Wag the Dog

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again.

All my life I have been severely prone to car sickness. Spend more than a few minutes as a passenger in a car, and there was a fairly good chance of being reintroduced to my last meal.

A few years ago, I had something of an epiphany. I call it wag the dog, and here’s how it works:

• When you get motion sickness, you start to feel crappy and the taste in your mouth gets worse.  
• If you change the taste in your mouth before it starts, you seem to be able to stop all of the other symptoms.

So that’s it in a nutshell, and it seems to work. Just to be safe, I made sure that the taste in my mouth took attention away from anything else going on. To achieve this, I found the strongest mints I could. 

Early on in the piece, I made a rookie mistake. I foolishly thought that I needed to keep my brain constantly focused on the taste, so I would pop them regularly during a trip. As I acclimatized to the strength of the mint, I needed a more frequent’hit’ to keep the brain’s attention. Before long, I would go through a tin of mints in an hour-long bus ride. FYI these mints are not a drug, but the behavior has parallels.

This reminds me of a drive I did from Christchurch to I think Cheviot, yeats ago, when my daughter was very young. She brought a friend along because they were doing the 40-hr famine together. That’s where they don’t eat anything for 40-hrs, and raise funds and awareness for World Vision. Since then, the Wokerati have taken over, and rebranded it as the 40-hr challenge, where people try to do without a convenience for up to 40-hrs.

Anyway, back then it was the serious business of no eating, but the contestants could suck on a Barley Sugar lolly occasionally for energy, to stop them fainting all over the place at inconvenient times and places.

So the girls in the back seat were armed with a box of Barley Sugars, and managed to polish them off by the time we’d done the one hour and change drive to Cheviot.

I was like that with my mints.

I have since realised that I can now make a tin last for days. I’m halfway through this tour, and barely half the tin used.

And Jo probably hasn’t had a Barley Sugar since.

Go figure.