Washing Powder and Asprins

Those Persil ads used to really annoy me. Those sad women on TV who hold their children's beach towels up and discuss washing powder. As if.

The TV company over expose the whiteness so it has a sort of halo. Check your bath towel to see if it has a halo. If it doesn't, check whether it smells 'lemon fresh'. You should wear an expression of having just achieved a drug induced high while doing this. Then phone a friend to discuss it all.

No? Don't blame you. Life's too short.

I will think of this next time I pull the sludgy mass of washing out of the machine. Running my fingers round those horrid rubbery edges to the drum and coaxing the load to come out always makes me feel uncomfortably like a midwife. However hard I try, it always lands in a mess on the kitchen floor or a sock spills onto the stairs when I carry it up to the bedrooms. Luckily I gave up nursing in the early stages, so never made it to Midwife. (I've just experienced a nursing flashback here, of shaking a thermometer really hard and smashing it against a bed rail. Little globs of mercury rolled around in every direction. I went to get a dustpan and brush, and was a bit surprised to get back to the bed and find police style tape cordonning off the area and men in white paper jumpsuits and masks looking like they were playing marbles with the little grey spheres. I hadn't just broken a thermometer, I'd created a 'mercury incident' which was quite exciting.)

There is something very impressive about those people in the paper jump suits and masks. You see them on the news quite often. They really look like they know what they're doing, it's more effective than even having a stethoscope round your neck. It's science in action!

On a separate but still medicinal note, I was thinking about the word 'paradox' yesterday. It's a nice word. Sounds like something you might dissolve in water to cure a headache. Take two paradox three times daily. Your headache won't go, and you will certainly be feeling quite confused by bedtime. Which also reminds me of those headache adverts, with more annoying women (maybe the same jobbing actresses?) clutching their foreheads with a pained expression on their faces, then looking like they have discovered Utopia when they see a packet of asprin. So, if you're a woman reading this, remember to act up big time over the headaches, and make sure all your party conversations are centered around the whiteness of your washing.