It goes spring, summer, autumn, winter, flu. This is a season of sickness, and the only season yet to be immortalised in a poem. There are no hedges and buttercups here, only the creeping mountain of toilet paper, scrunched, the smells are not those of lilacs, instead the ripe breath of someone with some terrible memory in their throat.

Flu is walking among us, poking us with its poisoned umbrellas

Can you remember a sicker time? When it wasn’t unusual for at least two of your colleagues to be in bed for a week, not including the one who insists on martyring into work looking like a badly maintained scrotum, sharing out their illness among everybody like birthday cake, when small talk ended and began with nothing other than flu?

Flu is walking among us, poking us with its poisoned umbrellas, and as we hear more about the fatal gravity of this seemingly casual illness, the whispering about hand washing and competitive bed rest gets louder. And this flu is bad – three times as many people are dying of flu this winter in the UK compared with last year, with around 700 people being admitted to hospital with it a week. A week! If your Google history is as telling as your fingerprint, then come this February we are all revealed as feverish hypochondriacs hanging on by a thread: “Is this flu, or just a cold?” “What is the correct Pantone shade for snot?” “Is death coming?” “When?”

But something quite lovely happens in these times of phlegm, which is that people come together, in their paranoia and heat. Everywhere you go, the smallest town, the biggest Lidl, it’s possible to get to know strangers by simply asking if they’ve had it yet. They will know what you’re talking about and they will raise their eyebrows and blow a sharp ooh from their lips before regaling you with the density of their own sick experience – some the vomiting bug, some the cold that came from hell, stopping off quickly in north London before continuing its journey into the lungs of every last fool of us.

I was at the chemist waiting for my flu jab (mates, have a flu jab, it’s not too late – even if you do get one of the flu strands the vaccination doesn’t cover, it will mean the one you get will go faster and feel less bad, please), sitting next to a jittery man waiting for his methadone. When I emerged, pricked, we weighed up the pluses and minuses of a week sweating in the juices of a hundred nightmares with the pinch of a quick needle in your arm, and he decided to book a vaccination, too. He asked if it hurt, and I said no, bravely. As he swigged his methadone I asked what it tasted like. “Horrid,” he grimaced. “Wouldn’t recommend. See you next time.”

After that, sickness bloomed all around me, my parents hacking into tissues like characters in the final third of a film, passing this illness between them like a Sunday supplement. It reminded me of living in a shared house as a student, when Joe went into Steve’s room to see if he needed a Lemsip, but was unable to cross the threshold on account of the fact he’d started retching at the smell of flu. At home last week my boyfriend lay in bed like something left by gangsters for a snitch to find, dragging himself to the kettle in my absence, his skin a sort of Farrow & Ball beige.

Our daughter became a walking germ, her temperature spiking at odd hours, her 20-a-day cough noisy in my ear as she slept with her head on my head, the thing finally culminating in a weekend of earache that made her spasm with pain. And me, my eyes went red. That was it. I woke up, and my eyes had swollen into two split crab-apples, bloodshot, and I felt this grand tiredness, like I was repressing a memory. But it was good! It was good, it feels good, doesn’t it, to be… part of something?

This is as close as the UK gets to agreeing. The politics of flu are minimal – we are truly all in this together, our sympathy for those suffering is honest and noisy, and when we do slip into a bored sort of stupor after listening to another complaint about snot, we’re soon rewarded with something new – a shocking death overseas perhaps, or the story of someone who coughed their actual tongue off. The sickness doesn’t discriminate, so neither can we.

We are in it together, this pit of tissues, this sugary storm of suffering. Hold on to this! Enjoy this brief moment in time when your sore sinuses mean it’s possible to empathise and engage with almost everybody, without fear of them coming back at you pointing out the facts you’ve got wrong, or with a hashtag that makes you feel bad. Besides, it’s easier to empathise with a whole country than a single person whingeing next to you in bed. The country is unified right now as if sheltering from bad weather beneath a flimsy bus shelter – there’s never been a better time to reach out. Just as long as you wash your hands first.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman