I realised while I was off sick for a whole week why it is that guys don’t take sick leave. We go to work when we’re sick, and if we do take leave we go back before we’re better. It’s not because we love working, or define ourselves by our occupations. Quite the opposite. While we are in the routine of working every day, we can maintain the suspension of cognition that allows us to spend the best part of our lives working to make someone else rich. Holidays in the modern world don’t break that, because we spend them so busy anyway.

But when you are sick, you actually stop and relax, especially if you are home for more than a day or two. Read a book, watch a video, get enough sleep and wind down for a change. Get some little projects done with no pressure to finish them, whether you upgrade your website, fix some stuff from the fixing pile, do music or creative stuff, or spend some quality time in the shed with your woodwork tools. An hour of that a day, is hardly a full day’s work, but it’s refreshing for the soul.

You can pick the kids up from school, have them bathed and fed by 6:30 and for a change have some family time at the end of each day. Suddenly you realise how rich and fulfilling life can actually be when you attend to your health and spiritual needs.

Then your medical certificate runs out, and you have to go back to the soul crushing routine of working for the man, made all the worse for the brief taste of actual living you’ve just had. It’s easier just to keep working and pretend you don’t know anything better.