Sedimental

Trees are naked, hedgerows sparse, birds forage frantically and hedgehogs hibernate. The world outside my window is holding its breath, recent mornings gripped in ice where sheep crunch through frost and bleat vapour in the frozen air. You can almost feel the year tilt upon its fulcrum, everything is waiting. Days slowly extend and signal renewal is near; we have passed the nadir and will awake to inhale the fresh atmosphere of spring. Excuse the waffle. It’s that time of year and it tends to make one rather reflective. It is also a time when we look at our list...

It has a lot to cope with, the mouth. Not content merely being the portal via which we nourish ourselves, the aperture also contorts to compose facial expression, assists in the passage of respiratory and other gasses, sculpts the sound of our speech and most critically of all – provides a laboratory for the analysis of flavour. There are numerous additional popular applications; but the Blog format limits space so we can take them as read.   But what do you drink when the palate is weary? You can only ask so much of one mouth in a day, and...