Aesops modern tales

One of my Mother's favourite tales, whenever she sees my four year old Niece with her finger (or anything else) up or around her nose, was of when I was about five or six years old.

We lived in a very nice house, with a breakfast bar in the kitchen. On one particular day my Mother had come back from shopping and left my sister (who must have been about three or four at the time) and myself in the kitchen with the shopping bags on the floor, including a box of sugar puff cereal.

She must only have been gone for a few minutes, but during this time we had managed to remove and open the box of cereal (a feat in itself which I am still often unable to manage without spilling the contents all over the floor) and positioned ourselves under the breakfast bar. She came in to see us shovelling handfuls of dry sugary goodness into our mouths when disaster struck. I must have inhaled whilst devouring a handful, as a sugar puff became firmly wedged up my left nostril (a particularly unpleasant experience at any age, but which seemed so much worse at that tender age!)

Panic ensued as I was unable to talk due to the tears coursing down my cheeks, and my sister wasn't fully conversant at that stage. As it was a mime that Marcel Marceau would have been proud of we established that a sugar puff had gone where no sugary cereal product should have gone. Probing with items (okay I admit it was mainly my finger) got us nowhere other than pushing it further and further up my nostril. My Father, who was (and still is) a General Medical Practitioner, and who was at his practice received an urgent call to say that his second (and I should imagine somewhat slower) son had managed nasal dilation by confectionary, and asked for advice. I was to be brought over for treatment, a trip of some 10 miles.

My sister and I were bundled into the car, strapped in (still in a lot of pain I have to say!) by a very aggravated and stressed mother. I seem to recall that the journey was fraught with red lights and other road users, and we had made it to about a hundred metres from my father's surgery when I felt the sneeze building, fifty metres and I knew what was coming, and turning into the car park when my mother was hit on the back of her head by a soggy sugar puff.

Of course I was flavour of the month for a while but I think that this story has a deeper message, namely:

"Don’t stick your nose where it's not wanted as the results are rarely very nice......and the resulting journey is often pointless!"