A Charm against Indigestion

Soothe your post-Christmas dinner indigestion with these readers’ charms, dug out from the spell-book that is the 24th December 1954 edition.

The usual prize of £5 was offered for a charm against the pains of indigestion after Christmas dinner, in not more than eight lines of English verse: the charm to be pronounced while taking the prescribed dose of bismuth, bicarb., or other normal remedy.

Nearly ninety competitors were prepared to reinforce their doses of magnesia, bismuth, bicarb. and alka-seltzer with a rhyming charm; but, although among the big and little guns there were (as Sir John Squire said in a Masefield parody) `some interesting ones,’ I was rather disappointed not to come across a really charming charm. Joyce Johnson (apropos of Cyprus) made her favourite pun: ‘To soothe and smooth the aisles of grease/Eno’s is/Eno’s is/Eno’s is the remedy’; H. E. Wootton achieved a triumph of compression in the five words: ‘Izzy, WIZZY, Let’s get Busy’; and I hesitated long over the entries of Mrs.