Science

Medical science - what a world of wonder, dear reader!

Your very own wee Minge seems saved from the perils of fatal death, all thanks to Dr Wendy, some chemicals and her firm belief in the power of pineapple. Yes, pineapple! I fibbed, today, at the hospital, telling her I'd been eating it every day, just as she'd advised.

So if pineapple hasn't cured my tongue - what has?

When I was young, I had a chemistry set. Recommended age group - twelve and over. I'd have been about eight or nine years old. My brother would have been seventeen or eighteen. He, once suspended from school for causing a fire in the science lab, me, home on a school day all thanks to chickenpox.

"Let's be chemists!" decides my brother.

Out came the box of tricks. The tubes. The powders. The liquids.

But the contents of the box were not enough for my brother. So we raided Mum's cupboards and the larder for bicarbonate of soda, salt, food colouring and bleach. A mad potion was brewed, yes, and in a tumbler it went.

"Drink this and you'll change," said my brother.
"Yes, from alive to dead!" shouted Mum as she came in from the back garden. "Put that down!"

I did as I was told.

The only other experiments I ever did with my brother were the lighting of our farts with a cigarette lighter and making slug soup. Slug soup was easy. There were only two ingredients: slugs and salt. Jamie Oliver would frown upon our recipe, though. The slugs were organic, yes, and there was no added fat, but the salt was cheap and nasty table salt, definitely not posh Maldon sea salt.

I often wonder about the blue potion we made in the kitchen in the early 1980s. I wonder what it really would have done to me. Penicillin was discovered accidentally. Perhaps my brother and I had invented a cure for something. We'll never know.

One thing I do know, though, is that the potion would have had more of an effect on me, I'm sure, than the (non-existant) pineapple.