Salt and Soot
"You used what?"
We always suspected the the Communist was not, in fact, born in 1923 as he has always claimed, but in fact considerably earlier, probably around the time of the Boer War.
He has always hated everything which he deemed "Victorian" - hence my current attempts to put back into this house just a little of the nineteenth-century character which he hated and did his best to eradicate.
To him, "Victoriana" was heavy, claustrophobic furniture and draperies and he wanted rid of it all as soon as possible, to be replaced with light, modern stuff.
However, when he starts reminiscing about his childhood - in the Leeds slums, at least the early part of it - it seems more eighteen-nineties than nineteen-twenties.
"Salt and soot was what we used. We didn't have toothpaste then."
And, of course, they wouldn't - it would be too expensive. I found out more than I'd ever wanted to know about toothpaste here.
Apparently you rubbed on salt and soot with a rag. Once, years ago, when we must have gone on about it rather a lot, he gave us a demonstration. I suppose the soot is abrasive and the salt is somewhat antiseptic - - and also, they had some of these to hand all the time.
Strange to think that the fresh clean feeling when you have just brushed your teeth is really very new to humanity - not much more than a century old, really. Everyone else - from Aristotle to Henry VIII to Jane Austen to Napoleon Bonaparte - was a stranger to minty toothpaste. Weird.
Anyway, when the Communist revisited this childhood pursuit, it made a fine old mess of the sink. I suspect we won't be going back to it.
We always suspected the the Communist was not, in fact, born in 1923 as he has always claimed, but in fact considerably earlier, probably around the time of the Boer War.
He has always hated everything which he deemed "Victorian" - hence my current attempts to put back into this house just a little of the nineteenth-century character which he hated and did his best to eradicate.
To him, "Victoriana" was heavy, claustrophobic furniture and draperies and he wanted rid of it all as soon as possible, to be replaced with light, modern stuff.
However, when he starts reminiscing about his childhood - in the Leeds slums, at least the early part of it - it seems more eighteen-nineties than nineteen-twenties.
"Salt and soot was what we used. We didn't have toothpaste then."
And, of course, they wouldn't - it would be too expensive. I found out more than I'd ever wanted to know about toothpaste here.
Apparently you rubbed on salt and soot with a rag. Once, years ago, when we must have gone on about it rather a lot, he gave us a demonstration. I suppose the soot is abrasive and the salt is somewhat antiseptic - - and also, they had some of these to hand all the time.
Strange to think that the fresh clean feeling when you have just brushed your teeth is really very new to humanity - not much more than a century old, really. Everyone else - from Aristotle to Henry VIII to Jane Austen to Napoleon Bonaparte - was a stranger to minty toothpaste. Weird.
Anyway, when the Communist revisited this childhood pursuit, it made a fine old mess of the sink. I suspect we won't be going back to it.
posted by Daphne at 11:02 pm
5 Comments:
That's right, give the Americans more ammunition to have a go at the state of our teeth - lol.
Next you'll be letting on we used outhouses, sent kids up chimneys to clean them and had only 2 tv channels.
Trouble is, I remember them all. Well not the kids one....obviously. Oh and our outhouse tv had 3 channels once BBC2 started. Posh or wot ? What, what.
Some of the worst teeth I have ever seen in my life belonged to Queen Mother Elizabeth. The older she became, the worse they became. Such a shame, too. One would think they could afford to see a dentist occasionally.
But I still don't care for the gleaming, phony porcelain whites Americans love. There's a reason teeth used to be called "ivories" or "pearly whites."
Salt, yes. Soot, I don't think so! We have done salt and baking soda...or maybe was that bicarbonate of soda.
My grandad used salt and sort and when he passed away aged 84 years he still had all his own teeth!
My grandad used salt and sort and when he passed away aged 84 years he still had all his own teeth!
I used soot when I was a kid, as an experiment, I didn't die, I've still got my teeth at 65.
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