From sleepless nights to stubbed toes and nightmares, tangled hair and sniffy noses, Mum always had a remedy. Yet these days, governments are preventing mothers from doing what Mums do best - loving and caring for their children without stifling their ability to grow and thrive.

I read this morning that The Victorian Agency for Health Information report revealed this week that 342 children, aged up to 17, have been presented to emergency departments each week suffering mental health emergencies. 

The data was recorded in the six week period leading up to May 30 and represented a shocking 57 per cent increase over the same timeframe last year.  It must be time for the logbooks of commonsense to be brought back in our country. This level of trauma must surely be attributed to the ongoing lockdowns and social isolation being enforced by our governments? 

Children, probably more than adults, need the friendship and interaction of their peers. Hugs and cuddles, smiles and hands held in times of stress or even just the normal actions of day to day life.

In 1944, under the Nazi regime, 40 newborn babies were split into two groups. There was the first group who grew up normal (the control group) and then the experiment group.

The babies in this group had a special facility where their basic needs (being changed, fed, burped, etc) were met. However, caregivers were instructed not to touch or look at the baby more than needed. No communicating with the babies, no extended interactions, just fill the basic needs and keep the place sanitary.

But the experiment had to be halted after just four months. By that point, half of those babies had died.

Two more died after being brought into a better place and many others passed away as well. The very few who remained alive would grow up psychologically damaged, mentally deformed and miserable.
No physical cause of death as the babies were all healthy. The scientists noticed that shortly before death, the babies would stop verbalizing or trying to engage the caregivers. Then they’d stop moving, crying and changing expressions. And finally, they died.
Meanwhile the control group had no deaths at all; the babies there thrived.

In the 1960’s, a similar experiment was done but (due to children protection laws) with newborn monkeys. Result? Same thing. Control group was fine but the ones deprived of love would die or become mentally incapable for life. 

For some reason, we humans flourish under the influence of love and we gradually die without it

These miraculous creatures we refer to as our mothers seemed to have some magical ability to fix everything. But sadly, even our mothers are now unable to do what comes naturally - to let the children grow up surrounded by love and a commonsense response, ensuring their children are protected without smothering them in cotton wool.

Unless our young people are allowed to smile and laugh without being masked and hidden behind a veil of authoritarianism; unless they can hug their friends, clasp hands and share the intimacy of a shared life in a huddle of joy in a playground, we are depriving them of the ability to thrive.

As Redhead approaches 90, I still rely on her logbook of love and commonsense. It seems a great tragedy that so many of our female " leaders " have never been mothers and therefore do not have that logbook of commonsense to moderate their draconian rules with a bit of motherly wisdom. 

Who knows the birthday of every grandchild, niece and nephew? Who diligently records the rainfall in her street for four decades? Who do you call when you want to know who did what, when and why? Mum. 

It is a strange thing that we refer to " old wive's tales " and we almost laugh them off as though they were written up by snopes as bunkem. 

Yet so many of those wise old tales are actually founded in good old fashioned commonsense and are steeped in historically proven, though often unexplained logic.

 It’s now nearly springtime here in Australia … my favourite time of the year.  Not that winter in Queensland is too bad mind you – cool mornings but balmy weather for much of the time. 

As a child and later as the mother of children, bee stings were an inevitable part of life in the spring and summer. Little ones would run inside seeking " Mum ": because, as we all know, Mums can solve absolutely everything.

Mothers knew that there was a chance that the children would get a bee sting in the summer. They didn't lock their children indoors, just in case they got stung. No, they let the children carry on as usual, but ensured that they had something on standby should the child get stung.In my family, it was the " blue bag ".

There are probably few young people today who even know what a blue bag is.

It was a big feature in most laundries ( or " wash houses " as I used to know them ), and they were small Muslin bags that were diligently placed into the washing machine to bring all the whites out looking super white.

No doubt the idea of whitening your socks and jocks in this politically correct world is just verboten. But. in my day, having white sheets, white towels, white underpants and white shirts was simply the only way to go.

And you did it with a blue bag.

They contained a blue pigment  which was used in paint, dye, and ink across the world

They also contained my old friend bicarbonate of soda which of course is alkaline and deserving of far more respect than it currently has.

I use bicarbonate of soda on a daily basis. 

If you have indigestion, take a teaspoon of bicarb in hot water and Bob will be your proverbial Uncle.

Itchy skin or a rash? Bicarb of soda will sort it out in a flash. Just pop it on in a paste made with water.

If you spill some milk ( or. as my granddaughter did decades ago have a nasty vomiting session in my car ) or home, bicarb of soda will if sprinkled on the offending spill, remove that nasty smell.

Old wives tales are more often than not based on good old fashioned logbooks of love and commonsense.

The blue bags worked on a bee sting because they contained mother's friend bicarb of soda.

As our world descends into the hell hole of so-called science, things like blue bags, bicarb of soda, and natural immunity are being consigned into a bin of conspiracy theories.

When Redhead records her rainfall records and shows that, actually, rainfall is cyclic and just does what nature does, old mate Mr Flannery or some other person steps up and tries to debunk what she knows and her records prove: that life is going on, in spite of the left wing alarmist rubbish that we are being spouted on a daily basis by the media and our politicians.

If you want to know what is going on in the world, don't ask a politician. 

Ask a Mum, a Grandma or a wise old geriatric fart.

We KNOW what is going on and I suspect that is why they are trying to get rid of us. We learned from our mistakes.

After all, we only got our education from the school of life, not from some leftist university populated and funded by left wing communist and socialist sympathisers. 

We didn't pay a penny for our education but we paid for it with our blood sweat and tears and survived because our mothers and fathers had some good old fashioned logbooks of love and commonsense.

But, of course, no one made any money from mother's wisdom, did they? 

I found this post from 2008 which I feel says it better than I could ever do.

Springtime invariably brings strong memories of my childhood, growing up in a sleepy seaside suburb full of old timber houses that time forgot (mostly gentrified now and worth a million dollars).

Backyards full of citrus trees and vegetable patches. Trellises loaded with sweet peas and climbing beans. Wild patches at the bottom of the garden overgrown with lantana and canna lillies and bordered by rampant nasturtiums. Tumbledown chook sheds (chicken runs) and clumps of bananas and pawpaws.

It was a Huckleberry Finn type of growing up. We’d disappear from home after breakfast and reappear for dinner. Our days were filled with sailing, fishing, swimming, beachcombing, climbing cliffs, playing games in the parks, annoying neighbours and generally engaging in the sort of mischief that most small boys (and tomboys) get up to.

One of our occupational hazards in spring was bee sting. Bees were everywhere in our overgrown world of backyards, parks and beachside jungle. The clover sprang up in most gardens and footpaths – and of course we never wore shoes.

Everyday, one or other of us was down yowling and trying to pull the sting out of our foot without squeezing the poison sac attached to it (this was an intricate and hard earned skill). After that it was either a dunking in the water and some hobbling around or else a call for the universal remedy if we were within sight of home.

My memory of this was triggered a few days ago when a little kid down my street stepped on a bee on the footpath. His sister pulled out the sting and then went searching for something exotic in an aerosol can to spray on it. It reminded me of the gulf between now and then.

Back before automatic washing machines and washing powders with space age ingredients, we had boilers or coppers that contained very hot water and were ‘stirred’ with large wooden implements. Most shirts and sheets were white then of course and rarely made out of synthetic blends, so boiling the hell out of them and then wringing through manual devices like mangles was the order of the day. Wash sheds resembled medieval torture chambers.

There was one magic ingredient however that my grandmother added to the wash. It was called a blue bag. It was a small muslin wrapped bag of synthetic ultramarine and sodium bicarbonate. Ultramarine is a very blue, blue and strangely enough (probably because it absorbs yellow light) clothes came out fantastically white. Not that I cared much about that of course.

Its great magical use was on bee stings. Whenever the inevitable happened, one of our mothers or grandmothers would produce a wet blue bag, place it on the wound and … no more pain. None of us knew why of course, but we were grateful for this piece of passed down lore.

The other day as I watched the little fellow wriggling around while his sister was obviously rummaging around inside looking for some anti-sting product or other, I thought of my grandmother, always having to hand a simple product used everyday for washing and able to be deployed for other reasons. We’ve become a society of specialists – in needs and expectations.

Oh for the world of the generalist, analogue solutions, and grandmothers who were prescient when it came to the casualty needs of junior Huck Finns.