#22

For the three days Friday, Saturday and Sunday I solely eat 'raspberries and cream' for lunch. I can't afford to have lunch and a pudding because I'm getting in shape for the surfing season (which, gadzooks, starts tomorrow!), so considering I over-bought on the double cream by a factor of three when my top notch Nephew and Sister and Cousin visited last week-end, the cream had to be used up, and my Mother obliged by buying loads of raspberries on a 2 for 3 offer. Well raspberries are good for you.. aren't they? Hmm, thinking about it this sounds very much like my rational for when I cannot resist the temptation of buying a chocolate bar to eat on the way home after a hard day at work: I buy a Marathon bar as apposed to, say, a Mars bar, because I can pretend to myself that I have gained some nutritional advantage from the peanuts in the Marathon bar, and so lessen the feeling of being a weak willed. Err, well, anyway, to counteract the effect of the oceans of double cream I have consumed, I had a cold-liver oil capsule or two to get some omega3 in me, help keep the blood going to those important bits like brain and stuff.

Eating the same unusual lunch three days in a row reminds me of the eating experiments I started to do many years ago... perhaps I'll try some more in the future. The inspiration came when I heard one food expert say on TV that you don't need to have a balanced diet where you eat a whole variety of stuff in one day: it's good enough to get the full breadth of food every few days, advice that has probably been contradicted since knowing these notoriously fickle dietary experts, but it did kind of conger-up an interesting picture in my mind of say just eating nothing but cabbage one day then nothing but potatoes the next then nothing but oranges the next and so on, and I think that inspired my eating experiments where I try eating nothing but one thing for a day. Well I'm glad that I didn't try eating cabbage for a whole day, in retrospect, because some years later I read that strange story in the Fortean Times of that bloke who eat loads and loads of cabbage and farted so much during his sleep in his poorly ventilated bedroom that he asphyxiated himself in his self-created sulphurous atmosphere of farts. I have to point-out here that these eating experiments of mine were nothing like the stupid experiments they do to athletes on Diet Doctors (#3) where people have to cram themselves stupid with one particular food for a whole week when the they know full well it will f**k them up.... my eating experiments were a genuine experiments to see what would happen (and not expecting anything bad), and just for the one day. Also it was before those very funny sketch-ettes on the Fast Show where the bloke emerges from an outside bog saying: "Today, I have mostly been eating...", which may well have put me off the idea. I remember the first eating experiment involved eating only beetroot for a day. Well, things seemed to go well, no ill effects were observed, and I didn't feel sick or anything. This somewhat lulled me into a false sense of security and by the following day I had resumed a normal diet and was thinking about other things when upon going for a wee I was horrified...oh no I'd better got to hospital there's blood in my urine....oh no.... oh,wait a minute... it's all that beetroot I eat yesterday... phew! I have since heard people since proclaim in a know-it all fashion: that it's a myth that beetroot makes your piss red -- an old wives tale they squawk... when I hear that I just smile to myself, and don't say anything, and speculate that one day the know-it-all eats enough to cause them an embarrassing trip to A and E the next day, only to find, after considerable unnecessary invasive procedures (on parts you'd rather not be subject to them), that actually, contrary to their smart-arse beliefs, beetroot does indeed turn your piss red. The next eating experiment was: pineapple, raw pineapple. Now the inadvisable nature of this experiment became apparent somewhat earlier-on in the day. I started the experiment in good spirits, cutting-up my nice big fresh pineapple and enjoying that great smell, relishing getting started. But it can't of been more than a couple of hours after eating about half of the pineapple before the pain started. It wasn't a bad pain at first, just mild discomfort of the tongue and gums. So I continued eating pineapple, but after about another hour was I curled-up on the floor in real pain! It felt like my gums were on fire. FIRE I TELL YE! Needless to say: that eating experiment was abandoned and it took endless swilling-out of my mouth with water to even start to make the pain go away. I almost, almost, went to hospital. It felt like my teeth were going to fall-out. Well, it wasn't until some months later that I learnt that the feeling of dental deciduousness was not far off the mark because, apparently, raw pineapple contains a powerful enzyme, which after prolonged exposure (presumably many days), does actually make your teeth quite literally fall-out! As a result of this experiment the obvious advice for consumers of pineapple is to either cook it first, or if you dare eat it raw -- do it in small portions... occasionally. Tinned pineapple is now always my preference since it is cooked during the canning process.

Tomorrow morning it'll be time to head-out on the road and head South West. Yksin. A journey which feels more like a mission because it's from the most urban of urban: Spaghetti Junction, to the the fresh foamy blue surf, calling from beyond the horizon. Some people might think of Spaghetti Junction as looking like the gates of Hell, where as I think she is a complete work of art: a gritty, grimy, twisted, mean bastard beautiful tangle of a construction, and because they built her so completely incompetently she's always changing, always having ugly arrays of metal drilled into it's dirty columns to stop them collapsing. They have to keep patching her up -- they can never, never, demolish and rebuild her because the entire nation would grind to a halt if they did... she is the diseased heart that pains you so but that you'd die without. When they banned lead in petrol they stole something from Spaghetti's beautiful urban heart, they stole her boast of having the highest air-borne lead levels anywhere in Europe but now the 'great unwashed' are buying diesel cars in their droves she has a new venom, venom of carcinogenic diesel soot, before she could only retard your childrens' mental development, now she can give you cancer, now, presumably, she can actually kill you. What ever is the current crime of the motor car, she'll concentrate it and spit in your face. What ever you think of Spaghetti, she's a damn good dramatic setting to start your journey to the coast -- and if you do think she looks like the gates of Hell, then just think how wonderful the gates of Hell would look if you're on your way out... not that Birmingham is any more hellish than other cities (except of course it can never be as hellish as the city that is the definition of Hades: London) it's just that any urban environment is only impressive and exciting in small doses, eventually it degrades you. So escape to the surf.