‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ ? – To Be Taken With A Pinch Of Salt?

In an age where we are surrounded by media promises of cures for almost every medical complaint, it is perhaps time for me to consider the relevance of ‘The Old Wives’ Tales’ in the 21st Century.

As teenagers we were given our polio vaccine on a lump of sugar. The vaccine itself was a wonder drug. Iron lungs became unnecessary and polio has been eradicated in many parts of the world. A routine ‘few drops on the tongue’ was often the preferred method of administering the vaccine in later years. Other immunisations, for babies in particular, still had to involve injections. The babies cried!

Recently I read that research has shown, ‘Babies do feel pain, so a sweet item given at the same time as an injection, helps their whole system to cope’.

Mary Poppins knew that. My Mum knew that. Every baby’s Mum knows that.

When I first started to suffer panic attacks, I had never even heard of them. All I knew was the dreadful feeling of fear and anxiety with no apparent cause. At last I managed to talk to a friend about the problem. After explaining about the use of adrenalin in the body, the friend advised a quick self-help treatment; a spoonful of sugar!

Sportsmen and students have long used sugar in some form as a quick energy boost, but diabetics know that they need to be careful about having sugar. In my case, a cup of tea with sugar in is fine occasionally, whereas fruit is only a very special treat.

Fads and fashions change nearly as often in diets as in clothes. Mum used to say that any food was fine in moderation, and that even water was a poison in excess.

‘A cuppa and a chat’ with friends has long been one of my favourite pastimes. It is surprising how often we can solve the most difficult problems in our lives – with or without sugar in the tea.

We may also decide that the latest media scare-story about sugar and other foods should be ‘taken with a pinch of salt’.

Mary Garratt
February 2009

Scrapbook for Scatterbrains

As you may have realised, my brain is a ‘Mish-mash of pearls in a Sea of Mud’ at the moment. Yesterday started badly when the severe weather warnings meant that my proposed visit to see Sam in Bristol was cancelled.

The snow itself kept me indoors and also made me remember that I’d read somewhere that a few heavy curtains would be eco-friendly. This would be because the central heating could be set at a lower temperature.

‘A Grand Plan’ was thus set in motion. We have curtains & curtain-linings, from at least the previous three houses, in our attic here.

Surely we could have a New Year change round, and increase the window insulation at the same time? Even better, we would be ‘using what we already had’. I love my shopping, but not when it is only a matter of replacing items.

Could we buy one new set of curtains by moving old ones around?

That was at 9am yesterday. At 11 pm I went to bed exhausted – but with no changes of curtains yet. Mike had brought all the curtains down from the attic and had measured up those, as well as all the ones already at the various windows. He’d been down to the shed, through the snow, to see if we had a spare curtain rod there. We hadn’t.

So far, so good. Time for a coffee stop! That was where the exhaustion began. While I thought about the curtains, I was also trying to answer yet another quiz question. We had a picture of a cat-like creature which had a name of seven letters and was female. The picture looked as though it was from a cartoon of some kind.

We moved here exactly 4 years ago but my many, many books are still scattered around the house.

By 11 pm:

I’d found: ‘One I’d written earlier’ and had wanted to include it in a Musing for Pancake Day, to help with a fund raiser for Abi.

My daughter, Clare, had drawn the picture of our Pancake day when she was about the age that Abi is now; Abi is paralysed after a brain haemorrhage while she was helping others in her life as a young teenager.

I’d thought: “Oh, there are my Royal Family scrapbooks”. An article about today’s ‘Celebrities famous for being famous for a few minutes, instead of being the Cinema Stars of previous years’, had reminded me that I’d cut out , and made those scrapbooks, of my kind of celebrity photos.

That was when I was very young, but last year Clare needed information about her injections as a child. Again I’d made notes. Sometimes I can be organised, so I’d found those immediately.

My actions: I asked Mike to make some copies of the Pancake day picture, so I could use those. He did so, while I intended to put the original back where it should have been.

It should have been in the collection of writing & picture pages that Clare and I had made in 1992, as ‘A Childhood In Two Generations’

Even in 1992, I had used something I already had, as a ‘temporary’ file. The pages are still in a binder for a long defunct magazine. The first collection is of our photos of one of the first Sandbach Festivals of Transport. I included some poor photo-copies of my Mum’s photos about the Parade for the Centenary of Fodens. The original photos are here – somewhere.

Meanwhile: Andy works at home, as he is snowed in, & can’t get his car out of the garage.

Dayve travels from Crewe to Bristol & back, by train, for a few hours work.

Clare & Sam enjoy a walk to the park, where Sam smiles at us, via a modern e mail from a mobile phone. Sam loves the snow.

Results: No change yet for the curtains.
No answer to quiz question about the cartoon cat.
Lots of exercise searching & sorting hundreds of books.

An idea for ‘Nana’s Notions’, as a scrapbook for Sam, from his scatterbrain of a Nana
a.k.a. Mary Garratt (Mrs)
3rd. February 2009