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I lost my words in the middle of my own toast at my daughter’s wedding. The oldest woman in the room was the only one who knew why. My daughter gave up her GP surgery in Bristol to marry a fisherman on an island with no doctor. My family thought she was throwing her career away. She was giving me my life back. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My daughter Rachel married Callum MacLeod on the last Saturday in June, in a little white church on an island in the Outer Hebrides. If you’ve never been, picture the edge of the map. 140 people. One shop, which is also the post office. A ferry twice a week if the weather lets it. The nearest doctor is on the next island over, and on the days the ferry doesn’t run, the nearest doctor is a helicopter. To understand what happened at that wedding, you need to understand how my daughter got there. Rachel is a GP. Or she was, in Bristol, at a big busy surgery on the edge of the city. 10 minute appointments, 40 patients a day, a waiting room that never emptied. She was good at it. The kind of doctor people asked for by name. She was also exhausted and fed up, though she’d never have said so to me. When she was 33, she saw an advert for a 6 month locum post covering the island clinics while the regular doctor was on leave. She took it, she told me, “to breathe different air for a bit.” The first week she rang me, she talked about the sky. The second week she talked about the sea. The third week she talked about a fisherman who’d come into the clinic with a fish hook through his thumb and sat there while she cut it out, chatting to her about the weather like she was doing his hair. That was Callum. By the autumn she’d extended the contract. By Christmas she told us she was seeing him. By Easter she rang to say he’d asked her to marry him on the harbour wall, and she’d said yes, and she wasn’t coming back to Bristol. My husband Steve sat at the kitchen table for a long time after that phone call. Then he said, “She’s going to live on a rock in the Atlantic.” That was his way of saying everything he couldn’t say. My sister Wendy rang that night. “She’ll last one winter,” she said. “Wait till the ferry’s off for a fortnight in January.” I didn’t argue with either of them. But I’d heard something in Rachel’s voice on the phone that I hadn’t heard in years. She sounded awake. She sounded like herself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sounded like myself. I should tell you about me, because this is really my story, not Rachel’s. I’m Janet. I was 59 that summer. I’ve worked behind the counter at a building society branch in Swindon for 26 years. It’s a job that’s all numbers and names. You count money all day, and you know your customers. Mr Patel who pays in on a Friday. Mrs Dunn who brings us mince pies at Christmas. I was always good at both. I never needed a calculator, and I never forgot a face. About 2 years before the wedding, I started to fade. There’s no better word for it. Nothing broke. Nothing hurt. I just slowly turned down, like somebody had their hand on my dimmer switch. It started with the mornings. My alarm would go at half 6, and I’d lie there feeling as if someone had poured concrete into my arms and legs while I slept. I always slept. 8 hours, sometimes more. But I woke up more tired than when I’d gone to bed, every single morning, as if the night had taken something out of me instead of putting it back. I needed 2 coffees before I could string a sentence together. Steve used to joke that he wasn’t allowed to speak to me before the second cup. After a while, he stopped joking. Then the afternoons went. Every day, at about 3 o’clock, it was like someone pulled a plug out of me. My eyes went heavy. My head went thick and slow. I’d be counting a customer’s cash and lose my place, and have to start again. Then I’d lose my place again. I started counting everything twice, then three times, terrified of a mistake. I’d never made a mistake in 24 years. One Friday, Mr Patel came to my window like he had every Friday for 15 years. I went to say “Morning, Mr Patel,” and the name just wasn’t there. I stood there smiling at a man I’d known for 15 years, with nothing in my head but fog. I said “Morning, my love” instead. He didn’t notice. I thought about it all weekend. At home I was no use to anyone. I’d sit down on the sofa when I got in “just for 5 minutes,” and wake up at 9 with the telly on and my dinner going cold on my lap. Steve took to putting a blanket over me. I stopped going to my Thursday choir because I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the evening rehearsals. I stopped meeting Wendy for our Saturday coffees because by Saturday I just wanted to lie down. I snapped at Steve about nothing. The bins. The volume of the telly. The way he said “you alright, love?” Then I’d lie awake feeling guilty about it. Of course I went to the doctor. Twice. The first time, she ran bloods. Iron, thyroid, blood sugar, the works. All normal. “It’s very common at your age,” she said. “The menopause can leave you tired for a long time. Try to get to bed earlier and pace yourself.” So I paced myself. I went to bed at 9. I slept like the dead and woke up like I’d been dug up. The second time, 6 months later, more bloods. All normal again. She asked whether I might be feeling low. I wasn’t low. I was tired. There’s a difference, and I knew it, even if nobody else seemed to. I’d have been perfectly cheerful if I could have kept my eyes open past 3 in the afternoon. I tried everything else I could think of. Iron tablets, which upset my stomach and did nothing. A multivitamin every morning, a good one from the chemist with “Energy” written across the front of the box. Cutting out wine. Cutting out bread. Early nights. More water. A brisk walk at lunchtime, which just meant I was tired in the fresh air instead of tired at my desk. Nothing touched it. Not one thing. By the time Rachel’s wedding came round, I’d quietly accepted something I hadn’t said out loud to anyone. I thought this was just who I was now. A tired woman. Someone who used to have get up and go, and didn’t anymore. We travelled up on the Thursday. It took the whole day. A train to Glasgow, another train to Oban, and then the ferry, 5 hours across open water. I fell asleep on the ferry before we’d even left the harbour. Steve woke me as the island came into view. A low green hump in a grey sea, a scatter of white houses, a little stone harbour with the fishing boats bobbing in it. It looked like the end of the world. It also looked like the most peaceful place I’d ever seen. Rachel was on the pier waving with both arms, in wellies and an old jumper, with her hair blown all over her face. I hardly recognised her. She looked about 10 years younger than the last time I’d seen her in Bristol. Callum was beside her. A big quiet man with a beard and hands like shovels. He shook Steve’s hand, then mine, and called me Mrs Turner until I made him stop. His father Donald was waiting by an old van. He was 63, 4 years older than me. He’d been out at his creels since 5 that morning, hauling lobster pots up from the seabed by hand, and he looked like he’d just stepped out of a hot bath. His wife Mairi hugged me like she’d known me for years and told me Rachel never stopped talking about me. Then Donald drove us along the single track road to the croft, and that’s when I first saw Peigi. She was out on the hill behind the house, a small figure in a long waxed coat with a crook in her hand, walking up a slope I’d have needed a rest halfway up. A dog was working the sheep below her. As we pulled up, she turned, saw the van, and came down the hill to meet us. She didn’t pick her way down. She came down it like a woman of 30. Peigi is Callum’s granny. She was 88. She took my hand in both of hers. Her grip was warm and strong, and her eyes were a pale sharp blue, and they went over me the way you’d look over a sheep at a sale. Quick and thorough and missing nothing. “So you’re Rachel’s mother,” she said, in that soft island voice. “You’ll be tired after that journey.” “I’m always tired,” I said, and laughed, because I always laughed when I said it. She didn’t laugh. She just held onto my hand a moment longer than she needed to, and looked at me. The next 2 days were a whirl of wedding preparations, and I saw how that family lived, and I saw how I didn’t. They were up at 5. Donald was out at the creels. Mairi baked bread, made soup for 20, and fed the hens. Peigi walked the hill with the dog before breakfast, came back and did the croft accounts at the kitchen table in pencil, then spent the afternoon out at the peat bank with Callum, cutting peats for the winter fire. If you’ve never seen peat cutting, it’s back breaking work. You slice the wet peat out of the bank with a long spade they call a tusker, and you lift each heavy black slab out and lay it on the heather to dry. Hour after hour. Peigi was 88 and she was out there cutting with the men. I went out to watch on the Friday afternoon. I walked about half a mile across the moor to the peat bank, and by the time I got there I had to sit down on a rock to get my breath. Peigi looked up from the bank, tusker in her hand, and watched me sitting there. She didn’t say anything. I fell asleep on that rock in the sunshine at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. When I woke up, Peigi had put her coat over my knees. The wedding was on the Saturday. The church was tiny, white walls and plain wooden pews, with the sea glittering through the windows. The whole island came. Rachel wore a simple dress and her granny’s pearls, and she walked down that aisle on Steve’s arm looking happier than I’d ever seen her. Callum’s voice cracked on “I will.” I cried through the whole thing. Then we all walked to the village hall for the ceilidh. If you’ve never been to a Hebridean ceilidh, I don’t know how to describe it except to say it’s the loudest, happiest thing I’ve ever been part of. A fiddler, an accordion, and a man on the drums. Long tables of food that everyone had brought. Whisky. Tea. Children running everywhere. Then the dancing starts, and it doesn’t stop until the sun comes up, which in June on that island is about half 3 in the morning. Peigi danced every dance. I’m not exaggerating. The Gay Gordons, the Dashing White Sergeant, Strip the Willow, which is the one where you spin your way down a long line of people until you’re dizzy. 88 years old, in her good blue dress, being swung round by young fishermen and swinging them right back. I danced the first one with Steve. By the end of it, my legs were shaking and my heart was pounding, and I had to sit down on a chair by the wall. I didn’t get up again. I watched the dancing. I clapped. I smiled. And at about half 8, with the hall roaring and the fiddle going, my eyes started to close. I fought it and fought it. Steve sat next to me holding my cup of tea, because I’d nearly dropped it twice. Then it was time for the speeches. Steve did his first, and it was lovely, and short, because Steve doesn’t like talking. Then it was my turn. Rachel had asked me specially. “Just say something about me when I was little, Mum.” I’d written it out at home, but I’d left the card in my handbag on the other side of the hall, and I thought, never mind, I know what I want to say. I’ve known my own daughter for 33 years. I stood up. The hall went quiet. 140 islanders and my family, all looking at me. And I started. I told them about Rachel at 6, bandaging all her teddies and lining them up in a ward on her bedroom floor. I told them about her at 12, wanting to be a doctor. I went to tell them the name of her primary school, where she’d won a prize for her nature diary, and the name had gone. I stood there. The school I’d walked her to every morning for 7 years. Gone. I could see the gates. I could see the red jumpers. I couldn’t find the word. I said “her primary school,” and waved my hand, and someone laughed kindly, and I carried on. But I’d lost the thread. I couldn’t remember what came next. I finished with “anyway, we’re very proud of her,” and sat down with my face burning. Steve squeezed my hand under the table. I didn’t look at Rachel. I couldn’t. Then Peigi stood up. The hall went quiet in a different way. The way a room goes quiet when the oldest person in it decides to speak. Even the children stopped running about. She looked at Rachel first, and smiled. Then she looked at Callum. Then she turned and looked straight at our side of the table. At Steve. At Wendy. At me. “I want to welcome Rachel’s family into ours,” she said. “You raised a lassie who came to this rock, and looked at our winters and our weather and our hard work, and didn’t run back to the mainland. That tells me a great deal about her. And it tells me a great deal about you.” She paused, and smoothed her dress, the way you do when you’re gathering yourself to say something difficult. “But I’m 88 years old, and I’ve not got time left to be polite when it’s honesty that’s needed. Rachel is one of us now. So that makes you one of us too. And on this island, we don’t let our own go downhill without saying so.” You could have heard a pin drop. I felt Steve go very still beside me. “I cut my own peats this year,” Peigi said. “I’ve walked that hill every morning since I was a girl. I’ve danced every dance tonight, and I’ll dance the last one at 3 in the morning. And I’m not special. You could ask any woman my age on this island and she’d tell you the same.” Then she looked straight at me. “Your mother sat out every dance tonight but one. She fell asleep against that wall at half 8. And when she stood up to talk about her own daughter, she lost her words in the middle of it.” My face was on fire. I wanted the floor to open. “She’s 59,” Peigi said. “I’m 88. And I’ll tell you for nothing, that is not her age.” Nobody moved. “I had a sister,” she said. “Ishbel.” She said “had,” and the whole hall seemed to breathe in. “Ishbel was 2 years younger than me. We grew up in the house on the hill, the one you came to on Thursday. She was the clever one, and the bonny one, and the best dancer on this island. When she was 20, she went away to Glasgow, because she wanted to see the world beyond the ferry. Got herself a job in a big department store on Argyle Street, and worked her way up to running the whole ladies’ floor. Married a good man. Had 2 boys.” “I didn’t blame her for going. This island is beautiful, but it’s hard, and not everybody wants hard their whole life.” “Then, somewhere around 55, she started getting tired. Just tired. She’d write to me and say she was sleeping 9 hours and waking up worn out. She’d ring in the afternoon and I could hear it in her voice. Like she was talking from the bottom of a well.” “Her doctor in Glasgow ran his tests. All fine. He told her it was the change, and her age, and she should pace herself.” Peigi said “pace herself” the way some people swear. “So she paced herself. She gave up the dancing first, because the evenings were too much. Then she gave up her job on the ladies’ floor, because she couldn’t get through the afternoons. She’d come home to the island every summer, and every summer there was a little less of her. The last summer she came, she couldn’t walk up to the graveyard to see our mother’s stone. 61 years old, and she couldn’t walk up the hill she’d run up every day as a girl.” “And every 6 months her doctor ran his tests and told her she was fine. Fine. My sister couldn’t climb a hill and her tests were fine.” She looked around the hall. “They read her numbers like the shipping forecast, and never once looked out of the window.” Somebody at the back murmured “aye.” Peigi’s voice didn’t waver, but something underneath it changed. “She lived till 74. But I’ll tell you the truth. My sister stopped living about 15 years before she died. She sat in her chair in Paisley and got smaller. And nobody, not one of them, ever asked why she was so tired. They told her it was normal, and they let her fade.” She turned back to me. “I watched your mother tonight, sitting by that wall with her tea going cold in her hands. I’ve seen that before. I watched it in my sister for 15 years. And I’m not going to sit in this hall and eat my dinner and say nothing while it happens again to one of my own.” She sat down. Nobody spoke for what felt like a very long time. Then the fiddler, bless him, started up a slow tune, and people began to talk again, quietly and carefully, the way you talk after something true has been said out loud. Mairi touched Peigi’s arm. Rachel was looking at me with tears running down her face. Wendy was staring at her plate. Steve was holding my hand so tight it hurt. And I sat there and thought: she’s right. An 88-year-old woman I’d known for 2 days had just said in front of 140 people the thing I’d been swallowing for 2 years. It isn’t your age. Something is wrong, and nobody is looking. We left on the Tuesday ferry. Steve didn’t say anything for the first hour. Then, somewhere out in the grey water, he said, “That old woman was out of order.” “Was she wrong?” I said. He didn’t answer. He just put his arm round me, and I fell asleep on his shoulder before we reached Oban. For 3 weeks after we got home, I carried it. Every morning I lay under that concrete feeling and thought about Peigi coming down the hill like a girl. Every afternoon at 3, when the plug got pulled, I thought about her out at the peat bank with the men. Every evening, when I woke up on the sofa at 9 with Steve’s blanket over me, I thought about Ishbel in her chair in Paisley, getting smaller. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know what I’d say. The doctor said I was fine. My bloods said I was fine. Who was I to argue with them? Then Rachel rang. “Mum, I’m coming down. I’ve got something I need to show you.” She came on the Saturday. Train and ferry and train again, a whole day’s travelling, just to sit at my kitchen table. She looked different again, brown from the wind, with her hair in a plait and a calmness about her that she’d never had in Bristol. She had a folder with her. Thick, with coloured tabs and highlighted pages and notes in the margin in her tiny neat writing. I recognised it straight away. It was how she’d organised her revision at medical school. “Mum,” she said. “I need to talk to you about what Peigi said.” “I know, love.” “You know?” “I’ve thought about nothing else for 3 weeks. She was right, wasn’t she.” Rachel nodded slowly. Then she took a breath, and said the thing I think she’d travelled 600 miles to say. “Mum, I’m a GP. In Bristol, I saw women like you every single day. 50s, 60s, exhausted, foggy, sleeping all night and waking up flat. I ran their bloods. If the bloods were normal, I told them it was very common at their age and they should pace themselves. I must have said it 200 times.” Her eyes filled up. “And then I went to the island, and I watched Peigi cut peats at 88, and I watched you fall asleep against that wall at 59. And I thought, those can’t both be normal. They can’t both be age. And I realised I’d never once asked the question that matters. Not ‘are the bloods normal.’ But ‘why is she so tired, when everything we test for is fine?’” She opened the folder. “So I went looking. Properly. Not the leaflets. The actual research. And I think I’ve found it. Or a big part of it.” Then she sat at my kitchen table and explained it to me. I’ll tell you the way she told me, because it was the first time in 2 years that anything about my own body made sense. “Mum, you know Peigi’s peat stack? The big one beside the house?” I did. A great black wall of drying peats, taller than Callum, enough to keep the fire going all winter. “Imagine that stack is your food. Everything you eat in a day. Your toast, your dinner, your bit of cake. It’s all fuel. It’s all there, stacked up inside you, enough to keep you going all day.” “But a stack of peat doesn’t warm a single room on its own, does it? You could have the biggest stack on the island and still freeze to death in January. Not until somebody strikes a match and lights it.” “Your body’s the same. The energy in your food isn’t any use to you until it’s been lit. Turned into the fuel your brain and your muscles actually run on. And the match that does the lighting is a vitamin. B1. Thiamine.” “Without enough B1, you’ve got a house full of peat and no matches. The fuel’s all there, and you can’t use it. So you sleep 8 hours and wake up flat. You hit a wall at 3. You lose your words in the middle of a sentence, because your brain’s running on the same fuel as everything else, and it’s not getting lit.” I sat there and stared at her. “Your body doesn’t keep much B1 in store,” she went on. “It uses it every single day and needs topping up every single day. And once you’re past 50, a lot of women are running much nearer the bottom than anyone realises. Nobody tests for it routinely. It doesn’t show up on the bloods I used to run.” “But I take a multivitamin,” I said. “Every morning. It says energy on the front.” Rachel smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Can I see it?” I fetched it from the cupboard. She turned it over and put her finger on one line on the back of the box. B1, 1.1mg. “That’s the basic daily amount,” she said. “It’s the bare minimum to keep you from being properly deficient, and that’s all it’s designed to do. It’s one match, Mum. You’ve got a whole winter’s stack to light.” Then she ran her finger further down the label. “And look at these. The other B vitamins work alongside the B1, in the same chain. They help your body turn food into energy, and they help reduce tiredness. That’s recognised. But see here? Folic acid, cyanocobalamin, pyridoxine. Those are the cheap forms. Your body has to convert them before it can use them, and that conversion doesn’t always go well as we get older. So you’re not even getting the full benefit of the little you’re taking.” She put the box down on the table between us. “You’re not worn out, Mum. Nothing’s broken. Your fuel’s all there. It’s just not getting lit.” I’ve thought about that sentence every day since. Nothing’s broken. It’s just not getting lit. For 2 years I’d thought something in me had run down for good. Like an old battery. Something I’d just have to put up with until I ended up like Ishbel in her chair. And here was my own daughter, a doctor, telling me nothing had run down at all. It was all still there, waiting for a match. Then she said something that broke my heart a little. “Mum, I’m so sorry. I handed women that same multivitamin advice across my desk for 8 years. I told my own mother on the phone to pace herself. I never once looked at the back of the box.” I held her hand across the table, and neither of us said anything for a while. Then she reached into her bag and set a bottle down next to the multivitamin. “I spent 2 months looking for something that does it properly,” she said. “Most of what’s on the shelves is the same 1.1mg with a nicer box. Or a decent B1, with everything else in the cheap forms. Or a ‘blend’ that won’t tell you how much of anything is in it.” “This is the one I’d give my own mother. So I am.” It was The Vitamin B Complex by rynw. A small British company. “100mg of B1,” she said, tapping the label. “That’s matches, Mum. Not one match. And all 8 B vitamins, every one in the active form your body can use straight away. Methylcobalamin for the B12. Methylfolate, not folic acid. P5P for the B6. And every dose printed right there on the label, nothing hidden.” I took the first one the next morning with my breakfast, with my daughter the doctor watching me across the kitchen table. I’d love to tell you it worked straight away. It didn’t, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you that sort of thing. The first week, I noticed nothing at all. The 3 o’clock plug got pulled at work the same as ever. I remember standing at my counter thinking, well, that’s that then. Rachel rang on the Sunday. “Give it time, Mum,” she said. “You’ve been running low for 2 years. You don’t light a whole stack with one match.” So I gave it time. The second week, something happened, and I very nearly missed it. It was a Friday. Mr Patel came to my window, like always, at about 3. And I said “Afternoon, Mr Patel,” without thinking about it. I counted his money once, and it was right. We had a little chat about his grandson’s football, and it was only after he’d gone that I realised it was 3 o’clock, and my head was clear. The plug hadn’t been pulled. I was still there. I had to go to the staff toilet and sit down for a minute, because I was crying, and I couldn’t explain to anyone why. In the third week, Steve noticed before I said anything. We were watching a film on the Saturday night, and when the credits came up at about half 10, he turned and looked at me. “You’ve watched the whole thing,” he said. “I know,” I said. “You haven’t watched the end of anything in 2 years, Jan.” He wasn’t wrong. I’d forgotten what it was like to see the end of a film. In the fourth week, I went back to my Thursday choir. They all made a fuss of me, and I sang the whole 2 hours. I stood for the whole thing and came home humming, and then I sat up chatting to Steve until 11 like we were courting. Around the sixth week, Wendy came round for coffee for the first time since the wedding. She’d been avoiding the subject, I think, because she didn’t know what to say after Peigi’s speech. She sat at my kitchen table, and we talked for 2 hours, and as she was leaving she stopped in the doorway. “I don’t know what you’re doing, Jan,” she said. “But you’re you again. You’re properly you.” I had to put the kettle on so I wouldn’t cry in front of her. By the eighth week, I’d stopped noticing it at all, which I think is the real sign. I wasn’t counting good days and bad days anymore. I wasn’t planning my life around 3 o’clock. I was just living it, the way I used to, the way I’d forgotten anyone could. I’m not 30 again. I’m 59. I still get tired after a long day, like everybody does. But it’s ordinary tired now. The kind a good night’s sleep puts right. Not the other kind. Not the kind that sits you by the wall at your own daughter’s wedding and takes your words in front of 140 people. The next May, Steve and I went back to the island for the peat cutting. Rachel had told Peigi I’d be coming. She didn’t tell her anything else. We came off the ferry, and there was Rachel on the pier in her wellies, and Callum, and Donald with the van. And there, standing a little apart from them in her long waxed coat, with her crook in her hand, was Peigi. She watched me walk up the pier. I saw her eyes go over me the way they had the first time, quick and thorough and missing nothing. She didn’t say anything. She just nodded once. The next morning I was up at 5 with the rest of them. I walked the half mile out to the peat bank without stopping. Peigi was already there, of course, 89 now, with her tusker in her hand. She held it out to me. I’d never cut a peat in my life. She showed me how to slice it out of the bank and lift it clean, and how to lay it on the heather. And I cut peats on that moor with my daughter’s family from 6 in the morning until the light started to go. My back ached. My arms ached. My hands blistered. But it was the honest ache of a long day’s work, and I didn’t sit down on a single rock. At about 3 in the afternoon, Peigi straightened up from the bank and looked at me. “It’s 3 o’clock,” she said. “I know,” I said. She watched me lift the next peat out of the bank and lay it down beside the others. “That’s a different woman to the one who fell asleep on that rock last summer,” she said. “It’s the same woman,” I said. “She just got her matches back.” Peigi laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh properly, a big laugh that came right up from her boots and went out across the moor. That night there was a ceilidh in the village hall, because on that island there’s always a ceilidh. And when the fiddler struck up Strip the Willow, Donald came across the hall and held out his hand to me. I danced it. The whole thing, from the top of the line to the bottom, being spun round and round by fishermen until the room was a blur. When I got to the end, I was laughing so hard I could hardly stand, and there was Peigi by the wall in her good blue dress, clapping. I danced the next one too. And the one after that. I was still dancing at 2 in the morning. I’m telling you all this because I think you might be where I was, sitting by the wall. Maybe you’re the woman who sleeps her 8 hours and wakes up more tired than when she went to bed. The one who needs 2 coffees before she can think, and runs out of road by 3 in the afternoon. The one who’s lost a name she’s known for 15 years and covered it with “my love.” The one who’s quietly been cutting things out of her life one at a time. The choir. The Saturday coffee. The dancing. Maybe you’ve been to the doctor, been told your bloods are fine and it’s your age, and you’ve started to believe it. If that’s you, please hear what an 88-year-old crofter said in a village hall on the edge of the map. That is not your age. The fuel is there. It’s in your food, every single day. It might just not be getting lit. Do see your GP first, the way I did, and let them check your bloods and rule anything else out. That matters. But if everything comes back normal and you’re still running on empty, don’t let “normal” be the end of the conversation, the way it was for Ishbel. Do one thing tonight. Go to your cupboard, take out whatever vitamins you’re taking, and turn the box over. Find the line that says B1. If it says 1.1mg, or 1.4mg, or 2mg, you’ve found what Rachel found on my kitchen table. One match for a whole winter’s stack. Then look further down. If you see folic acid, cyanocobalamin or pyridoxine, those are the cheap forms your body has to convert before it can use them. What I take every morning with my breakfast is The Vitamin B Complex by rynw. 100mg of B1. All 8 B vitamins in their active forms. Every dose printed on the label. This is where I got mine: https://rynw.com/products/b-complex Janet P.S. They have a 30 day money back guarantee. If you don’t feel a real difference, you get your money back with no questions asked. After 2 years of paying for a multivitamin that said “Energy” on the front and did nothing, that made it an easy decision. P.P.S. If you subscribe, it’s 20% off with free UK delivery, and you can skip, pause or cancel whenever you like. I went that way, because after the second week I knew I wasn’t going to stop. P.P.P.S. Give it time. My first week was nothing, and I nearly gave up. My second week was a Friday afternoon with Mr Patel that I’ll never forget. By the sixth week, my sister told me I was me again. As Rachel says, you don’t light a whole winter’s stack with one match. P.P.P.P.S. If you’ve got a friend, a sister or a mum who always says she’s shattered, who’s stopped coming to things, who’s started saying “it’s just my age,” please send her this. Ishbel never had anyone stand up in a hall and say it out loud. I did, and it gave me my life back. Maybe you can be that person for someone else.