Blue tape and beech

Started today in a really crappy mood – long story, and not one I’m telling here – and it didn’t improve much. I did want to commemorate something that’s become important to me, though. Sometime in the, oh, the next decade or so, I might finally end up getting some new glasses. My current ones are technically fine, but suffer slightly in practical terms from having been sat on and the frames broken a while ago. Actually a long while. At the time I lashed up a quick-fix with blue tape that was to hand, and it’s kind of, well, stuck. It’s not as if I haven’t tried other tape; I even purloined some surgical tape from the hospital earlier this year, thinking it might be nice and strong – and light-permeable in the way the blue stuff isn’t quite. But nothing works like the blue stuff, I’ve found. I replace it every few weeks, and all is well. Sure, it looks a trifle eccentric, but I’d be a big fat liar if I said I didn’t like that just a bit. These are the same glasses I’m wearing in the wee picture that crops up sometimes in the row at the top of the screen – taken by me with a timer outside the Gala Theatre in Durham after a sudden and torrential downpour – but I’m not sure anyone will recognise me any more once the blue tape is gone, so mark this entry down as for the sake of posterity.

Anyhow, tonight I walked with A. to our local Wild Oats, and I found something which lifted my mood somewhat, but not in the way that it might have hoped to do. The Bach Flower Essences ‘Personal Questionnaire & Guide to Use’, which I brought home with me, is a complete hoot. I think I might need a case of the Beech:

3. Beech

• Are you annoyed by the habits and shortcomings of others?
• Do you find yourself being overly critical and intolerant, usually looking for what someone has done wrong and not right?
• Do the incompetence and foolishness of others irritate you?

Nod, nod, nod. Particularly the foolishness of others who fall for what are at best tiny doses of some vague herbal tincture, at worst neatly categorised bottles of purest placebo. Also the foolishness of shops that can’t quite see the difference between the worth of, for example, organically-grown or humanely-processed foodstuffs, and the pseudo-scientific haze of junk like Bach’s remedies and Penta water. Though if they all sell, perhaps there isn’t any difference.

Conspicuously missing from the magic 38 ‘states of mind‘:

How can 38 remedies cover all known states of mind?

People sometimes understand this to mean that there are only 38 states of mind, but it would be more exact to say that there are 38 basic states of mind which can in combination with each other make hundreds of millions of variations.

— each of which has its own handy nostrum, is something that I might describe thusly:

• Do you find that great claims need great evidence?
• Does a company which manufactures products which claim medicinal benefits but which blithely waves away double-blind testing strike you as untrustworthy?
• Do you think they’re either slightly cracked or just in it for the money?

Obviously that might be called ‘Cynicism’, but I do have the solution, which oddly eluded Dr. Bach (pronounced, bizarrely, as ‘batch’, as if he were already thinking about huge vats of the stuff). It’s made from the processed bean of the cacao tree, mixed with the milk of the cow. Best taken in its undiluted form. Add common sense to taste.