The joys of motion sicknessI read voraciously as a child - that's how I learned words like voraciously. Long before I had ever considered a career in cheap car insurance, and before online car insurance was even technically possible, my favourite authors were Roald Dahl, Dick King Smith and Lynne Reid Banks, and I read their books many times over. I read at school and at home, after meals, in bed (possibly by torchlight), at weekends and whenever else there was nothing more important to me to be doing - which was pretty much all of the time. There was one sort of an occasion on which I learned definitely not to read, however - though I was stubborn at first. That was long car journeys. When you're seven - which I was in 1989, the year after Mouse Butcher was published and the third Indian in the Cupboard book - all car journeys are long ones. For instance, the hour-long jaunt down to my grandma's for Sunday lunch lasted an absolute eternity. The temptation to open my book and read through that journey would have been irresistible if I didn't know for certain that doing so would mean my dad having to pull over in the space of about twenty minutes so that I could violently, colourfully and ashamedly be sick all over the place. Motion sickness, from which I suffered the instant my eyes hit the page during most of my primary school years, is caused by mixed messages in the brain. The inner ear, which is aware of the motion of the car (or boat, plane, simulator, or - if you're a really lucky seven-year-old - space shuttle) is telling the brain that you're moving. Your eyes on the other hand, which are focussing on a static page, tell it that you're stood still. The result is that a part of the brain called the 'area postrema' examines the two pieces of information and decides (incorrectly) that the seven-year-old it's in charge of has ingested a hallucinogenic poison. In an attempt to get the poison out of the child's system, it induces the aforementioned vomiting. Research carried out by the RAC Foundation found that along with my own, 40 percent of parents have had to stop on the hard shoulder to 'attend to' a child suffering from car sickness - which we all know means wipe their mouths and hope to God they haven't got any on their t-shirts. In all, 60 percent admitted they had resorted to 'dangeous behaviour' like this, (turning round in their seat while the car is moving was another example), for the sake of a sick child. Such actions dramatically increase the risk of your having an accident, which at the very least can mean curtains for your cheap car insurance rate. But in spite of this, less than half of those questioned took any kind of preventative measures against motion sickness before setting off. Only one in three parents pack a sick bag when carrying children, and just 16 percent asked them to take anti-sickness medicines. The latter doesn't have to mean force-feeding your child pills - though such medicines, most of which contain the drug Dimenhydrinate, can be bought over the counter at chemists and have minimal side effects. I couldn't explain how, but Acu-pressure bands - which simply apply pressure to an area about three centimetres from the join of your palm and wrist by means of a small plastic bead - work every bit as well and are obviously totally non-invasive. Convincing a young passenger to wear one could mean the difference between miserable journey and a bearable one - and they're available in chemists, too. The point is: until I learned to stay bored rather then risk flipping pages, my motion sickness turned about half-a-dozen potentially tolerable car journeys into vomit-soaked nightmares for myself and my family. But as I discover now, the whole awful experience could have been avoided (or controlled at least) for the sake of a couple of wristbands and a plastic bag. So if you're planning on taking some children on a day trip somewhere, don't forget the sick bags. Some day, you'll definitely thank me for that.
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