A spoonful of sugar...

New Year was spent visiting relatives in Russia. Lily's parents are likely to move from her hometown this coming year and, with it being a few years since we were last there for the biggest celebration of the year, a trip for family, festivities and nostalgia seemed too good to miss.

As you expect at that time of year, food and drink were in abundance.

New Year Meal

Far removed from my usual diet (low fat, low sugar, low meat); if it was in front of me, I consumed it with great pleasure... Russian sausage, pelmeniy, cheese, salads swimming in soured cream, khachapuri [see below], pizzas, sweets (and one or two drinks).

Khachapuri...

The result was dramatic...




My stomach couldn't take the radical change of diet and my trip suddenly plunged into a toilet-based trauma. Who'd have thought that one person could contain so much diarrhoea...

Russians rarely seem to enthuse as much as they do when someone is unwell. Not seriously ill, of course, just unwell enough for them to display their encyclopedic knowledge of powders, potions and personal preference of pills and homemade cure-alls.

I knew precisely what this meant and decided to make do with own personal preference....

charcoal

After a day and a half of running backwards and forwards, making serious inroads into the family stockpile of toilet paper, and with the charcoal and my only concession to the traditional treatments, ridiculously strong black tea, failing to do their job, my power to resist the Russian remedies had dwindled. There was...

Enterosgel (also available in the UK) and the Russian powdered make-it-yourself version. For anyone not familiar with this (and I wasn't before coming to Russia), it is a thick gel, powdery no matter how well you stir the homemade one from the sachets or even when ready-made. It cannot fail to invoke your body's gag reflexes... it hardly tastes of anything yet its consistency has you struggling to keep it down.

Russian sachet.

Yummy

The next difficult-to-swallow remedy was krovokhlebka (a name which in Russian gives the idea of supping blood). The English name for the plant is great burnet. This is basically the herbal tea from hell and the reason I'd been so adamant that I'd survive without the family's suggestions. They'd given me it before and no matter how much my father-in-law told me how good for the stomach it was, even enthusiastically making some for himself, would convince me that this is not like drinking turps, especially when made using three teabags, something which would make Chuck Norris cry like a baby. Three teabags, not less, and thrice daily, not less, would apparently cure my problem. If, as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, this required a bagful.

Box of great burnet tea

Fancy a cuppa?

A couple of days of unbearably disgusting cures later and the diarrhoea had finished. Maybe it would have cleared up anyway by that time, but I still got the mild rebuke of needing to have started the Russian remedies sooner. Friends, hearing of my stomach upset, gave a knowing look which meant 'it wasn't the change in diet, it was the alcohol over New Year' and recommended chicken broth to line the stomach for what they assumed would be another piss-up.

The only problem was that the remedies have worked too well and I had become rather, ahem, blocked. I decided to keep quiet about. God only knows how they'd have tried to cure it.