Spirit House

impossible songs

impossible songs

Home safe

The newlyweds are back from Thailand with all their luggage, gifts and souvenirs, not a great deal of leftover money but both in good health. They tell of a strange land where water gypsies flourish in stilted communities, hotels have resident elephants, lizards appear in the toilets, each house has a little spirit house and a mini monsoon happens every other day, spicy food is served round the clock, city traffic is indescribable, the beaches are beautiful and clean, the streets are lined with orchids, Buddhas and yellow flags are everywhere and having to haggle over the price of a meal is common place. Sounds a bit like Edinburgh in August.

Problems of a metabolic nature

So what is the best balanced human metabolism? The high running, hungry churning and burning Porsche type, the steady, uneventful and regular Volvo, or the skimpy, minimal and economic, slowly revolving Smart and are there only clichéd types like these? Probably not but the best one to have is of course the one that keeps on running and gives you the least trouble over time relative to actual mileage. Naturally I’m a bit fuzzy on metabolic management, “you are what you eat” is now trite and irritating and true in the same way that fish don’t need to swim up hills or push wheelbarrows. So if you have a slow metabolism can you speed it up by eating more hot curries, drinking smoothies and munching on shredded wheat and doing exercises? I suppose that might work but I can’t be bothered with any of that or the Okinawa way or power eating and any other think that I might have to actually brood over and plan. There lies the problem; I really do not want to have to think about what I eat or how it may affect me. Of course I know I should but I don’t, I just want to fly through this life eating and drinking nice, tasty, brightly coloured and well prepared food (in reasonable but not large amounts) regardless of the consequences. With this attitude it’s obvious that a day of reckoning is clearly not far away - some may say.

I did laugh out loud when I read this quote from Jack Dee in the paper today: A woman wrote to the Daily Mail saying: “I for one am glad that ‘Jif’ has now changed its name to ‘Cif’, as there already is another product on the market known as ‘Jif’ and I found this really confusing”. Really? Did you really? How confused were you in all honesty between a lemon-shaped, lemon-filled, lemon-coloured, plastic lemon and a bottle of scourer with a picture of a bath on the side?”