‘Atishoo’ or a hanky?
21 Apr 2018
Dear LPG,
With a bit of luck, we are now leaving the part of the year when we are all stricken with degrees of that age old illness we call colds and ‘flu, as we look forward to the promise of a warm summer, but it was not long ago that way too many of my friends and I were being tormented.
Do you remember the days when we all used handkerchiefs in preference to tissues? When I was a child, in spite of the invention of the tissue, it was accepted that children went to school with a ‘hankie’ in their pocket and I even remember arriving at infant’s school, like many others in my class, with one pinned to my school jumper.
We are all told that tissues are more hygienic these days because they are designed to be used only once, but then they end up getting piled up in a waste paper bin, and unless it is fully covered, the germs are still relatively free agents that can be passed through the air to a certain extent.
The amount of times that one needs to blow when afflicted with a cold also makes for tissues everywhere and the cost to us and the environment is pretty heavy too. It occurs to me that a better way of making sure that the germs don’t get spread is to flush them down the loo, but your news article of January 4th which was called ‘Careful What You Flush’ got me thinking that that may not be the best way forward either.
I am also aware that although toilet paper is particularly designed to disintegrate, tissues are similar, which mean that there are fibres that can be transferred from even the best quality tissue to the inside of your nostrils, resulting in yet another complication of symptoms however minimal.
We are lucky now that our washing machines are there to do all the work of getting our ‘hankies’ clean and sanitary for us again, and if we are out we can keep used ones in a plastic bag until we return home, although there is some extra carriage and ironing involved.
In short, there are many arguments for and against the ‘tissue issue’ but I think that there are many reasons why we should stick with the old.
CP. Blyth Hill
LPG found some information for you
