Chore or Choice

 

 

  

Is it a sign of increasing age that one finds toothpaste boring?

     Don’t get me wrong, I do not mean that I have stopped brushing my teeth at least twice a day – the merest thought of skipping that chore is contrary to every fibre of my being.  Brushing one’s teeth is something that has been instilled in each and every one of us that, while other facets of civilization might drop off, teeth brushing is something that is so quasi-instinctive that it has to be done.

     On occasion, for various reasons, I have gone to bed without brushing my teeth, and have been unable to go to sleep.  I then realize that an essential rite of night has not been accomplished.  I get up, I brush my teeth, return to bed, and instantly fall asleep.  So I am not talking about skipping anything.  It is more the taste.

     When I was younger, we used Gibbs SR, a toothpaste I rather liked because it used my initials.  I have never, until a minute ago, known what the SR actually stood for.  I now know that is stands for Sodium Ricinoleate, a substance derived from castor oil and used to prevent gum disease and give the toothpaste its tingle.  Gibbs SR famously used the idea of the ‘tingle’ to inform the format of the first advert on commercial television in the UK when a tube of Gibbs SR being squeezed onto a toothbrush was shown encased in a block of ice to emphasise the effect.  The block of ice was not real, it was clear plastic, and so the first advert was also a visual lie.  Which seems somehow significant!

     Brushing one’s teeth was something that had to be done, not something there to be enjoyed, it was a duty.  Therefore, a toothpaste like Euthymol emphasised that by being bright pink and revolting.  It obviously worked on the “if it tastes disgusting it must be doing you some good,” the same principle used by the liquid antiseptics that were felt to be helping your cut knees because they stung when applied to the injury.

     My grandparents used a completely different toothpaste which in my memory was Ipana toothpaste, I only ever used that in Maesteg, though I suspect that we brought out own when we stayed there.

     My father used Eucryl tooth powder because he smoked a pipe and he used the abrasive qualities of the power to try and get rid of the nicotine stains.  I have never smoked, but I did use this powder on foreign holidays when sampling the local cuisine and wine as those seemed to leave evidence of their consumption more obviously than home food.

     I vividly remember when I was about 10 being allowed to choose Signal toothpaste – which had stripes!  And a higher price than the ordinary pastes, so that was a one off rather than a regular purchase.

     Nowadays there is a bewildering array of toothpaste not only branded but also own makes.  And the price is reasonable.

     Virtually the only thing you need to check is that the parts per million of fluoride must be from 1,350 to 1,500.  As far as I can tell, anything else is just cosmetic packaging.

     As I said at the beginning of this piece, I get utterly bored with the toothpaste by the time I (almost) get to the end of the tube, so my ‘dental hygiene’ drawer in the bathroom is full of (almost) exhausted tubes of past toothpaste – there is a part of me that cannot bring myself to throw away a tube of toothpaste that isn’t fully and exhaustively squeezed to extract the very last modicum of the preparation.  But I do deliberately buy a variety of pastes, usually own-make – while checking the back of the tube to ensure that the minimum ppm of fluoride so that I am not entirely wasting my money.

     The paste that I am using at the moment is a herbal concoction that seems to have something like aloe which actually numbs the lips!  It is also a light brown putty-like colour and tastes . . .  interesting.  As I bought this online as a sort of impulse buy, I did not do my customary check, and discovered when I had bought it, that it was fluoride free.  I therefore now add a morsel from one of the (almost) empty tubes and then put the new paste on top. 

     This is not an efficient use of either toothpaste or time, but the taste is marginally more interesting, and its doing the job, so I feel its justified. 

     And who else has a toothpaste cocktail in the mornings!

Resist and Remember!

I am, with difficulty, stopping myself from using the Internet.

It’s not that I am addicted to the damn thing, or that I have to keep accessing it to reassert my essential character or that I need the anonymous accreditation that plugging myself into the world wide web gives, no it’s because it’s all too easy.

It all started with a jingle:

“You’ll wonder where the yellow went

When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

              The sort of jingle that has lain supressed for god alone knows how many years and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly springs into the forefront of your brain and then will not let go.  The inane “tune” established itself in my mind and got stuck on repeat.  In a desperate attempt to get rid of it I began to think of other toothpaste commercials from the past.  “Gibbs SR” came and went because there was no tune to it in my memory, though as the first commercial on British TV, with toothpaste and brush embedded in a plastic block of ice, it did provide Media Teachers with a powerful metaphor for the concept of truth in advertising!  The Colgate “Ring of Confidence” briefly surfaced in my memory and then sank back drowned by the repetition of the Peposdent tune.

In desperation I turned to sweets.  I know from excited experience that, apart from physical injuries, there is nothing that people like to talk about with more enthusiasm than “Sweets from the Past”.  And, although I personally might be referencing sweets from sixty-odd years ago, remembering chews, black jacks and sherbet fountains (Barratt's sherbet fountains to be precise, the ones with the liquorish sucking tube) my own wistfulness can easily be matched by eleven or twelve-year-olds reminiscing about the times “When I was in Primary School” as if those were twenty years ago rather than the same number of months!

So, my flittering remembrance lighted on Opal Fruits.  A sweet I never really liked, too chewy and sickly-sticky for my taste, but the advertising jingle still lives on in my musical memory:

              Opal fruits!

              Made to make your mouth water!

              Cool as a mountain stream,

              Four refreshing fruit flavours!

And this is where it gets a bit jumbled.  I think that the “Cool as a mountain stream” is actually a lying line from a menthol cigarette advert, and after the fourth line the individual flavours were lovingly articulated.

The point is, I cannot remember what they were.  They must have been citrus, so lemon and orange should be two of them.  I thought that it might be banana as the third, but that is hardly refreshing.  Lime? hardly.  Strawberry is always popular, or black current or black berry or some woody fruit.

I know that I can type in Opal Fruits and all will be revealed.  I will probably be able to hear again the original adverts on You Tube.  There will be original packets for sale on eBay and Amazon will probably deliver them to my door.

But I refuse to take the easy way out.  I lived through the introduction of these sweets, I am sure that I had my favourites and spurned the “unfashionable” ones.  But, what were they?

And if I look them up will what I find out be a refreshing of my memory or the creation of a false one?  Will I truly remember, or will I convince myself that I do?

If you study with the Open University you are encouraged to be a wide ranging as possible with your range of electronic references, but the Powers That Be in the institution caution you against Wikipedia, like God Almighty warning Adam and Eve about the Serpent.  We are told that we Cannot Trust It, beware, we are told, of the Blandishments of Easy Knowledge from something that seems so guilelessly and gratuitously munificent.

The end result of course, is that we all (ALL) use it, but then look around for something more academically reputable to back up what it told us.

So much of the Internet is not really trustworthy.  My own experience of using a range of totally authoritative websites gave contradictory factual information, and don’t even get me started on my Sisyphean task of finding out the ‘correct’ punctuation in a line of Clare’s poem ‘I am’.  I rapidly came to the conclusion that the only way in which I could be truly satisfied was to see the original manuscript and I discovered that it hadn’t been digitalized and wasn’t on line.  I had various books of poetry in which the poem occurred, but there was not consistency about the way in which it had been written and, to this day, I remain unsatisfied.

It reminds me of the time when I was studying for ‘O’ Level Art in which there was, thank god, a whole History of Art Paper (On Which I Could Get Marks) and which partially compensated for my lack of artistic ability on the other two practical papers.  I had begun to buy Art Books and I realized that I had various copies of Turner’s “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth”.  I laid all these books on my bed, open at the painting and marvelled at just how different they all were.  It was not just the colours, though those were spectacularly different - it was how the publishers chose to size the painting, how they cropped it.  Few of the books actually gave the dimensions of the painting, and fewer still gave you the materials used.  Mostly, it doesn’t matter too much, but in the academic world it matters a lot.

Let me wrench you back to Opal Fruits – which may well still exist as far as I know.  My memory fails to bring too much back.  How can I be sure that anything that I gain about them from electronic media might be absolutely true or absolutely false.  How will I know?

Perhaps TIAT (Take It As True) is now a state of mind for us all.  The musty old libraries full of authoritative books have been superseded and we have instant, overwhelming information flows of truly questionable authority that we perhaps question too little.

Do you remember the flavours?

And, no, I still have not gone to the Internet.  At least not for that.