Vitamin C

My fingers waft that reminiscent scent of tangerine at me, that even now connects in my brain with Christmas, those pathways etched irrevocably in my childhood and never reprogrammed on moving to the Southern Hemisphere. Now in South Africa they are rechristened naartjies (pronounced narchees) and herald a late autumn fruit bonanza.

My weekly shop, that I so ungratefully dismissed yesterday, yielded a veritable rainbow of vitamin C rich fruits to combat that lingering cold and raise the spirits: 5kg sacks of oranges for R9; 3kg bags of naartjies for R7; guavas that my youngest loves to eat and she carefully selected four just for herself;

grenadillas or passion fruit with their burst of fragrant pulp; Williams pears that will have to sit on the window sill for days but will eventually ripen to succulence; as well as those standard big bags of crisp apples – one royal gala and the other golden delicious to see us through a week of snacks; not to mention avos and bananas. A weekly supermarket shop has its highlights when you live in a country where all these fruits grow and come into season filling the shops with fresh, flavourful and cheap cold cures.

Smiles are better than Vitamin C for banishing colds!