Soiled
Fiction: A new diet trend and the people going all-in.
This story is the grand prize winner of the Dispatches competition.
Can eating dirt make you a genius?
I first heard about Doktor Merkwürdigliebe from an old college buddy in an Irish bar. He was going through a fractious divorce, and it looked like the end was finally in sight—his wife had been granted the kids, but I don’t know quite how upset he was about that, in truth—and so we went out to celebrate, just the two of us.
It was one of those big nights that creeps up on you. We started off watching the Packers dismantle the Bengals, and before we knew it, we’d sunk a dozen beers between us, found a Wendy’s, laid waste to a couple of chicken sliders, then moved onto a whisky bar and got back on the liquor. It was classic guy talk: football and cars, and women we had been with in the past, before we got a little paunchy and lost our bite.
At a certain point my buddy interrupted a story he was telling about his bitch wife to tell me that he needed to swap from whisky onto something else—a clear spirit like vodka, tequila or, God help us, gin.
“It will fuck up my yellow bile,” he said.
“What?” I thought I had misheard him.
“Too much whisky.” He shrugged. “Fucks up your yellow bile, dude.”
I clearly looked how I felt—mystified—so he took out his phone and showed me.
There it was, clear as day on his Instagram feed: a chart explaining how the body contained four substances called “humors.” These were called blood (that one made sense), phlegm (likewise, though gross), and two biles, yellow and black. An imbalance in the humors, my buddy explained, was what made people sick. Too much yellow bile and you might get migraines, say. Too much phlegm and you were more prone to diabetes. There was a doctor online who was making big waves with this, and a lot of other people were saying it, too. His name was Merkwürdigliebe, though in his Reels, he sounded pretty American. My buddy flashed the guy’s page quickly: 195,000 followers.
“Paleo diet’s clapped out, man,” he told me. “It’s all about the humors now.” He shrugged again. “The mind’s inclination follows the body’s temperature.”
I googled “merkwurdigliebe theory of humors” while my buddy ordered himself a G&T.
The theory of the humors was first developed by the Roman physician Galen around the second century A.D., though Hippocrates and Aristotle both wrote about it and endorsed it enthusiastically. It is pleasingly symmetrical: each humor in the body has a season and an element associated with it, as well as a body part which produces it.
Yellow bile is secreted by the gall bladder, and is associated with summer and fire – people who are excessively full of yellow bile are choleric, meaning they are ambitious and short-tempered. (So, in a way, my buddy was right—too much whisky would have made him choleric. The only issue was that too much gin had the same effect.)
Phlegm, not to be confused with the modern type that you might spit out when you have a cold, is a fluid associated with the brain tissue, though also with pus, mucus, saliva and sweat. It is aligned with fall and water and phlegmatic people are cerebral and reserved.
Blood? Well, that’s blood, from your heart, and associated with the season of spring and the element of air. Lots of blood makes you sanguine, and sanguine people are social and enthusiastic.
Finally, black bile is produced by the spleen, associated with winter and earth. Too much black bile makes you melancholic but—and more on this later—it is also considered essential to creative endeavors.
I read about all of this online the day after my buddy introduced me to it. I was nursing a fierce hangover, but it was fascinating, and there was always more to learn.
Men and women, for example, are different according to the humors: men are generally drier and hotter, and have more yellow bile. Young men in particular were very choleric, and this made them quick to anger but also prone to take action to change the world. And as someone aged, their humors naturally changed in balance, which explained why old people are less active than the young. It followed a sort of basic logic, too. In the winter, when it is cold and wet, people get colds, with running noses: more phlegm. In the summer, people are happier and more energetic, because it is hotter and they produce more yellow bile and blood: they’re more choleric and sanguine. Imbalance in the humors, supposedly the cause of all illness and disease both physical and mental, was called dyscrasia.
I learned much of this from Doktor Merkwürdigliebe’s social media accounts, which I scrolled while sipping on an Alka-Seltzer on my couch and working my way through a box of cold soba.
The guy was active on Instagram, Youtube, TikTok and X/Twitter, though he tended to post the same content across all his platforms. He said he was in his mid-30s, but he looked much younger, with a babyface, round wire glasses and curly sandy-blond hair—a less menacing version of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Major Toht. He often wore a sort of interwar-style white medical tunic with blue epaulettes in his videos, which were filmed in a bright, airy clinic which he announced that he built himself in his backyard in St Petersburg, Florida.
A typical video on Doktor Merkwürdigliebe’s social channels might see him explain a concept behind one or more of the humors, before suggesting how to avoid an imbalance through foodstuffs and the occasional activity. In a spring video, he might recommend avoiding red meat and cutting down on the gym to make sure one doesn’t become over-sanguinated. At Christmas, he’d suggest whisky sours after dinner to keep the yellow bile up. In October, he would post about how to avoid too much phlegm as fall crept in by eating fish, seeds and roots—and, apparently, by masturbating regularly (you might already have guessed that Merkwürdigliebe’s regime is very popular with teenagers and men in their twenties).
Merkwürdigliebe and his fellow advocates were producing an entire worldview which their adherents, who as far as I could tell were overwhelmingly male, could use to explain every health issue they had ever faced. Subreddits including r/ancientwisdom, r/theoryofhumors, and r/bilebros were full of accounts of chronic illnesses that had been solved by, say, a reduction of yellow bile or an increase in phlegm. Before and after pictures showed wispy teenage boys turned into beefcakes in mere weeks, supposedly thanks to having rebalanced their internal humors. Something big and significant was happening online. But was it real? Could the ancient knowledge of the humors really help solve intractable health issues? Or was it all a sham—astrology for men?
I decided I had to meet Doktor Merkwürdigliebe.
Merkwürdigliebe’s website had a contact form. I entered my full name and email, adding that I was an editor-at-large with GAUCHE magazine and that I would like to interview the Doktor about his practice.
About three hours later, I received an email in response. It was from Merkwürdigliebe himself.
“Dear Tom,” it began. “I would be delighted to meet with you. However, due to being slandered online in the past, can I ask for approval in advance of the piece? I am conscious of certain misconceptions around my work with the Galenic humors.”
I replied that GAUCHE’s blanket policy was never to agree to editorial sign-off, but that I would show him the quotes I was going to include in the piece before it went out, albeit with no obligation for me to change anything other than the demonstrably factually inaccurate. Several more hours passed, and I began to wonder if the Doktor was going to ghost me, until another message popped into my inbox: “OK. Are you around next week?” I booked a flight to Tampa immediately.
Ten days later, I pulled up around mid-morning outside a stucco bungalow under the bright Florida sunshine. Merkwürdigliebe’s headquarters were small and unprepossessing, set on a quiet street in suburban St. Petersburg amid spindly backyard palms—hardly the location you’d expect to be the ground zero of a new medical revolution. When I rang the bell, a tiny Hispanic housekeeper opened the door, and I was worried that I had come to the wrong place, until I glanced over her shoulder and quickly recognized a joint kitchen/living room space where Merkwürdigliebe shot many of his most popular to-camera videos, tastefully furnished in mid-century furniture. I asked to see the Doktor, and the woman let me in with a nod.
I waited for a couple of minutes, surreptitiously scanning the framed pictures on the wall for any sign of a medical diploma, before Merkwürdigliebe appeared to shake my hand with an apology—he was finishing off a pre-recorded to-camera diet plan for a patient—and offered me a cup of Turkish coffee and a tour of the premises. He had a patient suffering from dyscrasia arriving in a quarter of an hour, he explained, but the man had already agreed that I could sit in on his consultation.
We headed out to the studio in the backyard, which I also recognized from Merkwürdigliebe’s TikToks. Inside was a small, rudimentary operating theater with a vinyl floor and something resembling a dentist’s chair in the center of the room, and a small drain beneath it. Skylights ensured it was a bright space, but the lower windows were frosted for privacy. The room smelled like it had been recently cleaned.
Hanging on one wall was a medieval doctor’s mask, the birdlike sort with the huge hollow beak. Merkwürdigliebe saw me admiring it, and explained that the beak was used by physicians for storing dried herbs which would ward off the bad smells and miasma of illness in their patients (I already knew this, but I did not tell him so). “These guys knew what they were doing,” Merkwürdigliebe declared.
In fact, throughout the day he expressed admiration for the philosopher-physicians of the past, including Galen and the 11th-century Persian doctor Avicenna, and was dismissive of modern medical practice. At one point, Merkwürdigliebe imagined himself in a conversation with a skeptical doctor. “You’re really gonna tell me that you, after a couple of years of med school, know more than Hippocrates himself? The inventor of medicine as a discipline?” He snorted. “Nah. These people lived through the Black Death and survived. They were the real deal.”
I pointed out that many people in Europe and Asia, actually, did not survive the Black Death.
“Right,” Merkwürdigliebe agreed. “But imagine how many more would have died if they didn’t know about humor theory.”
Merkwürdigliebe, of course, is not the man’s real name. The compound word means “strange love” in German, and it seems reasonable to assume that the doctor—if he is a registered doctor at all—has borrowed his moniker from the Kubrick film. This made it impossible to confirm where or when Merkwürdigliebe may have qualified as a physician (throughout our interactions, he refused to tell me his birth name, citing “security concerns”).
Merkwürdigliebe said he advertised on Instagram and TikTok, benefitting from new, looser rules around content moderation which many believe Meta introduced after bowing to pressure from the incoming Trump administration. He ran a Patreon account through which subscribers were sold customized humor-balancing remedies. I asked to try one out, and Merkwürdigliebe agreed to give me a comped subscription. (Later, back home, I received a recipe by email for eel and horsemeat frittata, which would “purge the spleen” and “renew black bile to increase [my] creative vigor.” I did not cook the horse recipe.)
But Merkwürdigliebe also saw in-person patients, and this was where his true source of income and influence became apparent. Self-described ‘bile bros’ would pay anything up to $400 a session to have the Doktor analyze their humor balance. With stool, blood, urine and saliva samples, he said, he could pinpoint what might be making a patient feel off-color, and help advise them on how to better balance their internal substances.
The patient arrived and introduced himself as Kyle. He was wearing a head-to-toe set of black sweats, and looked like a guy who worked out a lot. He told me he ran his own start-up in Miami, and had driven over on his day off to see the Doktor at a cost, he happily admitted, of $1,750. Kyle was too sanguine, so after signing some release forms, Merkwürdigliebe bled him from his forearm.
I asked Kyle about his route into the bile community. “I was into nootropics and the Lindy diet for a while,” Kyle explained while the blood flowed into a faucet beside the chair. “But I kinda came to see those as quackery. Humor theory just makes so much more sense.”
Did he take part in the community online?
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded vigorously and laughed. “I’m a real bile bro! Kyle by name, bile by nature.” The line sounded like one he delivered on a regular basis. Then he noticed the empty Turkish coffee cup behind me, which I had finished after accepting it from the Doktor. “Is that yours?”
I nodded.
“Are there still grains in it?”
I took a look, and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you mind?” He held out his palm, and I passed him the mug, at which point he grabbed it and scooped out the soggy coffee grounds and sucked them out of his cupped palm.
“Good for the black stuff,” he grinned, through teeth which now had the effect of being caked in rich soil.
As part of my visit, Merkwürdigliebe had agreed to prepare me the “ultimate balance meal,” a repast that would get my humors in order. He was quick to point out that, actually, it would take some time and a regular diet of humor-balancing foodstuffs to start feeling the effects of the diet plan—really, I’d need to eat this food every day for at least a month before the old bile, blood, and phlegm had been cleansed and replaced. But it was as good an alternative as he could offer. Because there was enough for the three of us, Merkwürdigliebe invited Kyle to eat, too. Kyle readily accepted.
Merkwürdigliebe’s assistant cook, the small housekeeper whose name I once again managed to miss, brought the food out to us. The first course was a seared plate of tripe wrapped in goose skin. It tasted fatty and bland, like an entire plate of bacon rind.
Merkwürdigliebe stared at me as I ate. He seemed to be very slightly smiling, and I had the sudden worry that I had been the victim of an extremely elaborate prank—one which had begun two weeks before with my buddy in the sports bar. But then he tucked into his own tripe and made appreciative noises, nodding in approval at his housekeeper.
Kyle, Merkwürdigliebe, and I ate in silence until the second course was brought through: a steak made from reconstituted beaver, elk and cassowary, charred around the edges. It was a little dry, which must have shown on my face, because Merkwürdigliebe asked if I wanted anything to go with it: ketchup or mayonnaise or something else.
“Are those allowed?” I asked. “You know, according to humor theory?”
He looked at me like I was an imbecile. “Of course they are! We’re not mad. They’re only condiments. Go ahead.”
I asked Merkwürdigliebe why the foodstuffs needed to be so obscure, why we couldn’t have some real food—some chicken or fries—to make us more phlegmatic. Surely they affected the humors just as well as beaver meat? He frowned. “The people out there, the normies, eat what you call ‘real’ food. Do they look healthy to you?”
I couldn’t argue with that. Next up came the finale: a crocodile brain sautéed in ghee. Merkwürdigliebe wouldn’t tell me where it was from, only that it was ethically sourced, so after pushing it around the plate for a few seconds, I dove in and took a bite. It was rubbery and cold and slightly jellied. I suspected he might have bought it from a hunter in the mangroves somewhere along the state coastline. I suppressed my gag reflex, thinking about all the nourishing phlegm this was going to produce in my body.
Kyle was watching me eat. He laughed. “Do you feel better?”
In fall, a wellness retreat was announced. A group of influencers including Merkwürdigliebe had crowdfunded $100,000 to rent a conference center in Oregon for a three-day summit at which everyone who was anyone within the humor scene would be speaking. Kyle texted me—we had exchanged numbers at the Doktor’s clinic—and invited me along. He knew the organizers, and could set me up with a press pass. I packed a bag and booked a flight to Portland.
I arrived at the conference center on Saturday morning, and found it abuzz with activity. It was already the conference’s second day, and the attendees seemed to have settled in well. Most of them were young men—generally but not universally white—but there were some women walking around dressed in dirndls, too, the result of the handful of female fitness and lifestyle influencers invited to the conference. I walked past several people with t-shirts bearing a cartoon image of Doktor Merkwürdigliebe’s face, replete with little round glasses and blond hair. A couple of guys were even cosplaying Hippocrates himself: bushy beard, chiton, caduceus.
The focus of the event, which seemed to be described interchangeably as a retreat, a summit and a conference, was black bile. While an excess of black bile is considered to make individuals overly melancholy in the schema of the four humors, it was also posited by the 16th-century Neoplatonic writer Marsilio Ficino to be an essential marker of genius. Ficino thought that it was a requirement that anybody who amounted to any sort of significant creative force by necessity had to have a significant volume of black bile in their body. The premise of the Oregon conference took this to its logical modern conclusion. Want to raise a killer Series B round for your start-up? Take some supplements and increase your black bile for eight weeks, then watch the cash roll in.
The mood was somewhere between Burning Man and Boccaccio. In the huge, hangar-like central hall, which was large enough to fit dozens of stalls, desks, and tents, concession stands sold T-shirts bearing the slogans EAT SHIT AND DIE and JUST HUMOR ME. I bought an apron for my wife with a cartoon of a smiling, defecating cat on it bearing the caption TIME TO PURRGE, knowing she would hate it passionately. Kyle had told me that attendees over the three days would break the five figures, and it certainly felt very busy. Other alimentary lifestyles were represented at the summit, too: walking past a meet-and-greet, I recognized a trio of YouTube dieticians from Tanzania called the Bushmeat Boys, and a man from the fringes of the scene around whom dubious rumors of minor cannibalism swirled.
I met Kyle at the entrance to the main auditorium. He was talking to a minor four-humor influencer called Abigail Rose, known online as “SanguineRose,” who runs a popular X account which takes pictures of celebrities and politicians and predicts with of their four humors are out of sync. (Gavin Newsom? Too sanguine, apparently. Sabrina Carpenter? Not enough yellow bile. Zach Braff? Needs to be bled.) The big news on the second day of the retreat: Elon Musk had approvingly retweeted one of Rose’s posts on X. SanguineRose’s follower count had tripled in 12 hours to more than 105,000.
On Rose’s suggestion, we headed to a talk by a British man named Leroy Smith. Smith had been propelled to fame within the four-humor scene after his daughter’s school in Harlow, England, refused to let her eat a spatchcocked vole that he had packed in her lunchbox. Smith had fought the school board in the English courts, arguing that he had a right to nourish his child according to his own belief system, and that the vole was essential for his daughter to increase her black bile. He lost. His response had been to move the family to Laos, his wife’s country of birth, and homeschool, and presumably feed, his children.
Smith came on stage to a standing ovation from the audience, which I estimated to be about 50-60 people. He was a small, red man with a shaved head and a beard. He spoke quickly and energetically, with an accent much like the singer Adele. “They don’t want you to be healthy,” he said at one point in his talk, pointing a finger at the audience (he pronounced it ell-fee). “They want you getting cancer, getting AIDS, hooked up to their dialysis machines at $900 an hour.” I sat next to Kyle, who didn’t seem to enjoy the talk very much; he kept looking at his watch, and when Smith finished his talk by promoting a new supplement, he didn’t stay to buy a tub, but left straight away.
I found out why very quickly, when we crossed the conference center to attend a fireside conversation between an influencer called Hannah Olson and a journalist from the Daily Wire. The room was packed, and we only made it into seats in the last few rows before organizers on the door had to begin turning people away.
It turned out that Olson is one of the most popular figures among four humors adherents, blending the roles of health influencer with political pundit. Unlike Merkwürdigliebe, who is mostly apolitical, Olson endorsed Trump before the 2024 election, and she hosts a regular podcast on which she has hosted both Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Blonde, svelte and well groomed, mother-of-two Olson also runs an OnlyFans account. In her fireside talk, she told the audience that after seeing internet personality Belle Delphine sell her used bathwater on the platform, Olson was inspired to sell vials of her own blood to fans. For $175, she will send you 25ml of type O negative, along with video evidence of her withdrawing it using a syringe. What you do with that blood is up to you.
This time, Kyle stood in line for twenty minutes after the talk to take a photo with Olson. The two exchanged small talk and looked into Kyle’s phone camera as I took the shot for them, Kyle grinning sheepishly and Olson flashing perfectly white teeth at me. Both made ‘‘b’ for bile’ signs by putting their thumbs and forefingers together on their right hands and holding the other three fingers up like a shadow-puppet bunny.
Then it was lunchtime. Lunch was included in the ticket. I had hoped that we’d get something unusual, like the crocodile brain that Merkwürdigliebe had served me in Florida, but the food was regular: hotdogs and burgers and fries and burritos, or what the most committed humor influencers such as Leroy Smith derogatorily call ‘soylent,’ after the foodstuff in the 1970s dystopian film Soylent Green.
I ate with Kyle, Rose and two other ‘bile bros’ named Patrick and Archer who we had met in the queue for photos with Olson. Throughout our meal, people approached Rose to congratulate her on her endorsement from Musk, and she seemed pleased, if a little abashed. I asked her, Patrick, and Archer each how they first came across the four-humor lifestyle. The two men had both been introduced to Hannah Olson’s videos by a mutual friend at the gym, but Rose’s story was different: she had been an academic, studying for a PhD in Classics at the University of Idaho, when she first came across Galen’s writing on the humors.
Slight and dark, with the build of a long-distance runner, Rose told me that she had suffered from the gastrointestinal condition called Crohn’s disease since childhood, and that regular stomach cramps and diarrhea had been a part of her life as long as she could remember—until she tried consciously balancing her humors through dieting and emesis. Overnight, Rose claimed, her Crohn’s symptoms abated, then disappeared. As she told her story, Kyle, Archer and Patrick nodded reverently.
After lunch, the weekend’s keynote speech was delivered by Merkwürdigliebe himself. As we found our seats in the largest auditorium, and the lights went down, I felt nervous on his behalf. So far, both the speakers I had seen address the conference had been passionate and charismatic. But here, there were easily 700 or 800 people in the room, including some of the biggest names in humor theory. What if the softly spoken Merkwürdigliebe wasn’t up to the task?
I needn’t have worried. Merkwürdigliebe strode onto the stage soundtracked by Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and the crowd went nuts. He was wearing his white physician’s tunic, which glowed under the halogen spots. His hair was slicked back over his scalp, and he was smiling widely—a rock star’s smile. He triumphantly raised a fist in the air when he reached the center of the rostrum, and waited for the applause to die down.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, sounding boyish but still confident. “Welcome to the future of nutrition.” There was more cheering, whooping and applause from the crowd.
Over the next thirty-five minutes, Merkwürdigliebe executed what I can only describe as a tour de force in public speaking, spinning a narrative that positioned Galen’s theory of the humors as a deeply held, almost religious truth that had been discredited by nefarious actors over the past four centuries. Step-by-step, Merkwürdigliebe claimed, knowledge of the humors had been repressed first by the Roman Catholic Church, then by the United States government, and finally by Big Pharma, until humans had lost the self-knowledge of their own bodies. “Until now,” he added, sparking another round of appreciative applause.
Merkwürdigliebe shouted out his fellow thought-leaders in the four humor space—Hannah Olson and Leroy Smith among them, though not Abigail Rose—and noted that there was still more work to be done. When Merkwürdigliebe told a story which clearly referred in passing to Kyle, who was seated beside me, I felt him physically tense up with excitement and recognition.
Then, Merkwürdigliebe paused. He asked, rhetorically, whether anyone in the crowd knew why the conference was being held where it was. There was silence in the hall.
Answering his own question, Merkwürdigliebe announced that West-Central Oregon had a very specific chemical make-up that meant its mud was particularly nourishing for black bile. And, as a surprise, he had sourced this very earth and brought 150 kilograms of it to the event. An excited murmur spread through the room, as two men in lanyards pulled a long trestle table on wheels laden with paper plates of dirt out from stage right, and began handing them to the audience members in the front row. We would become, Doktor Merkwürdigliebe announced, a roomful of geniuses, if we just ingested enough of this mud.
The plates of earth were passed back through the hall, including to us. Something was moving under the surface of my portion, but around me, I could hear the sound of men scooping up handfuls of soil and swallowing it dryly down. Soft loam was sprinkling the floor like heavy snow. I stood, frozen, wondering what teeming lifeforms awaited my intestines in the earth.
Then someone in the crowd began chanting through a mouthful of mud: “Merky! Merky!” Beside me, Kyle stood up and raised a fist, and joined him. Within seconds, the entire hall was on its feet, worshipping the Doktor on stage. “Merky! Merky! Merky!” Men were standing on their seats, yowling triumphantly through craws stuffed with humus.
In the excitement, I managed to slip my untouched, seething plate of earth under my chair.
In January, while I was in Louisiana writing a story for GAUCHE on voodoo crypto traders, my phone buzzed. It was my buddy from the bar, and he had sent me a link to the St. Petersberg Gazette. Doktor Merkwürdigliebe had been arrested. Kyle was dead.
Initial reports suggest that in order to save money, Kyle tried to bleed himself, but he nicked an artery, and bled out in within a few minutes. A sealed vial of blood found beside him had been matched to Hannah Olson, the OnlyFans influencer, although she was not a person of interest in the case. Merkwürdigliebe, though, was being held on suspicion of a string of robberies at local zoos in the South Florida region. Animals had been stolen from four different zoological societies over the previous fifteen months, but it was only after a diet plan written by Merkwürdigliebe was found on Kyle’s laptop that police had put two and two together. Suddenly, zookeepers across the state knew why all their flightless birds had been disappearing.
Merkwürdigliebe’s real name was Tim Saladino, and he was thirty-six years old. Having completed only one year of community college, he was not a qualified medical doctor. In his text message, my buddy told me that he had decided to give up on the four humors lifestyle; his new interest was in trepanning.
Later that month, I drove to North Carolina to meet up with Rose, the X influencer, at a park near her home in suburban Durham. She told me that with Merkwürdigliebe’s downfall, a major gap in the market had opened, and that she was hoping to open her own private clinic to balance her patients’ four humors, pending approval from the state of South Dakota. She was expecting the paperwork to go through within the fortnight.
We walked along the waterfront. Rose was polite and affable, and when I told her about Kyle’s death, she offered her commiserations, though she said she didn’t recall their meeting at the Oregon conference. I got the impression that she certainly wasn’t going to let it put her off her ambition to take over Merkwürdigliebe’s business, should he be convicted, which seemed probable. As we walked, it struck me that the FBI was likely to contact me about the crocodile the Doktor had served me and Kyle when we first met.
As the sun began to wane, Rose made her excuses and left, citing a flare-up in her Crohn’s symptoms, which had returned since the conference. She had to get home to feed her young son, too—though what, exactly, I didn’t ask. I was left alone on the promenade near a food kiosk. It was a cold day, and darkening. Although it was only mid-afternoon, I ordered a sanguinary glass of mulled wine, conscious of the fact that Merkwürdigliebe would have approved: good for the blood on a chilly day.
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