Warning: May contain information

There's nothing funny about food allergies.  Of course they can have dire consequences for those affected.

I'm just guessing now that it's the reason we see so many warnings on packets and boxes of foods these days.  You need to know if nuts are anywhere in vision if you have an allergy to the things.  That's somewhat obvious.  Around 1% of  Britons and North Americans are allergic to peanuts and other nuts.

But it does mean that some of the wording on boxes, bags and whatever do seem to have  gone off on one of late.  I mentioned on these pages a while back about a box of lamb grills that was heading for a BBQ of ours that had the instructions, 'do not grill'.  Odd when you consider that grill featured heavily in the job description of that particular product.

Now maybe that's more to do with just daft language.  The rest, I'm thinking, is more to do with a spin off of the warnings train of thought or arguably a rather literal interpretation of ingredients. The above picture is a classic of it's type, spotted by my son.  A bag of fish fillets.  The ingredients lists fish.  Not such a surprise, in fact I would go as far as to say we would feel pretty cheated to open a bag of fish fillets only to find that fish was not the dominant component part.  You can't really have a bag of fish that's fishless.  

But closer inspection shows that that the allergy advice of a bag of fish fillets is a stark warning (exclamation mark) that the bag may contain fish.  Just thinking this through, I know,  but if I was allergic to the previously mentioned fish, what the hell I am doing with a bag of fish in my hand? 

If you had  the nut allergy pointed out earlier, you wouldn't select a bar of fruit and nut chocolate and say, 'Oh for goodness sake, they've only gone and put nuts in a bar of fruit and nut, haven't they?  I mean how stupid, how dense do they have to be?  Lucky I spotted that one in time...'

I've got a bag of salt in the cupboard that 'contains salt.'  I don't know what to say really except... good.  Thanks for clearing that one up.

There are plenty of other bizarre twists of language out there when it comes to the obvious.  And it's not just the food industry.

For example:  On a box that contained hair curling tongs.  For external use only.  I think you'd need to be fairly up to speed on advanced torture techniques or have unusual tastes in the bedroom to consider that electric heated hair tongs had any internal applications available.  Hairdryer:  do  not use in the shower.  I wish, I really wish I was making these up but sadly I'm not that clever.  A bottle of dog shampoo: Caution, the contents of this bottle should not be fed to fish.

So the warning is clear and obvious, next time the Labrador is a tad dank and in need of a spruce up, don't get confused with Tiddles the Goldfish doing several laps of his bowl with his tongue hanging out.  Trust me: dog shampoo and fish food are significantly different.

My eyes have been itching of late and I know it's because I have to be careful what I slap on my delicate little face.  It took a few years of frog-like facial expressions in a range of Mediterranean destinations to work out that I'm allergic to suntan lotions dripping into my eyes when mixed with a sweaty brow.  I now use a suntan lotion for babies less than a day old and it seems to work.  The rest of me is bathed in factor whatever, just not from the neck up.

The fact that my eyes have been itching recently means that I'm going to stop now and head for the shower to check on something.  Like most women, my wife's shampoo contains ground pearls, gold leaf, the extract from leaves only found in one acre of Brazilian jungles and so on.  I strongly suspect she's got me something from the value range at Pets R Us again.

Something fishy's going on.