Husband requested home-made and/or edible presents for Christmas, and one received was a ball of smoked Welsh cheese.
I tasted some for lunch yesterday. Bleurgh. It's no good. I can't eat anything which reminds me so forcibly of Famel Syrup, the cough medicine of my childhood. Which makes it sound as if I had a lot of coughs. I don't remember that I did, so perhaps my gran just dosed me up to be on the safe side. I've just read up on it. It's no longer available though it is remembered fondly by many as being effective. Some suggest it was banned because it contains opioids; other say it was the creosote that got it banned. I don't know if it was ever banned or whether they just stopped making it.
Did you have Famel Syrup?
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Just before Christmas I was admiring our orchid in the kitchen, thinking, 'I'm sure it's not supposed to be covered in blooms in December. '
A day or so later I was in the study while Husband was cleaning the kitchen. I heard, 'Oh fiddle!'
He'd decided to give the orchid a bit of a prune, cutting off the old dead-looking bits. Unfortunately he snipped the wrong branch. Which is why our orchid blossom is now in a vase on the window-sill.
* * * * * *Of the books I've read before or over Christmas, Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach is my favourite. It's not Christmassy - I'd already finished all those - but is a lovely story. Super flawed characters. I love her writing. She's the author behind The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel too.
Another favourite was High Rising by Angela Thirkell. This was one of my charity shop Christmas books haul. Written in 1933 it is 'of its time' and quite hilarious. As Daughter, who read it after me, said, 'It's very Barbara Pym.'
That and Christmas Stories by Noel Streatfield, written in the 40s and 50s, made me think about the way children were treated and behaved then compared with nowadays. Admittedly all the children were probably upper middle class, but their language and attitudes were so different. In one story a group of children, of whom the eldest was probably only about twelve, are allowed to stay by themselves in an empty house because there's not enough room at their grandmother's.
Yesterday I asked GrandDaughter1 who's twelve now, if she was keen to go into town on her own. She made a face at me and her mother said, 'She's not going into town on her own! She's only twelve.'
This led to reminiscences from Husband and son-in-law about what they were allowed to do at that age. Their choice of stories - in one a friend was killed by a wall falling on him, and in another a friend had his fingers blown off when he made his own fireworks - brought us all down on the side of Daughter's view that children should stay home with their mothers as long as possible.
8 comments:
Famel Cough Syrup must have been solely a British brand, unavailable in Canada, thank goodness. I've never even heard of it!
Parents are a LOT more overprotective of kids these days than when I was young. We roamed free in a way that has simply disappeared now. There were just as many dangers back in those days, but in simpler times, people were either unaware of them or assumed they would never happen to anyone they knew.
I remember Famel syrup endlessly in use during my chronic bronchitis days at uni in Manchester, before they cleaned up the polluted air. Whatever was in it, it kept me breathing!
Your orchid blossoms are lovely, Liz. Your husband's mishap paid dividends to us blog readers.
Famel syrup? Never heard of it. It's probably a Hoax. (That's a feeble attempt at a joke.) Now that you mention the smell of creosote in a medicant, though, that was probably the basis of the vile smell from the lotion that my mother applied to Elder Brother and me when we were living in a mobile home park (trailer court) in Texas during WWII. We got "the itch" (I assume it was scabies). I don't know which was worse, the intense itching or the vile smell of the lotion.
My first forays out were to fetch a pail of milk from Grandmother's - about 1/3 kilometer up the lane from us. I must have been age 2 or possibly 3 while Elder Brother was age 4 or 5. It took the two of us to carry the pail. We were in the aforementioned Texas by the time I was age 4. By my age 5 we were living in a city (Tulsa, Oklahoma; although Elder Brother went to live with a different Grandmother back in Missouri) and taking buses by myself - when I could scare up a nickel.
I had never seen nor hear of Famel Surup. When I was a kid, we were given “Fletcher’s Castoria” quite frequently.
PipeTobacco
I think we're all just more aware of the possibilities but we're losing a lot - or our children are, I think, Debra.
I think I quite liked Famel at the time, Boud.
Calamine was the skin go-to remedy for us, CopCar.
I'm sure lots of these cough medicines were the same, PipeTobacco. All containing lethal ingredients. If it didn't kill you it made you better.
I had never used Calamine lotion until I tried it a few years ago although Hunky Husband swears by it. It is for "mild itches" and would have come nowhere near to fulfilling the task of calming our itching in the 1940s. We wanted to tear our skin off!
"A mosquito bite can itch. So can poison ivy. As unpleasant as these skin irritations can be, they pale in comparison to the itch of scabies. " from The People's Pharmacy.
No Famel Syrup in my childhood though I don't remember being sick often. I think it is a scarier world out there than was in past gone days.
I seem to remember Famel but I don't think I ever used it. The first time my daughters went into town on their own I spent the time in a state of high anxiety, and when it came time for them to be home I was pretending to be working in the front garden while all the time looking down the street anxious to see them arriving around the corner, and so relieved when they did.
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