DIPLOMACY

I am running short of verveine tea again.  It is my usual bed-time tisane and without it I wake up shortly after falling asleep and toss and turn.  I’ve been taking it now for many years; the problem is that you can’t buy it in Britain.  Although here the supermarket shelves stock an ever expanding range of herbal teas, verveine in its various forms (verveine and peppermint, verveine and orange) is not among them.  Verveine by itself tastes like cat’s pee.

    So I buy it in France whenever I go over there, but I haven’t been since last August and that is why I am running low.  My neighbour sometimes brings some back for me. I received an email message from her last week containing a number of interesting recycling ideas such as using old boots for plant containers and making chandeliers out of old wine bottles.  It was written in French which made me think possibly she was at her French home in Tharon rather than fifty yards away on the other side of the road.  So I replied hopefully in French, but she said she was in fact over the road and wouldn’t be crossing the Channel again until Easter.

     I looked on the internet and tried our local health store. ‘You asked about this before,’ said the woman who runs it, looking at me suspiciously. ‘It’s impossible to get hold of.’  And so it is.  Nasty Continental habit. Obviously!

    The trouble is I need the stuff more than ever just at the moment what with the hoo-ha in the Ukraine and the outbreak of the First World War being rehearsed nightly on the television in the shape of that excellent drama 37 Days that traces the diplomatic missteps that blundered the Continent to catastrophe.  Even today it seems all rather worrying.  Of course everything has settled down, but only after two world wars and it is quite possible to argue that Russia’s actions today in the Crimea have their roots in the various German invasions.   Queen Victoria should have taken better care of her grandchildren.

    There once existed a game called ‘Diplomacy.’ (It may exist still for all I know).  The players each represented a major European country in about 1900. Turkey was given honorary status in this respect, though not Ukraine.   You were allocate armies and fleets which you could move around the board attacking other countries and defending your own. You could also form alliances, temporary or permanent.

    I once played this game on a Saturday in the Occupational Psychology Department of Birkbeck College, London where I happened to be studying. Each team representing a country had its own room complete with telephone, which meant that you could set up alliances in secret from the other players.  My team was playing France and I proposed the immediate strategy of a permanent alliance with Great Britain. Imagine, I said what Pitt and Napoleon might have achieved had they worked in alliance!  With France’s armies and Britain’s fleets they could have ruled the world.  The world might have been all pink (or at least pink and blue) instead of only half of it.  (Quite why British rule should have been represented by pink is a question that has never been satisfactorily explained). 

    Anyway this strategy worked brilliantly and during the course of the day we successively wiped the Italians, the Turks, the Germans and the Russians from the map.  Then in the last move of the game, in a stroke of perfidy that I am still smarting from, Britain attacked France, thereby demoting her from joint winner to second.  I never played the game again.

    Now the West and Russia play Diplomacy with Ukraine. There will be a solution however uncomfortable it may be to one or other party, but I suppose we shall have to pass through a lot of unnecessary pain to get to it.  So it is no wonder I need my verveine and peppermint tisane to help me sleep.  Of course other people would prefer something stronger.  A glass of malt whisky has long been recommended for insomniacs. But my stomach rebels and its rumblings would outdo Vesuvius.  While this is much to my chagrin, it is to the distinct benefit of my pocket.  For the price of a glass of malt I can buy a whole month’s supply of tea.

    Still all is not lost for I wrote for help to my friend John who lives near Le Havre and received an immediate reply.  Touched by my plight he went immediately to the French supermarket and purchased fifty sachets. This he put in an envelope which will be winging its way here shortly.  That is if the customs don’t intercept it on the grounds that I am importing an illegal botanical specimen.  You never know.