Three wheels on my wagon

...and I'm still rolling along. Maybe no cherokees however. I feel as though a wheel has come off, this cold is tormenting me. I feel better then I feel worse again.

I think the up and down of temperature change did for me on Friday. It was mild when I left Surrey, sunny as we came into Waterloo. Travelling across London on the tube left me overheated, feeling sticky and shiny-faced. By King's Cross I could feel a warning tickle in my throat as I dashed to the right platform. That's an annoying station, the main concourse is too small and over-crowded, the signs are confusing as are the platforms - split and spread apart. There were a lot of police officers on the station that day, luminous yellow overjackets dotting the station. One policewoman had a spaniel on a lead. A police spaniel, how bizarre.
Stepping off the train at Cambridge it was cold, a relief from the heat, colder still in Norwich, bearable at last, but the damage was no doubt done.

But I'm British, I will come through. I know this because Austen and Sue have given me a book which is reprinted from a wartime leaflet produced by the US war department. It is called 'Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942'. The section entitled 'The British Came Through' offers this advice to American servicemen.
'For many months, the people of Britain have been doing without things which Americans take for granted. But you will find that shortages, discomforts, blackouts and bombings have not made the British depressed. They have a new cheerfulness and a new determination born out of hard times and tough luck. After going through what they have been through it's only human nature that they should be more than ever determined to win.'
Another section, entitled 'Waste means lives' also struck a chord with me.
'It is always said that Americans throw more food into their garbage cans than any other country eats. It is true. We have always been a producer nation. Most British food is imported even in peacetime, and for the last two years the British have been taught not to waste the things that their ships bring in from abroad. British seamen die getting those convoys through. The British have been taught this so thoroughly that they now know that gasoline and food represent the lives of merchant sailors.
And when you burn gasoline needlessly, it will seem to them as if you are wasting the blood of those seamen - when you destroy or waste food you have wasted the life of another sailor.'
Wow, very strong stuff, and I had never thought of that aspect of getting food and supplies to the country during the war. I never waste food, but I have certainly been shoving too much of it into me over the past few days.
Maybe that's why that wheel has fallen off my wagon.