The Olden Days
★★★★★
I have been tidying up this week and re-discovered my Polio vaccination card - such a hoarder am I!! We got four jabs! I was amused to discover that there was a space on the card reserved for "parental consent". In it my Mum had written "any vaccine available" so she must have been keen! My Mum had a strict "one child policy" before the Chinese even thought of it.
When it came to scalp problems we might (no pun intended here) have had a puff of DDT sprayed on our noggin at our school!! "Line up there!! " or more likely, a dunking in a Detol bowl rather like what the farmers do with their sheep (dipping).
In one house I lived in, we had no electricity and in another, we had no inside running water. There was one tap in the outside shed and a well right next to the outside loo. The protocol for getting a once-a -week bath, was to hop on the bicycle, peddle up the hill for a half mile, hand over two and sixpence to the lady of the house and have a nice warm bath - luxury.
Otherwise, to fix a scalp problem, one just dived head first into a bucket of cold water brought up from the well and held one's head under for as long as you could and sort of frizzled one's hair about. It usually stopped the itching pretty well. We must have been operating on the KISS principle before that acronym had been invented.
We have finally got rid of our wool carpets and gone for synthetic ones. We would have much preferred wool, as New Zealand used to be the happy home of seventy million sheep but the carpet beetle had caused such damage to the old one that we didn't wish to go there again.
Now you know how old I am, how old are you?
Cheers from Down Under
Michael
Just thought you should know.
Makuna Honey
★★★★★
