Chemical Warfare.

I'm a nature loving gal, so I hate chemicals, or so I say. I was hellbent on having natural childbirth, whatever that may be, until forces greater and stronger than that of my body and that of my unborn baby proved to be, and chemical and surgical intervention were required. And now, while I'm not physically chemically dependent on anything, thank heavens, I am definitely reliant on chemicals, and I suspect you may be too.

Take the contents of my cleaning cupboard. There are products aplenty, for each and every kind of stain or surface. Different  detergents for clothes, some for those in the washing machine, others for the hand wash stuff, ditto for the dishes. Tile cleaners for floors, and another for shower surfaces, bleach for dishcloths and thicker bleach for the loo. Intensive stain remover for those hard to remove spots, and creamy Handy Andy for kitchen counters. Mr Suzy Q reckons we are all being held to ransom by Reckitt and Colman, or whoever, and one bucket of soap and water would do all jobs just nicely if it had to. Heavens, didn't we used to wash our camping crockery and cutlery with sand and water back in our hiking heyday?

Then we have chemicals for all those household pests. I have sprays for cockroaches, ants, fish moths and flies, of which we seem to have had a plague this summer, and pellets for things that scurry around in the roof at night. I hate to tell you that I was once held to ransom by a rat which took up residence in our kitchen for an inordinately long time. I emptied all the cupboards, laid down poison and traps, but the wily Willard continued his nocturnal romps, of which there was evidence aplenty every morning. In desperation I called the Council, and they sent in their very best Pied Piper who laid super strength muthi, also to no avail. Eventually it was my own handsome hero who flushed the beastly creature out from behind the dishwasher, and Rex, who fancies himself as a bit of a ratter, took one look at King Rat and fled, leaving Mr Suzy Q to do the dirty, and it was gory. Now there's an image for you, poor old me, the original 50's wife screaming atop her chair as the rat finally met it's fate at the hand's of my husband's hatchet. But I digress. In my gardening shed is a collection of fairly lethal sprays and pellets for aphids, slugs and cutworm. When donning my pool boy's hat (many a hat I have to wear, girls, it's not all lady's lunches as you might suspect) I do a regular assault on our swimming pool with cups full of chlorine, hydrochoric acid, sacks of salt (so good for my biceps) and rather toxic looking algaecide. In this case the cure actually looks worse than the disease.

In our personal capacities, ignoring the chemicals we use to enhance our tresses and faces, we also take tablets to break down the fat we ingest to unclog our arteries and to reduce the blood pressure caused by the daily stresses of life. Children are pretty much raised on a diet of antibiotics to beat the bugs which used to cause little more than common coughs and colds in my childhood, but which now all seem to lead to pneumonia. There are supplements which claim to make children better behaved, more intelligent and thus better performers at school. And let's not start on sportsmen. Teenagers and young women take the contraceptive pill to prevent inconvenient  and unwanted pregnancies, whilst middle aged women take  hormones to stave off depression because they are no longer able to  reproduce. Crazy changing world that it is, it looks to me like chemical warfare is here to stay...