It’s that time of year again where the cold feels like it’s actually penetrating your skin and flesh and working its way to your very bones. It’s a special kind of chill in England that feels almost Baltic, it’s sharp and biting, a bitter cold carried on the air that just intensifies when the wind blows harshly from the North. It’s important in this season, more than any, to wrap up warm because there are many chances to catch some kind of illness due to the increased exposure to cold temperatures. The first thing you could do, which is actually also the easiest thing, is simply to wear more layers and wrap up warm. Going outside when it’s close to freezing (0˚C – not just a description!) wearing little more than a shirt and trousers is not really a clever idea. You’ll need at least two layers on, a t-shirt under a flannel shirt, for example, plus a jacket on top of that – and I’d really recommend wearing two pairs of socks. Recently I’ve just been wearing one pair and it strikes me as strange: my feet are constantly freezing, and I wear two layers on my top half – why not on my feet? That’s a new thing I’ve got into. If it can be said to be a thing that can be got into.
Aside from just dressing sensibly for the season, there are a few other things to keep from catching one of the many illnesses that are floating around. Keeping up your levels of vitamin C and vitamin D, as well as zinc, can help keep your immune system strong and ready to fight off any nasty infections that find their way to you. That’s what I do every year, anyway. I eat a lot of fruit – even though fruit is something that you would prefer to eat when the sun is shining in the sky and the weather is hot, you should still eat fruit when it’s cold.
If you do feel like you’re getting ill, however, the first thing you should do is get on down to your family doctor for health checks. I should do it more often, because I actually tend to self-diagnose myself, which is a bad thing to do. The doctor will be able to tell, just from hearing a few symptoms, what illness you have. The best thing to do, however, is to try not to get yourself ill whatsoever!