It happened so abruptly I thought I was going mad. I missed a meeting, then another. I kept going upstairs for laundry and coming back without. I forgot what the RSPB was called, and the supposedly unforgettable date my son was born. Worst of all, words started failing me. I made a GP appointment and forgot to attend. When I did make it, on the third attempt, I blanked on routine questions, and lost the word for “that thing about being able to have babies …”
“Fertility?”
“Yes, that. Jeez.”
He was reassuring, and ran through the options for HRT. It can, of course, be life-changing for some women. But as I considered the various oestrogen patches and gels, a different unease grew. Hormones or hormone-mimicking chemicals can be powerfully disruptive to the body, and in aquatic systems cause female marine snails to grow penises and the feminisation of male fish. Sewage treatment is able to strip oestrogens from domestic effluent, but that’s limited comfort given the institutional negligence of our water industry. Besides, I swim in rivers and lakes. Doing so has a borderline miraculous effect on my wellbeing – and that of thousands of older women. How many swim slathered in hormone gel? I balked. Sometimes it’s just all too bloody complicated.
With typical discretion, my friend Maria, a forager and herbalist, proffered the information that red clover flowers are full of phytoestrogens and nettle seeds are amazing for hair and skin. Both plants are abundant locally – the clover having been sown as a soil improver. It carries in nodes on its roots near-miraculous bacterial factories that convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrate at a rate of about 250kg per hectare a year – an ecosystem service that greatly reduces the need for synthetic fertiliser (good news for farmers, as the price is rocketing).
I started making daily clover tea and nettle porridge. My biology background demanded that I also read around. I learned that the hormone-stabilising effects of red clover are, thus far, scientifically indistinguishable from placebo, with the familiar caveat that “more research is needed”. But a strong placebo effect is still an effect. If it helps – and a month in, it seems to – does it matter? My inspiration comes from nearby nature; the possibility that it might also give me back the words to respond to it, free, is profoundly appealing.
