Illicit Wives and Vick's Formula 44

It is cold and rainy this morning, but I'm typing in the conservatory with the radiator radiating and the wash steaming away.

You hear about wives who, having traipsed across the planet after their husbands, and, with nothing to occupy them, take up illicit habits, like gin and baccarat and human rights activism. My illicit habi turns out to be running the heat and taking off my coat while I type. I've turned it off now, though, so it's OK.

I've shut myself into the conservatory with the laundry and it's like the Amazon in here. Outside, the rain is clattering down out of the broken gutter, and, inside in the steam, the basil and the rosemary cuttings are sprouting and thriving and you can hear the spiders swelling and bursting out of their last, now-too-small exoskeletons, and I will find their actually pretty big husks duned up in the corners.

Oh hey! Now the sun's come out! and I've rushed out to take a picture of the event.


Just as illicit as running the heater, I''m also drinking a D 'n' B soda. I love D 'n' B soda because it is a masterpiece of marketing. The bottle is black and glossy and bullet-shaped. The font and print are punches of gold. "D! Fuckin' B!" it barks, "You got a problem with that!?" with a bikini'd efferescent Sprite babe on each arm swaggering frosty out of the refrigerator, jostling the pansy Fantas out of the way.
However....
If you read the label, you notice that the "D" is written really big in swaggering solid gold block Sans Serif, but then you see, that beside the 'D' is 'Dandelion' written small and apologetically. And the "B", they break it to you means "Burdock" for crying out loud. But, to let you know that Dandelion and Burdock have Soda street-cred, the marketing department has added on the corner of the label in edgy, graffiti hacked by either a kidnapper with a blade (or a three year old with a crayon, it's not easy to tell which) the D 'n' B slogan: taLL, daRk,&DriNkSoMe.
Drinksome?
Actually, it's pretty good stuff. (To put that statement in context, I had better admit, I was a Dr. Pepper Girl even after I discovered that the spicy elixir's main ingredient was, I'm pretty sure, prune squeezings, the tidy "10 2 and 4" logo and sophisticated art deco, stream-lined clock on the glamorous, sleek glass bottle, took on an embarrassing new meaning, I reamined true.

Even when all the Cola-louts hooted in their bikinis with their icey buckets and volley-balls, and hopped on their bandwagon, its corporate wheels oiled by cane sugar syrup and the blood of the masses, Buying the World a Coke and clanking their love beads, I held fast.

Even after the horrific coup-de-grace when Denise Kerr's dad was handing out sodas from the fridge at her birthday party and he was laughing over shreiking little girls stamping their shiny buckle shoes and yelling, "OK! Who wants Coke!" to frienzied "Me! Me! I Want it!"s and he was digging in the fridge and handing out drinks with "Here you go! Wait a minute, Barry (who was the only boy there, he and Denise liked to crush earthworms together after a rain), don't pry that off with your... Oh ha ha! Well, they were baby teeth weren't they?" and
"OK! Let's see here, There's RC Cola (Barry drank RC) and some Fresca (to a resounding "Ewww!")...no...that's you're mother's. She'd have my hide...and, say, how'd this get here? Here's an old Dr. Pepper. Ha! Wonder where that came from?" and I said, "I'll take it."
The silence fell on them like they'd been un-plugged, her dad in mid bottle cap pry and kids in mid-guzzle, but Denise, at 10, already Ambassador to The Man, stepped forward to sum up the World's disdain for me and my kind with the pat: "Ew, that's prunes".
It could not be denied.
I liked it and felt an instant affinity of others who chose The Doctor. Although, I've got to say, they were thin on the ground as I recall.

So D 'n' B is pretty good. If, when you hear "pretty good", you think of Vick's Formula 44, which is exactly what it tastes like. It cost 59p, so they're not giving it away. It's also, I read here, the Official Soft Drink of the Great Britain Rugby League. An angry bunch. The label on that the black plastic bottle (very few soft drink bottles are actually black) lets slip a softer - dare I say truer side, by revealing that the bottle contains "sparkling dandelion and burdock flavour". Sparkling. Like a brook. Like a beautiful restorative quaff. And the warning: "If spilt, this product may stain." Who can be surprised?
It's made in Glasgow.