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7thWave AI Assistant

I think it’s time to talk about skin.  It’s all very well to rest your head on someone’s belly but it would not be so comfortable without skin.  Not to mention the havoc blood and guts would play with soft furnishings.

More specifically, I want to ask: what on earth has happened to soap?  Skin can get a bit messy with sweat adhered to all the muck and stuff in the environment.  Together these things make a breeding ground for bacteria, fungi and other things, some of them pathogens.

Soap is brilliant because soap molecules have two ends.  One end is water soluble and the other isn’t.  This means soap is an effective way to disrupt the cell walls of pathogens, including viruses.  This is why we were admonished to sing Happy Birthday twice during the lockdown to give soap a chance.  (I preferred “Pop Goes the Weasel”, and imagined cell walls popping!) 

Now there are a few drawbacks to soap.  It has a tendency to generate gallons of slime, usually partially contained in a soap dish.  If the slime escapes it can find its way down the side of the sink onto the floor and play havoc with soft furnishings.

Any road, some bright spark noticed this and thought – why not bottle the slime?  So, now when you go to the soap shelves in a supermarket you see row upon row of bottles of soapy slime.  They all have a plunger thing in the top that extracts the slime except when there’s half an inch left in the bottle.  And the plunger thing has been known upon occasion to actually work!

Those of us who are still sane must search for a distant corner of some shelf, where we’ll find most prominently, packets of Dove.   I accidentally bought some during lockdown and used one bar.  Whatever it is, it isn’t soap.  Shove it to one side and if you’re lucky you’ll find a maximum of two types of soap, one scented and the other Simple soap that isn’t.  I’m fairly happy as I bought Simple before the lockdown on the grounds that my manly scent does not need to be augmented by lavender.

I don’t remember being asked whether I wanted bottles of soapy slime or proper soap (where are you Lifebuoy Toilet Soap, Cussons Imperial Leather, Fabulous Pink Camay, Wrights Coal Tar Soap?)

These days if you want proper soap you’re better off at some artisan soap emporium, probably.  I last visited Lush about 20 years ago in pursuit of a Christmas present for my approx. 5-year-old niece who wanted something pink.  I asked for something pink for a little girl and was told the soap contained all fresh ingredients, was not tested on animals, and was guaranteed safe to use with delicate skins.  (I hadn’t entertained the possibility I might consign my niece to an acid bath!)  Yes, but is it pink?!

You’d think that with all the concerns about the environmental impact of plastic, a move of this magnitude to more plastic would have met with some resistance.  But no, not a peep, we all seem to have rolled over and accepted the loss of proper soap.  Does anyone know why?

This is Day 18 of Writing Challenge 2024.  People all over the world take part in the WC.  We write something every weekday for 4 weeks based on a prompt   This year, I'll be sharing 21 articles based loosely on prompts about parts of the body.  Do we fully appreciate the role things and stuff play in our lives?  Each part of the body has certain things and stuff associated with it.  (Probably!)  I've no idea where this will go but hope you enjoy the journey.  The introductory post was Things and Stuff.  The last post was A Fantastic Voyage and the next is On Not Being Daft in the Head.

Should the title of this post be "Pop Goes the Weasel"?  I had a vague memory of the question and searched YouTube and this is what I found.  Stay with it and in time Anthony Newly (who's he?) gets to the question.  (By the way, isn't it a Monkey that's knocked off the table with a stick?  Poor Weasel!)