WINTER REMEDIES

My uncle had a wonderful remedy for a heavy cold, which involved dark rum and a red-hot poker! Not that he ever demonstrated, sadly, but on his sound advice I have found the liberal addition of dark rum to hot milk at bedtime certainly assists sleep.

Uncle Douglas spent most of WWII in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Perhaps it was before his capture, or after his release that this story came about, but at some point he encountered some Russians who were in possession of a bottle of dark rum… As he related it, they would pour rum into mugs/flagons/steins, then warm a poker in a roaring fire until it was red hot. The poker would then be plunged into the rum. I can only imagine the steaming, hissing and sizzling reaction, and the smell of hot rum must have been wonderful! I’m not sure if milk came into this story at all – it seems to me that the Russians simply drank down the hot rum neat to cure their colds!

I may have written before about the debilitating effect of colds, and this one has rounded off a wet and thoroughly miserable January in perfect character. I’m fighting the onset of a chest infection, but that’s another story, and I may be winning. Copious mugs of hot lemon and honey - to which rum may also be added - have undoubtedly helped.

My January reading was as indifferent as the weather, until I discovered a new (to me) author. Peter Grainger writes crime novels set on the Norfolk coast, and his writing is a cure in itself. I reviewed the first in a series ‘An Accidental Death’, giving it five stars:

‘Some books are written in such a way that you know you will come back to them when all else fails - and this is one of them.
Peter Grainger - a new author to me - gently and subtly takes the reader's hand and guides the way like an old friend, with beautifully crafted prose. Add to this some unusual and truly likeable characters, an excellent plot, and reading doesn't get much better. I loved this, and have immediately started to read the next one in the series.’

A good book is an essential part of recovering from winter ailments. I usually return to an old favourite, but this time I’ve been lucky find a substitute and I’m now racing through the series.

I can only view the garden from the window at the moment, and its bleak contours are lifted by the amusing ‘blackbird wars’ which never end in and around this part of their territory. Birds are at risk at this time of the year, especially when the temperature drops and food is scarce. As well as one of my blackbirds, I leave you with R's lovely photo of a little Goldcrest on a cold morning, and an extract from Thomas Hardy's poem 'The Darkling Thrush' which so wonderfully describes the month about to end...

'I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.'