Medicines in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was a child, were deliberately awful; this was to stop you thinking you were ill. 

We never had Calpol.  We had medicines designed by evil professors – with no taste buds.

Getting a sore throat wasn’t at all advantageous back then as we’d be prescribed the foulest of all tablets: Dequadin.   It’d have been preferable having your tonsils ripped out by some vicious goblin who’d only qualified that week in an ENT ward.

Getting a cold and being forced to hide your head under a towel with a chipped bowl containing Friar’s Balsam taking effect didn’t encourage you buy anything else from the monastery.   I always seemed to get a cold on a Sunday – the treatment would coincide with “Sing something simple” being on the radio.  As if having a cold wasn’t punishment enough – vapours from hell and a radio programme from an even worse place.

The one medical thing I did learn (the hard way): Alka Seltzer – not the ideal product to make lemonade.  All that fizzes is not gold, as the nurse with the stomach pump told me.

Gripe Water’s off, love.