It May Wean Me From My Pickle Vinegar-Drinking Habit

Sometimes great and fantastic stuff can come from deep and prolonged misery. But you know what? I think I may have recently discovered the best and most brilliant example of this phenomena. "Dulce et Decorum Est"? Forget about it. Pretty pictures of sunflowers torn from interminable mental anguish, much like an earlobe is torn from a crazy head? Mere Crayola scribblings. The beautiful, lyrical melancholy of sacred cow around this parish, Mr Guy Garvey Out Of Elbow? OK, you may have got me on that one. But let's say my discovery is almost up there. Sing it long and sing it loud: Happiness, thy name is Bovril.

Let me start at the top. I have a cold. I am safely assuming that I am not alone in the feeling that every time I have a cold, I redefine the phrase "deep and prolonged misery", as each time I recover, I somehow manage to forget just how annoying having a cold is. Especially if it's not quite bad enough to silence the aggravating, earnest corner of the brain which is just obsessed with getting out of a cosy bed and going into ridiculous work. And doubly especially when there is a sore throat involved. Did you know the average human swallows 2,000 times a day? Nothing like a searing slice of pain whipping across your neck twice a minute to remind you of that juicy little statistic. Anyhow. "Hot beverage!" my white blood cells were crying. "Bring us a hot beverage, so that we have the energy to continue fighting our good fight!" What a quandary - can't have tea or coffee, cos I don't want the dairy to clog up the pipework, can't have hot 'bina, cos I'm not 5. Suddenly a burst of feverish inspiration!

Oh, Bovril. You came and you gave without taking. The perfect drink. It's hot, it's nutritious, it's more delicious than a mug full of liquid has any right to be. It's like drinking gravy, for God's sake, but gravy that you're allowed to drink without people throwing you out of their establishments. I can't believe more people don't drink this all the time. True, I've got through a jar in two days, and as the sodium makes itself known in my system I can actually hear my arteries fuzzing up. That, and I'm so dehydrated that I'm not so much "going to the toilet" as "huffing talcum powder out of my body". Plus, it's done absolutely stone-cold nothing to affect my cold, apart from give it a delightful meaty hue.

But still, I feel like I have discovered a whole new colourful prism of experience. A brave new world where the horrendous suffering of the winter sniffles can inspire the revelation that beef can sooth a hurty throat. And bring into being a post so solipsistic that even hardened bloggers would cock a snook at it. Truly, friends, it is a wonderful world.