Happy New Year & Hand Sanitisers

Thank you for reading and sharing my 2019 musings. It’s been a strange year.  Let’s not ruin the mood of hopefulness that the new year might bring – let's look forward to contentment and sanity.

The new January front page may shock. Dizzie (Gillespie) is helping out before friends arrive. It's my personal statement against hand-sanitiser.

Our local greengrocer has become a haven of taste and a benefit to our suburban community. Year by year it has moved to more organic produce, less plastic, more interesting vegetable displays, along with the obligatory vegan dips, seaweed salad, Italian vinegars, kombucha drinks, kimchi “chutneys” and stylish hessian carry bags.  The associated butcher is all grass-fed and free-range.

But there's a new development. Each check-out now flaunts a pump bottle of hand-sanitiser. Natural, healthy living is being compromised by the fear of natural "people" germs. More people are harmed from lack of money than from handling it!

The Murdoch Children's Research Institute has found that 1 in 10 infants now suffers from food allergies, all probably due to our modern lifestyle.  "Australia has the unfortunate title of being the food allergy capital of the world."  Their hypotheses can be summed up as the 5 Ds - Diet, Dry Skin, Vitamin D, Dogs and Dirt. (For dogs read - dogs, cats, rabbits, macaws, siamangs etc.)

They believe that infants should be introduced to as many foods in their diet as possible between 6 - 10 months.  Any infant unfortunate enough to suffer dry skin due to eczema is more likely to be sensitive to certain foods.  Vitamin D deficiency is likely to show an increase in food allergies.

The last two - dogs and dirt - are easy. Get them outside touching "stuff", stop them washing their little hands at every opportunity, don't spray their schools bags, their bouncing balls and the kitchen bench tops with germicidal sprays.

And get that dog inside, give it a kiss and get that cat in the bed.

(Old "folkloric" linen tablecloth - "Spanish Blackwork" embroidery, out of Denmark, possibly Polish.)

Shocked?  Tell me. 👇