Aaaargh!! My eyes!! MY EYES!!!!

------------
The Setup
------------

Anyway, last Friday I had to cycle down town to get a birthday card for "her inside of the doors". I had the head ache before I set off and so by the time I'd reached the 'Beirut in the 80's' nightmare that is Abingdon's shopping precinct, or "parade" as it's aspirationally called sometimes, it was a vice-like band of pain across my sweating temples ("Aaaah, Tripitaka! It hurts, it hurts!!"). Because I get a lot of headaches I take a lot of paracetamol and aspirin and am conscious of the effect these must be having on my stomach, which was what prompted me to search out 4Head. I had seen an ad on telly about 6 months ago for the 4Head analgesic stick that is applied like a Pritt stick across the forehead, made the usual, "That sounds good" comment and then never actually did any more to find out how it worked, if it was suitable for me etc. I figured that if I bought some tablets downtown, I'd need to spend a £1 on bottled water as well and so I decided to see if it was worth me getting a stick of 4Head instead.

The "parade" has a Boots luckily, so I headed in and found it in the Pain Relief section very easily. First shock was the £5.99 price tag. If you think that you can get generic packs of 24 paracetamol for about 30p, £5.99 is a big investment for a small roll-on applicator. I had a quick read of the back which advised applying across your brow when in pain, applying further if the symptoms don't go away. Seemed straight forward enough so I splashed out my £5.99 and went outside to try it for the first time.

I am a man. Men never read instructions (real men anyway :) Men just "do" and like to think that they are man enough to handle whatever consequences might arise from them not reading instructions. This is loosely called bravado, which is quite closely associated with foolhardiness. So, I whipped out the 4Head stick (it is indeed like a very small Pritt stick. The actual "stuff" is crystal-white in colour, hard, dry and whiffs faintly of mint), discarded the instructions and liberally applied 4Head to my forehead expecting instant relief. What I actually got was a feeling very much like someone spraying Deep Heat directly into both of my eyes. Think how your eyes would react if you were to spread Vicks on your cheekbones, it was that kind of feeling. My eyes were streaming so badly that I had to keep walking around with my head tilted at 45 degrees to keep the vapour away. I'm sure this was great entertainment for the chip-eating plebeians in the precinct.

Let's go back to the bit where I discarded the instructions. You remember, the instructions that weren't for real men? Well, a couple of days later, when my sight was restored, I found some instructions on 4Head and it was here that I discovered that 4Head is composed of 100% levomenthol - a powerful natural painkiller. And the clue is right there in the name. It was the menthol vapours which, whilst possibly doing good things by absorbing directly into the area suffering pain, were also cascading down my face and into my eyes, rather like cold vapour rolls, fog-like, out of the fridge on a hot day.

This product simply did not work for me at all, which is a real shame because I really wanted a non-ingestive solution to headache relief. Actually, didn't they used to tie strips of willow bark across the forehead in ye olden tymes? Um, might try that at home, but maybe not wandering round the office.