SEPTEMBER WRITING PROMPT | A-CULTURATED

Sleep in Milky Sheets and Roll Your Eye With Gold

Common knowledge isn’t that common sometimes, especially with folk remedies

Lucinda Munro Cook
A-Culturated
Published in
5 min readSep 25, 2024

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A woman’s face and shoulder showing in a milky bath
Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash

There are some things that ‘everybody knows’. They don’t teach them to you in school, you’re just supposed to know them by osmosis. But such ‘universal facts’ vary, depending on which country you’re living in.

Maybe because my childhood was multicultural, I not only got an odd blend of so-called common sense, I also had a lot of gaps.

I wished there was a book that listed common knowledge, for all the world to read. So I started writing it in my head, when I was five.

I almost died when I was five. Gazing idly at an electrical socket, I picked up a sewing pin and poked it into one of the holes. As you do.

I got a terrible shock, and it threw me across the room. Then my father roared at me for doing something so utterly stupid, which scared me even more.

It was so unfair, how was I supposed to know?

My mental book was a list of things that everybody should know but loads of people didn’t, or have perhaps forgotten. Things like you get food poisoning if you re-freeze food, or if you put the…

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