Piss a bed

and other gifts….

Growing up in the 1970s, you could make a crown from dandelions, blow the clock and count your wishes, or press the yellow heads between your palms and leave your skin stained gold. But you absolutely could not pick them. Everyone’s mum or nan had the warning ready: pick a dandelion and you’ll wet the bed tonight. We believed it even as we watched the bees drag themselves through those same flowers without any apparent urinary consequence (did bees ever wet the bed?) . The dandelion is a diuretic, and a powerful one, and the folk name piss-a-bed is a piece of genuine botanical knowledge that somewhere along the line got turned into a child’s superstition. it was real information that It just got a bit garbled, the way folk lore can.