Patent medicine

We have been soaking up the sea and the sun rather more than is our custom and by yesterday my lower lip was quite sore. Tiring of toughing it out, I popped into the small Boots in Ventnor and showed my lip to the assistant there. She frowned and intimated that it was in a bit of a state.

I've got just the thing for you she says, presenting me with a very small pot of ointment, a snip at £2.50 or so. Sold.

Outside, in the comfort of a neighbouring bus stop, I put some of the stuff on the offending lip. Stings a bit, but after a while it all calms down. Further applications through the day, and this morning the soreness has more or less gone.

I suspect that the stuff is a brand leader, in the way of Nescafé, and one is prepared to pay what it takes to get the job done. In which I imagine there is some interesting feed back: one pays good money for a good product, so it works, almost by power of mind alone. If only one could pull off such tricks for more serious complaints!

Investigating further, I discover that the Carmex people run to a fancy web site (reference 1) and that I could have bought the stuff off the Internet for not much more than half what I actually paid. Although I did not look that closely, and that might well not include postage and packing. So not as big a discount as at first might appear.

Not to be confused with reference 2 which seems to be something quite different. If you want Carma Laboratories Incorporated, you need reference 3. Which talks of 'a soothing blend of colloidal oatmeal and fruit seed oil helps restore moisture for smoother, healthier, naturally beautiful lips' - unlike the product itself which talks of petroleum. That is to say, vaseline. But you can't buy shares as it is a private company, maybe even founding family owned.

I associate to the calming potion called 'calma' or some such in the Miss. Marple story about a mirror cracked from side to side  (the subject of a fine painting by Holman Hunt, first seen but not noticed at reference 4) and involving a lot of film people who take the stuff to calm their nerves. I wonder if Agatha - or her script writer - knew of the lip ointment.

PS: by around 0800, surfers on the Isle of Wight have clearly woken up and BT broadband is once again pretty grim compared with what we get on the mainland. Seems to be better much earlier in the morning, when decent folk are still asleep.

Reference 1: http://www.carmex.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.carmex.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.mycarmex.com/.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=baa+lambs+reprised.