cleaner throwing a hissy fit.

I then discovered another little-known reality. If you go home suffering from anything else, people leave you alone. If you go home suffering from laryngitis, people decide you’re not REALLY that sick. So they ring you.

And you have to answer, because of the first of the modern Ten Commandments (watch this space for the other nine) which goes: I am the Lord Thy Phone and when I ring, Thou Shalt Answer Me.

Even people who could have texted, telephoned instead.

One of my clients worked out a system allowing interaction. She asked me to make like that unfortunate Frenchman who wrote a wonderful book when largely paralysed, by blinking a number of times to indicate letters.

She wanted me to snap my fingers a set number of times for yes and a different number of times for no, while she put propositions to me.

I baulked at that. A digit too far, you will agree.

The ease with which the office replaced me would have been humiliating if it wasn’t for the fact that I was in good company. In one sense. President Bush got laryngitis the same day I did.

He was due to appear at the 80th anniversary dinner of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a mere few blocks down from Central Park, where his helicopter was going to land.

His arrival would have forced temporary closure of a sizeable chunk of mid-town Manhattan. The city’s traffic officers were livid.

Their problem was that Friday was a gridlock alert day. Just as country shoppers used to go to Dublin to do their Christmas shopping on the 8th of December, so non-New Yorkers go to Manhattan to shop on the weekend before the 10th, which meant that 100,000 additional vehicles were due to arrive in the city.

Snow was also forecast. In that situation, a Presidential cancellation causes nothing but celebration.

It’s not the first time laryngitis has been politically helpful. Back in the middle of the Clinton/Lewinsky sex crisis, American feminists had an awful time of it, because they could not but condemn a President who used the aphrodisiac of power so indiscriminately to break vows made to one of the sisterhood, but on the other hand, they thought Bill Clinton, in politics and person, was one delicious bit of brainy manhood.

Caught between a rock and a cigar, so to speak, many of the feminist spokespeople talked complete drivel to the media.

The best known of them, on the other hand, said nothing.

Nothing at all.

Not a word. Not a syllable. Gloria Steinem, the most articulate of an articulate generation of women, the beautiful one with the aviator glasses and the blonde hair, was suffering too bad a dose of laryngitis to give any interviews.

Which means that, in the sorry record of that tacky episode, she is missing in inaction, which is quite the best place to be.

The Guardian newspaper recently ran an experiment to find out if it’s true that women talk a lot more than men do. They wired up two writers, to record everything they said in one day and allow the respective word-counts to be compared.

The end results were skewed.

The woman turned off her recorder accidentally for several hours, so her word count had to be extrapolated from the rest of the hours in her day. The man told everybody he met he was wearing a wire, which inevitably limited conversational freeflow.

What did emerge from both flawed recordings, however, was one inescapable truth: most of us talk the greatest load of irrelevant guff all day.

We talk too much, too often, about nothing much. Less than ten% of what we say is coherent, interesting or significant — and yet we have the effrontery to criticise politicians for waffling.

A pandemic of laryngitis would be the perfect Christmas present for the nation.