Half the population of Killdicken is thrown down with colds, flus, coughs and sore throats.

There was hardly anyone at mass on Sunday, the bingo is only at half power and Lily Mac tells me she could hardly hear her ears in the post office last Friday such was the coughing and the spluttering.

The Doc Doherty is flat out trying to keep people out of hospital and away from the clutches of Tinky Ryan. I saw the hoor putting a new set of tyres on the hearse during the week; he must be expecting a lot of business.

As we all know, there’s no cure for the common cold, except to take to the bed, swallow copious amounts of hot drinks and be patient. Nevertheless, people insist on beating a path to the doctor’s door in the vain search for a miracle cure.

The common cold affects everybody and in Ireland we have a multitude of names for the affliction. Our neighbours on the bigger island next door are more polite and reserved when it comes to describing this most common of ailments. They may call it a “chill”, or “a rotten cold,” whereas here in Hibernia, the land of perpetual winter, we are not quite as polite when it comes to giving the thing a title. It’s variously called a “divil of a cauld” a “hoor of a chest”, a “bastard of a cough” or a “fecker of a dose”. In terms of how it affects you, it can be “stuck into you”, “smotherin you”, “chokin’ you”, or “bungin’ you up”.

It strikes me that all trainee doctors preparing to work in this country would do well to complete a course on the more common names for illnesses, ailments and symptoms. If a medic is not familiar with the local lingo, you can imagine him or her struggling to diagnose what’s wrong with a fella who presents with “a bastard of a dose that’s stuck into my craw and smotherin the gizzard out of me”.

In previous columns, I have written extensively about the myriad of local cures for the normal ailments that afflict people, but since the arrival of antibiotics, most of these cures have died out.

However, of late, medical experts tell us that massive overuse of the said wonder drugs has rendered many of them ineffective and useless.

Our resident expert on everything under the sun, Tom Cantwell, tells us that the bugs and bacteria these drugs are meant to kill have learned how to fight back and you might as well be eating smarties as taking antibiotics nowadays. He also tells us that people are returning to traditional cures to fight many illnesses.

I’m not too impressed with this reversion to the more traditional remedies; some of them were downright cracked.

In my youth, the remedy for a sore throat involved wearing a dirty sock around your neck ’till you were cured. People didn’t seem to cop on to the fact that a normal sore throat would probably be gone after a few days, sock or no sock.

Yet, I still hear people singing the praises of this auld cure.

“You can’t beat the sock. I had a divil of a throat last spring and I wore an auld working sock around my throat for a week, and sure I never looked back.”

Then, of course, you had people who were gifted with the cure for ailments such as ring-worm, whooping cough, or eczema. This was often handed down from one generation to the next. I’m reminded of a famous publican in Rathbinnis, Moll Riordan.

Moll was reputed to have the cure for worms. It involved drinking a half pint of stout from a special pewter tankard she kept in the back room of the pub.

People would come for miles looking “for the cleansing”. They’d be directed to the snug and Moll would disappear down the back, returning after a few minutes with the pewter tankard full of stout.

She’d say a strange prayer in Latin and insist the afflicted drink every drop of the contents in her presence. They’d slip a donation to Moll as they left and she’d warn them to stay away from crowds and close to a ditch for the next three days. People swore by her cure, and they also swore by her instructions, saying that in the wake of her dose the call of nature arrived suddenly and demanded an urgent response.

The mystery of Moll’s cure came to light after she died and the pub was sold. The new owners went in search of the famous pewter tankard and found it in a secret compartment behind an old dresser – along with a few gallons of a well-known deworming dose that was normally given to calves.

It worked, wasn’t that the main thing? CL