Interesting, I never knew about the carrot thing. I mean, carrots are good for eye health with all the beta carotene and lutein but eating them obviously does not improve your night vision. I had assumed it was another ’eat your greens it’ll put hairs on your chest’ thing to get kids to eat veg, I never knew it was spread by the government to hide how we were so successful against German air raids.
Shame they couldn’t have explained a bit more about why it was necessary to scatter the chaff rather than lob bales of it out. I guess it would have given away the very secret the carrot myth was invented for, but when you tell people what to do and not why, often you are wasting your breath as people will use their own intelligence but without the right information may act wrongly. I remember moving into a rental property that had one of those alarms that rang a control centre in the event of a break in (and unbeknownst to me, also a fire). I had specifically asked the landlady for the instructions and the passcode. I was told “You don’t need to know. Just enter the pin when you come in and that’s it”. Being a responsible tenant, I spotted that there was a smoke detector and it had a flashing red light. As all the smoke detectors I had seen upto then used a flashing light to indicate a failing battery, I thought I had better test it. So I waved some burning paper under it to see if it worked. The burglar alarm went off much to my surprise, having not been told that the alarm was connected to the smoke detector. Panic! Then the phone went. Crap, that’s all I need, a phone call right now! Answered it and it was the control centre. Did I need assistance? No I said, except please turn the alarm off! “what’s the pass code?” I didn’t know. Guy hangs up. Phone rings again. It’s the landlord. “you’ve set my house on fire on the first bloody day!!!” “No I haven’t, I was just testing the smoke alarm and you never told me it was connected to the burglar alarm, I asked you for the information and you declined to tell me so suck it up”. Then the fire crew arrived and evacuated us, saying “why are you standing around in a burning house?!” “Er, sorry officer, but I think you’ll find there isn’t actually a fire”. They were thorough though and insisted on coming in to check. It all could have been avoided if she hadn’t been all “you don’t need to know”. Obviously state secrets are a different matter though.
I don’t have any war stories as my dad was too young to remember and my grandfathers never ever spoke about it. I would have liked to talk to them about the olden days (not necessarily war as that’s hard enough to digest as an adult) but when my grandpa came back he’d lost all his hair from shock and hardly ever spoke to anyone about anything. My grandmother mainly impressed upon us the need to ‘made do and mend’, never to waste food, and to take notice of the beauty in the world - she was an artist and keen gardener.
