A big fat frappé

Sometimes when we have a large shopping list we begin with a coffee in the Tesco cafe. For us this is a recent development, but it certainly makes shopping easier. Probably the caffeine.

Anyhow, the other day two large youngish ladies sat nearby with two large frappés so being nosey I checked the calories. The Tesco cafe is helpful like that – it shows the calories against each meal and drink. Those frappés were 390 calories each so the obvious question arises. Do we have at least a partial explanation for the size of those youngish ladies? They were big.

Maybe this is merely something we notice because we don’t see people like that walking on Ecton Hill, climbing up Hall Dale or striding along Stanage Edge. Different environments, different people. It’s very noticeable.

Until next time

Last week found us walking in and around the Chatsworth estate. On the way back we passed the clearing up operation after the RHS Chatsworth Flower Show. Huge trucks lumbering around on temporary metal roadways, gangs of men dismantling everything from vast marquees to temporary toilets or packing trays of plants into huge wagons.

Not something we’ve ever go near because of the crowds and the traffic but it was interesting to stand there and watch the whole thing being dismantled with the crowds all gone. We can't remember the names of flowers anyway. Bound to be a disadvantage.

I can’t imagine organising something so big and so temporary. Seems a waste somehow but I suppose in one sense it is only a much bigger version of the circus coming to town.

Shopping for an illusion

The other day we visited a White Stuff clothes shop. I don’t know if all their shops are the same but the men’s section of this store was designed to look like the interior of an old workshop complete with an ancient, heavily scarred wooden workbench in the middle of the floor. It even had an old vice.

The walls were boarded with what appeared to be old planks and sections of antiquated wooden doors. Even many of the clothes seemed to be designed to evade any suggestion of pristine newness. The whole ambience was artfully designed to avoid a sense of shopping for new clothes.

The clothes tended towards subdued colours and some had a contrived appearance of having been worn before. Some would not have looked out of place on a Victorian labourer and no doubt that was contrived too.

The overall look of the place hinted at some kind of imaginary recycling as if to say I’m not really shopping, not really buying new clothes and not really a consumer even though the clothes were of course brand new. I didn’t buy anything.

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Chopey plays a blinder

Experienced referee Chris Chope had to endure a storm of vituperation after sending off every player of both teams during a recent Parliamentary friendly. I’m not surprised quite frankly. Blimey - something has to be done about blatant time-wasting and constant waving to the fans in the stands. Not that there are many of those these days.

The basic problem is that the two leading teams are stuffed with overpaid prima donnas who don’t train hard enough and waste too much time off the pitch. What with interviews, publicity stunts and social media there is no time left to play real matches. As one commentator said – “I don’t know why we bother with the gits, they rarely turn up and most of the lazy sods are too flabby to last the full ninety minutes anyway.”

It’s the same old story when teams are on the slide. Not enough training, a general lack of fitness, not enough strategic nous and far too many outside interests. Not to mention waving to the fans all the time. What have this lot got to wave about anyway? Blimey - Chopey deserves a medal for drawing attention to it all.

The shadow of cholera

For many nights he lies in bed, without getting up by day. He is tired and sleepy. A harsh-voiced man comes to the bed, and says that he must not lay his hands outside the coverlet. They give him evil-tasting stuff with a spoon; he eats nothing. There is whispering in the room, and his mother weeps. Then he sits again at the window in the bedroom. Bells are tolling the whole day long.

Green biers are carried over the churchyard. Sometimes a dark mass of people stand round a black chest. Gravediggers with their spades keep coming and going. He has to wear a copper plate suspended by a blue silk ribbon on his breast, and chew all day at a root. That is the cholera epidemic of 1854.

August Strindberg – The Son of a Servant (1886 - 1909)

A quote taken from Strindberg's autobiographical novel. In 1854 he would have been five years old. It opens up a chink of light on a world without modern medical science and what a grim world it must have been. Dickens’ world, Jane Austen’s world and yet this is just one of the shadows under which they lived. Also in 1854 there was the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London.

This outbreak, which killed 616 people, is best known for the physician John Snow's study of its causes and his hypothesis that contaminated water, not air, was the source of cholera.

To my mind the most difficult aspect is trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be familiar with the dangers of cholera yet ignorant of its root cause. We often seem to take knowledge for granted yet hard-won knowledge is the gulf between now and then.

Ageing is merely a belief system says Bill

According to the Mirror Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sees ageing as a belief system.

Fit and healthy Coronation Street star Bill Roache, 86, is often asked the secret to his seemingly eternal youth. In the final extract from his new book Life and Soul, Corrie’s Ken explains how he could live to 120.

Before we look at the practical steps to wellbeing, we need to look at beliefs.

Take ageing, for example. Ageing is a belief system within the collective consciousness of humanity. It’s what we’ve collectively decided about age and what it means for our body and our lifestyle.

We don’t have to age and die at a certain time. We can extend our lifespan by pushing the parameters of the belief that we’ll only live to 70, 80 or 90 years.

I can't say it feels like that to me but perhaps I'm not a natural believer.