Bates' Salve

If you look up Bates' Salve on the internet you find that it is one of the rarest materials in the universe.

What was Bates' Salve (I may have the apostrophe wrong, forgive me)? It was a warm to hot poultice applied to a wound presumably to prevent infection back in those days when there were not all that many things available. It had a wonderful smell; a reassuring smell. What did it smell like?

Well, if you go into a chicken shed as the chickens are receiving their bran and pollen you have perhaps one component of the Bates smell. If you go into a kitchen after bread has been freshly baked that is another component. However, there is yet another component which I did not know about when I was young but was the reason for Bates' salve becoming rarer than the finest diamond. It was its lead content.

The pharmaceutical powers decided that something containing so much lead could not be out in the community. Who knows how much lead it contained? If you know let me know. It was not pure lead or anything near that. Perhaps it was 2.5% lead. There was a sweetness in the smell which could have come from the formation of lead acetate, sometimes used by vignerons in the past - or perhaps even now - to sweeten their vintages.

I had Bates'salve applied to me on hundreds of occasions when I was a child. It always worked possibly because (a) there was no infection to kill; (b) just the smell of it lulled the organisms into a lethal sleep; (c) I knew it was going to work so it did work.

Then there were many years when I no longer smelled Bates'salve but the memroy of that odour remained with me. When I would smell fresh bread I would think of the salve. Some of the finest French cooking smells like the salve. I have thought ot the Salve in Bayreuth during a performance of Parsifal (so good for weeping wounds): I have thought of the Salve during a performance of Strauss's four last songs at the Barbican.

On night I was in Wagga Wagga having a few wines with friends. A neighbour of theirs came around who had been a pharmacist and somehow I got onto the subject of Bates' salve. To my astonishment she said she still had a stick of the salve at home, just a few metres away.

She went home, brought it back and we heated it in the traditional way. And there was that odour. Ah well, Proust can have his Madeleines. I have my Bates' salve. No, I don't have it myself but I know that, a few hundred Km down the road, there is perhaps the last stick of it in this hemisphere.

In writing this I have added to the almost nil information about Bates' salve on the net and somehow I shall keep the Salve and its smell alive. When Google assembles its odour register I will submit the Salve so that people all aroudn the world can savour it on-line.

Object reference

"Object reference not set to an instance of the object"

Leon the Huguenot has a brief but utterly frustrating episode with a Windows computer.

"Object reference not set to an instance of the object" What a helpful error message! How self-explanatory!

I received this message in relation to my Dymo LabelWriter this afternoon when printing labels from Word. I tried various things to no avail. Of course Word Help would be as much use in this situation as a bread poultice so I did not try this. In fact Word Help is usually as helpful as a bread poultice in any situation. This may explain why very few bread poultices are used these days.

On getting onto the web, where I have sometimes found salvation for my computer errors, there was nothing intelligible; no explanation as to what I should do; no guidance.

It seems this error occurs in relation to many other devices and I am the first person in the world ever to get it with a Dymo LabelWriter. Perhaps the others who did get it just gave up immediately and chucked their LabelWriter out with the food scraps.

My current plan is as follows:

(a) Try repairing Word 2007. That might be a problem if it asks for the Word disc since I have at least 7 legitimate copies of Word 2007. I have labelled none of them with the computer they are on. Why would I be as sensible as that? I will have to try them sequentially until I hit the right one.

(b) Reinstall the Dymo software so that the now blighted marriage between Dymo and Word will be refreshed and the little "Object reference not set to an instance of the object" episode just laughed off as a mild hiccough in the development of a long-term relationship.

I shall let you know how it goes. Since I am probably the only person reading this blog...like the previous blog I briefly established...at least I shall be able to inform myself of what I did. It is rather like sitting right down and writing myself a letter. That could be the lyrics of a song.

I must write down my other recent computer episode before it fades from the history of the planet. Now what did that concern? Sorry, it has faded from the history of the planet. Apologies to the history of the planet.

Finally, since one of the labels attached to this blog is "mating habits of pterodactyls", which I have attached to attract people to this blog, I guess I shall have to say something about them. I know everyone has an unhealthy, perverse interest in the mating habits of pterodactyls but you're not going to find anything about them here. I consider them quite unsuitable for a family-oriented blog. Look somewhere else for those e.g. my forthcoming blog entitled "mating habits of pterodactyls".