It's Always More Complicated

There's a story about the origins of the song in the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' by the son of one of the Sherman brothers, that they were trying to come up with the song, and he came in from having his polio vaccine on a lump of sugar, and, BINGO! there was their song.

Okay, they changed it to spoonful....

The concept of 'sugaring the pill', to conceal the taste of bitter medicine, used in a metaphorical sense, can be dated back at least to the seventeenth century (according to the Oxford English Dictionary online).

I do not know whether, throughout the Mary Poppins books, she ever administers medicines thus concealed, but it would have been a strategy surely passed on through generations of less supernatural nannies on how to medicate their charges.

While Sabin's sugarlump may have been the immediate stimulus, I depose that the song itself was at least riffing on subconscious memories of this time-honoured practice/saying.

(It is a relentless historian's habit to be sceptical of neat stories.)

Was given to think, today, of the ambiguities of the term 'not working'. It may mean just what it says, as in, not doing what it is intended to do, but sometimes, it seems to me, it tends to mean 'not working in the way I want it to' or 'not doing what I would expect it to do'.

Whence my title, which is from a collection of selections of winners of New Statesman competitions (I am not sure if it was Salome, dear, not in the fridge or Never rub bottoms with a porcupine, though I think the latter): this one was to invent a new but deep and meaningful sounding new proverb: the one in question was 'A new dishwasher won't mend a broken heart: it will, however, do the washing up'.

There are also things that Do Not Work for some people, but Do Work for others, perhaps along the lines of there being 6 and 60 ways. Can't recall exactly where, but within the last week was reading a plaint from a writer about all the exhortations all over the place about the importance of outlining, which killed the entire process stone-dead as far as they were concerned.

I may already have mentioned my tendency to fair lay on the ground larffing if somebody asks me in all seriousness about my research methodology. I mean, the chaos method of filing stuff, forgetting where I put it, and therefore having to go through my files, making useful and serendipitous discoveries along the way, to find it again, has always pretty much worked for me, but I would not entirely recommend it to anybody else. I may have occasionally jeered at habits of colleague who obsessively colour-coded notes, photocopies, etc, but it certainly worked for them.

Sometimes, things may work but only as one element within a larger system.

There are also things which, however clunky or apparently dysfunctional they look, work for some people and their particular needs.

Then there are things that may have stopped working in one way, but have been repurposed for another. An old railway carriage off the rails may not take you anywhere, but can be turned into a delightful bijou residence.