WHO KNEW.....?

Years ago, I was listening to Radio 4 and there was an interview with a guy who referred to himself as a Medical Herbalist. He went on to discuss some of the diseases he had treated, and the patient outcomes. I was in the kitchen and stopped in the middle of kneading the bread. I had one question:

Herbs can provide a 'medical system’?

I thought of medicinal herbs as rather sweet but ineffectual – chamomile tea before bed – sort of thing. That anyone actually used them to practice medicine, and that they could be effective,  was a new one to me. The guy was well-educated, articulate, not obviously a weirdo, and very well informed, so I listened to the end.

So. That was interesting.

The next week I picked up a glossy women’s magazine and there was an article covering a variety of complementary health care options, using the patients’ perspectives rather than practitioners. One woman told of her ill health over several years, the many GP visits, and the eventual realisation that the steroids she had been prescribed was the last option the orthodox system could offer her. In desperation she went to visit a Medical Herbalist, and after three months of taking the herbs she felt an improvement, after six months she began the slow weaning off steroids, and eight to nine months later she felt ‘completely well’. She was so impressed with her recovery that she trained to be a Medical Herbalist herself. And the contact details were there: the contact details for NIMH – the National Institute of Medical Herbalists – the oldest professional body of medical herbalists in the 

world.

This was serendipity….

So I trained to take the degree in Herbal Medicine, first with a private college, then it was transferred to a University in London. And I qualified as a Medical Herbalist. I have a practice in Bridgwater where I see patients and sometimes do workshops, and I help run a training school in Porlock to provide the world with professional herbal medicine practitioners.

My NIMH certificate

I also joined another professional body - The College of Practising Phytotherapists - CPP. Phytotherapy is just another [more modern] word for herbal medicine. These two professional bodies just make sure you keep your standards up and keep up your training every year.

No day is the same - I see patients, I teach, I write, I grow and pick herbs, I make medicine.... I sometimes forage, to pick the best herbs in the best condition to make tinctures and teas for my patients. I grow some in my herb garden at home.

My home-grown, hand-picked Feverfew

This was a tincture I made from fresh cleavers ages ago. All gone now...

Sometimes I buy in raw materials from organic sources to make my own medicines from, or if push comes to shove, I buy in the tinctures already made from a specialist supplier.

When I give talks I always ask the question; Do you know what a medical herbalist is? The answer is usually a no…

I had a patient recently, and I asked her the same question. I was surprised that she also answered with a no, and wondered how come she had booked an appointment without even really knowing what it was that I did; but she explained that her sister was an old patient of mine and she had told her to come.

The point is: People know what Homeopaths are, Chiropractors, Acupuncturists – they have heard of Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese Herbal Medicine. In fact, some people think that’s what ‘herbal medicine’ is. The Chinese roots and insects and stuff.

But, no.

Here in the West we have a long tradition of herbal medicine, but it is very much overshadowed by orthodox medicine. I am not one of those ‘alternative medicine’ believers that think the NHS has nothing to offer; it is not unknown for me to engage in a dialogue with GPs and Consultants so we can find the best route of treatment for our patients.

Orthodox medicine is vital in life-saving scenarios and surgery etc, but it has gaps. I think that orthodox medicine can stop you dying, but it doesn’t often make you well.  So use both…

THE GRANDMA WHO TURNS SOCKS INTO RABBITS

Following their unconventional approach to parenting and family life, our Mum and Dad carried over their unique take on life into grandparenting*. Basically, they made it up as they went along.

You could never be sure what they'd do next...

I suppose Saggy and I should have known better when Mum (aka Grandma) offered to fetch our primary school children home one day when she was visiting us. This was at a time when our two families lived next door to each other, and we had racked up a fair number of kids between us. So, off Grandma went to the school with a length of rope concealed about her person. She wasn't leaving anything to chance.

When Grandma had rounded up the correct number of children (nine of them, and a very lively bunch too) and checked that she'd got the right ones, she produced the rope and corralled the kids inside it. Off home she set with them all roped together, down the street and across the roads getting the sort of funny looks she was well used to and happily ignoring them all. The kids thought it was great. Nobody else had a grandma who was quite so much fun.

Grandma never came to visit without helping out somehow, most often by sorting out and pairing up odd socks. This wasn’t such an easy job as it sounds, which is why I hadn’t usually got around to it myself. It was sock chaos and Grandma loved it; it was right up her street.

As the children got bigger and the family grew, the number of socks increased until they seemed to be everywhere, clean and dirty. Grandma came into this mayhem like Wonder-woman and heroically brought order. I would produce a mountain of clean socks and she would settle herself down to tackle it, fortified with occasional cups of tea, until at last there was a pile of paired socks all done up like little rabbits (or pocket bunnies, as Dan called them when he was very young) and an almost as large pile of socks for which no partner could be found. 

Another of Grandma’s favourite jobs was sweeping the garden path. I don’t know why, maybe she preferred being outdoors in the relative peace and quiet. Dad (aka Granddad) would usually be indoors entertaining the children and causing some sort of happy riot. This was Grandad’s forte, and Grandma thankfully let him get on with it.

Grandma could also have a lot of fun with her grandchildren when she felt like it though. She was famous among the grandchildren for being able to grip them behind the knee with her special secret hold, which had them paralysed, helpless, laughing and terrified all at once. It may seem a strange way to bond with your grandchildren, but it worked! They loved it. I don’t know where she learnt this dubious skill from. She wouldn’t tell me or show me how to do it. It would have come in SO handy with the teenagers.

Remember, this was my role model for grandmothering. But this Grandma is a very hard act to follow There's nobody quite like her.

*My spell checker didn't like the word ‘grandparenting’ and suggested ‘grandpa renting’ instead. Now there's a thought. Watch out Dad, I've had an idea for making money…

THE GRANDFATHER WHO NUMBERS EGGS...

It slowly dawned on me that my parents weren’t quite as normal as everybody else’s when my friends and I used to swap stories of what we did in the holidays or at the weekend. Nobody else I knew had parents that lay in a circle on the living room floor with Mum’s head resting on Dad’s stomach as a pillow, my sister’s head on my Mum’s tummy, my head resting on my sister’s tummy and my little brother’s head resting on mine. And there we would lay, in the dark of an evening, telly off, just talking…

I soon stopped telling people that we only went to the seaside in the winter specifically because nobody else was there, or that we developed a list of unusually named trusses for men with hernias, or that we would spend afternoons hunting for interesting names on gravestones making note of the best ones. I used to think that when I grew up I wouldn’t think that my parents were as weird as they seemed to others the time, or that I would perhaps find out that other people’s parents also did odd things.

But no. My friends’ parents were civil servants and tax officials who had dinner parties and drank sherry. The Mums wore aprons and did housework. Our Mum didn’t think much of housework, she preferred sing us funny songs when she had a bath, her voice drifting across the landing at night to our bedrooms singing three children to bed at once.

But as they both aged and we moved to the other end of the country [these two facts are not related] we saw our parents less and less and assumed that they had grown up at last and had become more normal. I also hoped that my father would behave himself in a mature manner on formal occasions.

I was mistaken:

The day came when they moved near us so we could once again keep an eye on them. Apart from my Mum’s habit of saying the rude things to people that normally people only think but don’t say, and my Dad’s habit of drawing cartoons of two words that make a funny picture [you have to see it really], we thought we were home and dry. Then this happened:

He takes eggs home, and unable to place complete confidence in the date stamp on the egg box within which his eggs are placed, he carefully takes each egg out and writes the date on the shell.  He doesn’t just scribble the number on with any old biro, or use the pencil he keeps behind his ear which is useful for crosswords. No, he gets out a superior marker pen and prints the numbers in a perfect script as if they will be photographed for posterity.

This was understandable at least from a perishable point of view, but then he moved on to margarine tubs. With margarine tubs, I think he realised that the date stamp on the tubs could be trusted, [margarine is indestructible] but how many had they opened since they moved in? This was a question that needed to be answered.

The problem obviously preyed on his mind. These tubs should be numbered so that they could be progressed through in an orderly fashion:

But, eighty three? I’m only slightly more concerned about his state of mind, than the sheer volume of synthetic butter he has consumed…

So, I have to become resigned to the fact that I have slightly weird parents and I must stop trying to hide them from the outside world. After all, something must be right judging from a comment passed by an old neighbour when all us kids were still living at home;

'You could often hear laughter coming from your house. You seemed to be having such a good time.'

Oh, we were.....

DON'T TELL YOUR MOTHER!

I don't want to worry any of you young parents out there in Kidworld, but you wouldn't believe the things my kids got up to without me finding out until much later. In some cases, much MUCH later. It was enough to make your hair curl.

You see, it was my belief that children need to have at least some time without an adult breathing down their necks in order to become independent as they get older. They should be making dens and climbing trees - that sort of thing. I still believe that, despite the risk. Sometimes it wasn't easy for me to let them, so it's just as well I didn't know about some of it or I'd have got out the cotton wool and started wrapping them up.

Apparently, or so they tell me, they used to climb out of the upstairs bathroom window, drop down onto the lean-to roof and somehow get down to the ground and out into the garden. How did I not notice this? 

But the thing that really makes me come out in a cold sweat is the suite of underground rooms and tunnels they constructed. I can only assume they have exaggerated this story. I mean, I knew they were digging a couple of holes in the garden, that was all. Or so I thought. Apparently, it was all done properly, reinforced and all that, but it surely can't have been safe. They could have been buried alive! Eventually they were rumbled when their Dad noticed the tunnel entrance and put a stop to the whole thing. I suspect it was a case of ‘don't tell your mother’ in case I had a hairy fit. I was told they had been trying to make a tunnel but had been made to fill it in. I didn't find out the extent of the excavations until many years later when all danger of hairy fits had passed.

I used to let the boys go out to play in the fields near where we lived. I knew they had a wonderful time out in the fresh air and sunshine, and came home happy although maybe a little grubby and damp. What I didn’t know until recently is that they had been riding down the river on home-made rafts. Aaargh!

I was aware that two of my little girls had managed to escape from the garden and take themselves off for a walk. That was bad enough, and gave us all a fright. Oh, the relief when they were found! But what I didn’t find out until much later was that these two had set out hoping to find a short cut to Heaven. Logical, really, as they had been told what a brilliant place it was. I still don’t know how they intended to find it, and I don’t like to ask. Enough guilt already.

There was a place in our large garden where a small person could squeeze himself, unseen from the house, through into a neighbour’s garden. I didn’t know about this until the neighbour turned up on our doorstep with a grubby toddler who was wearing a cheeky grin, a T shirt, and nothing else.
‘Is this one of yours?’ she asked. What could I say? Naturally it was one of ours, no point in denying it. I swear the older kids had been tunnelling under the fence.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. They survived, and some of their happiest childhood memories come from the stuff I didn’t know about. My conviction that kids need a certain amount of freedom to learn about risk and consequences for themselves remains unshaken.
Come to think of it, some of my own happy childhood memories are of times spent without adult supervision.

There are things that my mother was never told!