Healthy eating at Easter

Went to give blood on Good Friday, a little apprehensively since I’ve had a cold recently, and am still coughing from time to time. The nurses at the Blood Donor Centre in Edinburgh take a fairly relaxed approach to your suitability to donate blood. About as relaxed as an SAS admissions officer. If you’ve so much as recently walked past someone who sneezed, they’re liable to shake their head sadly and ask you to come back next time. Woebetide you if the person who sneezed as you walked past might have once had sex with someone in Africa. Then you're for the high jump. You can see why I was apprehensive. Not only have I coughed recently, but I know a man with a Kenyan wife. So when I mentioned that my plane home from Australia in January had stopped off at BANGKOK... the eyebrows were raised sharply and she disappeared to ascertain my fate. I glanced nervously upwards, half expecting a hermetically-sealed container to drop from the ceiling and insulate me from society until I was safe.

I protested that I hadn’t left the airport in Bangkok, and had purchased nothing more than a book while I was there, but all to no avail. Apparently the plane even touching Thai tarmac knocks blood donation on the head for 12 months. Malaria hotspot, it would seem. So that’s that. Still, I came away with some mini-eggs courtesy of the Blood Donor Centre.

Easter Monday brought an expedition to St Andrews, after breakfast at the incomparable Indigo Yard. Kenny D, Broon, and Jen all made the trip, among others less infamous to the readers of this blog. We were all careful to suck on sweets as we went over the Forth Bridge, after Jen’s public assertion that her ears pop when she goes North.

The sun shone, the wind blew, and we had fun. The sun shone so much that Jen went slightly pink and declared herself to have sunstroke. The wind blew so much during our time on the beach that we all experienced exfoliation by sand-blasting, and are still finding sand in various bodily crevices. Actually, I can only speak for my own crevices. A long and satisfying game of beach cricket was marked by the usual events: dropped catches aplenty and Kenny D muttering darkly about the uneven surface every time he got bowled.

Dining in Zizzi’s that evening, I took a moment to read the advisory notice on my glass bottle of Coke. It advised me that 330ml of Coca Cola, ie one glass bottle or a can, contains 39.5% of an adult’s RDA of sugar. I pondered this for a moment, considering how I’d started the day with a breakfast soaked in maple syrup, and reckoned that with the syrup and Coke alone I must have been close to sugar saturation for the day. I looked up to see three year old Lewis polishing off the last of his own bottle of Coke, and breathed deeply. What percentage of a child’s sugar RDA, I wondered...

My sister and her partner were up over the Easter break, which meant I finally got the chance to meet my 11-week old niece. We got on reasonably well, I feel. She seemed to tolerate me when I kept moving, as if this held promise that I would soon hand her over to someone more competent. Childcare, at that age, seemed refreshingly logical and uncomplicated to my bachelor eyes. If she was crying, she was either hungry (hand her to my sister), or tired (hand her to my sister), or had a loaded nappy (hand her to anyone in sight. Except perhaps, my dad). If she wasn’t crying, carry her around for a bit for bonding purposes until she started crying.

On Saturday at our church’s music practice, two of the band, by necessity, brought their young kids along. Surveying the carnage in the church at the end of the practice, and the fraught look on the faces of the parents in question, I was reminded that childcare doesn’t stay logical or uncomplicated for long.

The weather was glorious in Galashiels today, which is where my job took me. Sitting outside at lunchtime, drinking my way through 60% of my sugar RDA, I looked up to see a bus with a question plastered over its side: “SALT. Is your food full of it?”

I checked the bottle. 0.0g salt.

Phew. Still eating healthily.

Devastation and disorder

My apologies for disappointing one or two of you with my lack of comment on the Cricket World Cup, currently ongoing in the West Indies. The fact is, I’ve struggled a little to get ‘into it’, for a number of reasons, a principal one being my lack of TV. And the highlights are on BBC quite late, which makes for antisocial visiting hours. Not that I’ve let such trivial concerns bother me before. Perhaps I should get a kebab and wander down to my mum’s.

However, it is also true that there hasn’t been a lot to write about. Ireland beating Pakistan on St Patrick’s Day in one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history, Freddie Flintoff getting fished out of the sea at 3am after capsizing his pedaloe, rumours and whispers of match-fixing. And the small matter of Pakistan’s coach being murdered in his Jamaican hotel room. It’s all been a bit mundane so far.

I generally find it harder to get excited about one-day cricket than Tests in any case. So, it would appear, do the England team, who regularly under-achieve in this form of the game. However, all that said, I would very much like to be watching the World Cup more than I am, but being sans TV, never mind Sky dish, makes it awkward. Not that it's been a lot easier, or more enjoyable, to be at the tournament itself, by all accounts. Many observers' fears about the state of readiness of the new stadia and facilities have been realised, which has rather spoiled the preparation of many of the teams. And the spectators have been put off by outrageous ticket prices and overbearing security - banning drinks being brought into the ground unless they're made by the tournament sponsors, not to mention musical instruments. Good old ICC, how typical of them to prevent any possibility of a carnival atmosphere.

Work has been busy of late. Our two consulting rooms in the basement have been completely refurbished, and I have to say they look very nice. Included in the refurbishment was the redecoration and refitting of our WC. Now, my colleague Matt spends a lot of his working day in the bathroom, particularly in the mornings. I think he finds it a pleasant place wherein to sit and ruminate on life’s mysteries. Or perhaps his digestive system is in permanent overdrive. And so it came to pass that Matt went downstairs for his first, um, sampling of our brand new toilet. Having berthed himself onto the seat with his customary vigour, he then shifted his not inconsiderable weight forward to, as he puts it, “get purchase”. Whereupon he demolished the toilet seat. Completely annihilated it. See picture.



Thank you for all your comments on melancholia. Was particularly impressed with the tributes to Eeyore. Inspired, I purchased another Ray Lamontagne album (‘Trouble’) and it’s another good ‘un. Been listening to it a fair bit on my travels around the Borders these last few weeks. Had a gorgeous run from Coldstream across to Peebles last week. The route follows the River Tweed the whole way. The air was misty and full of foreboding, which only added to the beauty of the run, and cheered me up immensely.

Still, every silver lining has a cloud... Spring is on the way...