Writerings

Managing my eczema is like trying to solve a whodunnit at times. Narrowing down the list of suspects one by one. Was it the beers I had for Chris’s birthday? Did I have a reaction to the egg and cress sandwich at the train station? In the end it turns out the butler did it, which in this case normally means that I have let too much mould grow on the kitchen window and I need to attempt some bodge DIY job.

It differs from a Poirot story in that I can’t gather all of the suspects in a room at the end. I have to eliminate them one by one by testing out different hypotheses. In this way it is much more similar to the sleuthing in the early Noughties CBBC programme Big Kids. 

Sidebar for those not familiar with Big Kids. It featured a very medium family. In the first episode they participate in a hypnotherapist show by Ming the Merciless where the parents are hypnotised into behaving like toddlers. Subsequently, each episode sees the parents switch back into acting like kids at the most inopportune moments and it’s the children who have to act like parents. It’s a fun show and the adult actors have a blast.

At the end of the series the children are desperate to figure out what is causing their parents behaviours. They track it and make graphs and try to triangulate what happened at each flare-up. It turns out that it was every time they said the word ‘ming’ as in ‘flaming’, ’fuming’, ‘steaming’. For a kids show, there really didn’t have to be such a satisfying resolution as it does.

So, for health reasons (and definitely not because I love data) I have a spreadsheet recording, amongst other things: what I eat, the temperature of my showers and how many hours of YouTube I’ve watched. 

Anyway, it turns out this time it was the Crunchy Nut I’ve been having for breakfast. I didn’t realise they contained nuts (which I am allergic to). I thought it was like how Ginger Nuts don’t contain nuts or how Gorilla Glue doesn’t actually contain gorillas [citation needed]. Or one of those cheeky anti-Ronseal brands

So from now on I am sticking with Cheerios, Nestle have never done anything bad, right?