Help Needed Fairly Urgently – Notes From The Editor

Things have reached a fairly desperate stage.

I have now spent three weeks with this particularly nasty strain of flu going around and around the village. Some people are calling it COVID Mk. IV. Me I’m calling it a kak jol.

I have tried working through it and I have tried ignoring it. I have tried sleeping more, and I have swallowed the tablets, drunk the water, taken the vitamins and done most of the sensible things one is supposed to do. Still it lurks, like a fart in a wetsuit.

So I am taking a week off.

St Francis Today will go quiet for seven days while I lie down, sleep and attempt to return to the land of the living. Before I disappear, however, I need your help.

I want old-fashioned remedies.

Not things you have just found on Google. I want the family stuff. The strange stuff. A remedy your grandmother swore by, your mother inflicted on you as a child.

At this stage, logic is optional.

If I need to cut a potato in half, rub it on my navel and bury it under a dog pooh, tell me where to dig. If nasturtium leaves must be eaten at the going down of the sun while eating a toasted chicken sarmie from Vida, I am ready.

There is the starvation cure. The ice bath until the hard hallucinations kick in. Sauna yoga. Eucalyptus inhalations that gently remove you from this dimension. Standing barefoot on the earth to discharge the illness. (I hardly ever get to use the word discharge). Whispered incantations to dark lords. Full-moon interventions. And, somewhere out there, surely, an auntie who knows exactly which part of a dead chicken needs to be inserted…

At this point, I am listening to all of it.

There is only one rule. No alcohol remedies. Please don’t tell me about hot toddies, brandy, whisky, brown sherry, or anything else that comes out of a bottle. The very thought currently makes me want to lie down. I am, in fact, already lying down. Alcohol is unlikely to improve the situation.

Scientific credibility will not be a deciding factor.

Send them to me. I will publish the best ones when I return, assuming I return, and at this stage, I am prepared to entertain almost anything except urine.

In the meantime, St Francis Today is going quiet, and the editor is going back to bed.

No sympathy, I need a cure. and a haircut.

See you in a week.

The Editor