Time to make a deal with Pixies
This, in it's way, is a plea to the head pixie. Let me explain. We live in an age of science and technology. Education for the masses and the ever expanding frontiers of human knowledge have gifted us a society that is rational and based on logic. Or so I thought.
In fact it turns out I may be only a few angry skin rashes away from a return to the primitive superstition and mystic barbarism that our ancestors got to enjoy before we improved the world with votes, SATs tests and taxes.
I discovered this when my baby daughter Bonnie broke out in hives or – My One True Love tells me – urticaria. It's from urtica, the Latin for nettle. She's a gardener, she knows her way around words like urticaria.
But for me we are already into the realms of Dan Brown: it's a Latin name. And while we are on the subject of eternal riddles: why do Latin words have this mysterious hold over italics when they appear in print? I'm not saying all Latin words appear in italics . . . if it was all of them it would be obvious that Latin was up to something. Too obvious . . .
Returning to the topic in hand – my daughter's rashes (this is definitely a column to keep for her first boyfriend to read when he meets the parents) – I find that the colloquial alternative name hives only adds to the superstitious mystique.
The word has the same kind of ominous West Country eeriness to it that My One True Love has when she is waiting for me to do something right without being told.
It sounds like a curse brought on by pixies for kicking a football into their snapdragons.
My One True Love took Bonnie to the doctor and I was instinctively sceptical about how effective townie medicine could be. What do these college-educated types know of pixie magic after all?
She came home with some medication for allergic reactions and, to be fair to science, it calms the outbreaks, but the real problem is working out what is causing them and that's where the believe anything-style mumbo jumbo comes in.
The rashes fade away after a dose of the medication and we spend a few hours hoping they don't come back but then she bursts out in colour like a chameleon in a discotheque.
We are thinking of everything and anything. Is it something she is eating? Is it her clothes, her bedding or the powder they are washed with?
There has been no obvious change to routine or her regular diet.
She has been taken off orange barley and she has spent a day without milk. I considered making her cot a plastic cocoon free of natural fibres and then a natural cocoon free of man-made materials.
She's had immunisation jabs recently. I started getting paranoid about them being the cause and of course, just because I'm paranoid about it doesn't mean it isn't true.
The point is, it doesn't matter what's true, what appears to work is ruling the day. It could be years before Bonnie is allowed another tomato.
Here I am, a man of the modern world and quite frankly in this state of simmering primal panic, if I thought it would make her better I would make a deal with the pixies.
If you are out there head pixie, how much to get the curse lifted?
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Friday 10 February 2012
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