Is phlegm acceptable?

Winston met Earl on a freezing cold, terribly windy day and there was nothing Earl could do about it.

“Chilly! Isn’t it but?!” called out Winston.

“I am never again having five coffees in a day!” Earl cried in reply.

“Hmmm,” Winston pondered. He came within arm-swinging distance of Earl and stopped, standing tall and a bit blurry around the edges on the footpath. Earl squinted. Why was this chap blurry? Was he a ghost? “Are you a coffee addict?” Winston asked curiously. He watched Earl narrow his eyes, open them, narrow, then open, and he suddenly knew exactly why this man should not consume more than one standard caffeinated drink per twenty eight hours.

“Are you- are you non-existent?” Earl grumbled rather like an old and grumpy man who had to ask for his afternoon tea biscuits rather than have his needs being pre-empted.

Winston chuckled, his gloved hand rising slightly to his face as if to hide his amusement. “I believe I am existing. At least for now.”

“Eh,” Earl blinked and took a step back, tilting his head away and looking down his nose. “Nup!” he declared immediately, “I do not see it! You are not a man with edges at all.”

“Well now...” Winston thought about edges and men and coffee stains on the couch. “That is a very forward thing to say. I trust it has something to do with your caffeine addiction, then.”

Earl said, “Eh?!” in a defensive way. “I am neither an addict nor a liar!”

“How many coffee-type drinks have you had today?” Winston asked. He took his top hat off and looked around for a place to sit as he feared this would take a while.

Earl, meanwhile, was peering at his own hands. He had never encountered such a fluffy human. He wondered how this fellow came to be this way and why he didn’t realise his time was, surely, definitely, indisputably, almost up. His own hands were wrinkled and tan, his nails slightly off-colour and short, and there were smudges of yellow around his finger pads. Nothing blurry about them.

“So…” Winston prompted and Earl looked up to see that the man had seated himself on the ground.

“The ground sir!” Earl cried in outrage. “Have you never heard of a chair?”

Winston placed his hat in his lap and looked up expectantly. “You were just about to tell me a long and winding and probably tiny bit boring tale of how you came to be an addict.”

“And you were about to tell me the short and serious and most horrendously unfunny tale of how you became this blurry ground-sitting nincompoop of a gentleman!” Earl raised a fist and shook it at nothing, really, with a glare at this silly man.

“Shall I go first?” Winston asked.

“Oh, do!” Earl all but shouted.

Winston sighed softly, lost in an apparent blissful memory, "It all started with a cough…”