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Patricia had been a worrier her whole life, and retirement gave her considerably more time to do it. Fifty-one years of marriage, three children raised, a part-time bookkeeping practice run from the kitchen table for two decades. She'd been busy every day of her adult life and had, she now realised, relied on that busyness entirely. When it stopped, at 68, the anxiety that had always been background noise became something louder. Her sleep suffered first. Then her appetite. She picked up every cold that came within range, spent most of last winter with something or other, and began to dread the grey months in a way she never had when she had somewhere to be each morning. Her husband Frank worried. Her eldest daughter researched things on the internet and printed them out, which Patricia found both touching and faintly alarming. She tried various things. Evening primrose. Vitamin D. A meditation app she opened twice. Nothing shifted the underlying feeling that her body was simply winding down, losing its reserves, becoming gradually less reliable. She mentioned it to her GP, who was kind and unhurried and suggested, gently, that some of this was simply the terrain of getting older. Patricia accepted this. She was a practical woman. She didn't indulge in self-pity. But she did mention it to her friend Joyce, over coffee one afternoon in February, and Joyce — who at seventy-three had the energy of someone considerably younger and the immune system, apparently, of a person half her age — slid a small bag of golden granules across the table. Bee pollen. Spanish, she said. She'd been taking it for six months. She hadn't had so much as a sniffle all winter. Patricia took it home, read everything she could find about it — the bookkeeper in her required due diligence — and was quietly impressed by what the research showed. Bee pollen contains a natural compound called quercetin, a powerful antioxidant flavonoid with well-documented anti-inflammatory and immune-supporting properties. Combined with the full spectrum of B vitamins, over thirty minerals, and the natural enzymes that help an ageing digestive system actually absorb what it's given, it amounted to something the body of a woman in her late sixties was, it seemed, genuinely missing. She started in March. A teaspoon on her porridge each morning, which she found she didn't mind at all. By April she'd made it through the entire month without catching anything, which hadn't happened in two winters. By May she was sleeping through again — properly, waking up feeling like she'd actually rested. The anxiety hadn't vanished, but it had quietened in a way that felt connected to simply feeling better in her body. Less depleted. More herself. Frank noticed before she said anything. "You seem more like you," he said one evening, which was not the most poetic observation he'd ever made in fifty-one years, but was, she thought, exactly right. She's signed up for a watercolour class in September. She's been meaning to do it for years. Bee Natural's 250g Spanish Bee Pollen — sustainably harvested, 3rd party pesticide tested, ISO certified. 30-day money-back guarantee.