Tomorrow I am going out into the big wide world for the first time since I was told to isolate myself in March. I am going to Manchester University Hospital to see when I can be taken in to have a new aortic valve fitted. In normal times I like to wander about in the lovely park just across the road from us. If I do go to town it is usually just window shopping. When you get to my age there is not much that you need to buy apart from odds and ends such as shaving stuff.
It was while I was in Boots the Chemists last year looking for some tooth-paste that as I was bedazzled by both the range, the price and the claims of one particular firm. I wonder if this tooth-paste maker will ever run out of new ways of enticing us to buy their latest wonder product.
This made me think of what I did as a child to keep everything in my mouth in a healthy condition, the answer is not much. I never cleaned my teeth with anything except rubbing them with salt now and again. Not really the best way to look after them and probably why I lost a few teeth before I was fourteen. Salt was used for all manner of cleaning jobs, salt and water as a cure-all such as an eye wash or to clean a small wound.
Before the miracle of SR tooth-paste, my brother Don, who was about.eleven and just a year older than I was .Told me what the soldiers did to clean their teeth when they were in action. He gave me a little piece of Fairy soap—a laundry soap and said that if I chewed it as if I was eating something for a few minutes my teeth would be sparkling clean, and this is what the soldiers did.
“Just chew it for a little while until it foams a bit”. he said.
I’m not sure if it did make my teeth sparkle, but it did make me feel very, very sick.
To be fair to Don though, he never told me to swallow.
Madeinchertsey 