Just as I was building up a little post-holiday momentum - reworking the JT Agapanthus story, blogging, reorganizing my studio - I came down with a flu that reduced me to shuffling around the house and coughing for about a week. Today we had significant snow in England, so I walked to work rather than riding my bike. I hadn’t walked along the Cowley Road (our main drag here in East Oxford) for a while, and I really enjoyed browsing. I went into out a Brazilian shop/art gallery, a middle eastern grocery and a retro old-style pharmacy where I found a German liquid iron supplement called Floradix that was recommended by a colleague when, post-flu, I was looking a bit pale. Here is a *partial* list of the ingredients: Carrots, nettles, spinach, quitch roots (?), angelica roots, fennel, ocean kep, aftican mallow, orange peel, pear juice, grape juice, blackcurrant juice, cherry juice, orange juice, red beet juice, lemon juice, carob extract, apple juice, yeast extract, honey, and MORE. I should be leaping tall buildings in a single bound any day now. This is just one more stop on my tour of European health tonics - at Christmas I had the novel experience of imbibing a French herbal remedy delivered in - I kid you not - individual glass pipettes that taper to a tiny sealed point on each end. You are literally supposed to *snap the glass ends* and shake out the contents into a glass. It may keep the contents sterile. It may be great for the manufacturing process. But if you delivered something this way in the US you would be sued before the first batch left the plant. I was really careful, and still managed to stab my finger. And this was a standard product, recommended in two different pharmacies for a common complaint. I’ll try to post a picture of one of these things so you can see what I’m on about. Anyway, I am not abandoning my comics storytelling project, and will post some more sketches ASAP.
Have you ever been mid-story, and as you are speaking, the whole thing sounds so implausible that you begin to doubt that it ever occurred? This happened to me yesterday when I was telling two colleagues about the existence of a Mock Apple Pie in which the filling consists of Ritz crackers. As a dual-citizen, I have a good line in tales of “funny American customs”, but this threatened to veer into the realm of fantasy. Could there really have been such a recipe? Enter the ever-useful Internet with the answer: yes. I hasten to add that I only remember *reading* this recipe - this starch-meet-starch concoction never darkened our door. My mother made only lovely pies that contained actual fruit. Clearly just seeing the description was enough to etch it in my memory though.
