I’ve just been having a discussion online with Granddaughters Number One and Number Two about dysautonomia - “a condition where the autonomic nervous system does not function properly.” This is because both of them suffer from chronic fatigue and occasional allergy problems. The sceptical bit of me wonders about the rash of conditions that abound nowadays, condition beginning with “dys…”, conditions that nobody heard of when I was much younger than I am now. It also makes me think back to reading Doris Lessing and one of her novels where characters were diagnosed with various conditions, a kind of “you’re nothing but a … insert name of condition” syndrome. Putting a label on something became a sort of cure, or at any rate made in more acceptable and easier to bear.
More seriously I wonder if the state we have got the world into has more than a little to do with the rash of allergies, digestive disorders, nervous conditions that abound in the modern world. The amount of pollution that surrounds us, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, must have an adverse affect on our health. Not to mention the plastic, tiny particles of which we take into our bodies! Good grief! I could get quite pessimistic about it all.
Life used to be much simpler!
Our daughter, her partner and her younger offspring have gone off on holiday to Roquetas de Mar in Almería, prompting Phil to compare their summer holiday the holidays his family used to have in the 1950s in a boarding house somewhere by the sea here in the UK. Not all of us went away on holiday back then. In the case of my family, living in Southport we just stayed at home and had a series of visits from relatives who lived in Yorkshire. And of course, in line with those simpler times, the seasons behaved themselves and the summers were always warm and sunny!
Thinking about how people used to live in earlier times, going even further back, here’s a link to an article about investigation into an archaeological site near Pompeii, the Civita Giuliana villa.
The opening statement from the article made me smile: “Archaeologists have discovered a small bedroom in a Roman villa near Pompeii that was almost certainly used by slaves, throwing light on their lowly status in the ancient world, Italy’s culture ministry said on Sunday.”
Did the writer of the article somehow not expect slaves to have a “lowly status”? I wonder.
Returning to the modern world, I keep reading about an increase in shoplifting. Some researchers put this down to the cost of living crisis we are living through. Some supermarkets are apparently putting security tags on bottles of milk and baby foods as such basic items as these are frequently stolen. However, the head of security at the John Lewis Partnership has a different opinion: ““Retailers across the board are seeing a rise in crime. This isn’t driven by a need to put food on the table, but rather professional shoplifters stealing for greed over need.” Of course it’s quite likely that those who steal because they can’t afford to put food in their children’s mouths might not even go into, far less steal from, places like John Lewis and Waitrose.
In an attempt to combat such shoplifting though Waitrose and John Lewis are offering free coffees and other hot drinks to on-duty police officers. The drinks are aimed at encouraging a police presence in order to make thieves “think twice” about stealing goods, said their head of security. But there is a kind of rider to this offer: police and community support officers can only take up the offer at Waitrose cafes if they bring a reusable cup, the retailer said. And now I have the image of community support officers going round with a reusable cup clipped to their belt ready for when they pop into Waitrose.
To finish off for today, I came across a post on Facebook about the term ‘hangover’. I am always interested in the etymology of words and expressions. This one went:
“The real meaning of ‘hangover’. The lowest for of accommodation in Victorian England was a place where you could, for the price of a penny, dangle on a rope overnight.” It was accompanied by a photo of such sleepers. However, further investigation revealed that the photo was probably taken on the set of the film “The Great Train Robbery”. But, at the same time I read that the 19th century French novelist Balzac once wrote about “those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope." Similar.y George Orwell in “Down and Out in Paris and London” wrote:
“At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it sounded -- at any rate, better than bare floor.”
There you go!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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