Fighting Weight

As a part time teacher, I guard against being a bad influence on my pupils. This sense of caution was reinforced for me when one of them came to class with her hair braided up just like mine. ("Look!") Well, that's okay, but I would be abjectly horrified if any of my pupils talked about food and dieting as much as I do.  I have explained that dieting stunts teenage brains, but occasionally I still let it slip that I am anti-sugar or not eating bread. Over-emphasis on food, dieting and body-size is a North American epidemic, and I do not want to pass on the germs to naturally slim, healthy, physically active Scottish lassies.

(She collapses forward and bangs her had on the coffee table.)

Okay, that's done. Now let's talk about my super-brilliant Low Blood Sugar Diet. I promised an overweight male reader  I would post about it, so here we go.

Right. So I followed Dr. Michael Mosley's Low Blood Sugar Diet more or less strictly for 8 weeks, and then, as it was Good Friday, I baked up some delicious full-wheat hot cross buns from scratch and ate two or three. I ate another two on Holy Saturday although for supper I had the ever-tasty Red Pepper and Squash Soup from my best-friend-for-eight-weeks, the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook. So, incidentally, did everyone else at the table. There are a number of garnish options for this soup, and on this occasion I chopped up some of the mountain cheese Polish Pretend Daughter brought from Poland and fried it like halloumi. It melted much faster than halloumi, but it was still delicious, adding much-needed texture and salt.

On Easter Day I had that splendid breakfast, including cake and a potato pancake or two, and I ate a magnificent dinner, including cake and trifle, but a minimum of roast potatoes. On Easter Monday I tried to keep bread and sugar to a minimum while otherwise scarfing what I was served. By evening my resolve had collapsed, and I ate the sugared wedding almonds. Next to dates stuffed with walnuts, I adore sugared wedding almonds.

Sugared wedding almonds are the official snack of marriage. They symbolize marriage because the sugar is sweet and the almond is wholesome but the almond skin is bitter. Sugared wedding almonds are a reminder that Marriage is Hard and has its bitter elements although, all-in-all, it is lovely and eventually your teeth fall out.

Actually, our teeth wouldn't fall out quite so much if our Elizabethan ancestors hadn't added sugar to our diet, but they did, so good-bye teeth. However, I believe you can preserve what teeth you have left by cutting out as much sugar as possible, plus visits to the dentist who beg you to floss.

Besides cutting out sugar and anything that swiftly turns to sugar in your blood--wheat flour, anything made from wheat flour, rice, alcohol, potatoes, oranges, dates (boo)--the Low Blood Sugar Diet discourages SNACKING. All my current diet gurus, including Toronto's Doctor "Obesity Code" Fung, hate snacking and love fasting between meals. Dr Fung also loves fasting between supper and lunch, which is not all that difficult, if you sit down to work with a big mug of coffee and forget all about eating until noon.

Some diet gurus think you should eat all your meals in eight hours, leaving your body 16 whole hours to recover. If you eat,brunch at 12 PM and finish supper at 8 PM, this is doable. When I finished eating my allotted 800 calories much before 8 PM, however, I went to bed feeling hungry.

It was possible to stick to 800 calories or thereabouts thanks to coffee, herbal tea, water and--especially--sparkling water. Sparking water is a profligate use of money--as drinking water is more-or-less free from the tap--but in our house it has replaced wine, which costs at least ten times as much. Because we derive a lot of water from our food, not eating food makes us dehydrated and headachey. Also, most of the recipes I tried in The Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook were delicious.

Underscore most. There were some failures, most notably the almond flour pancakes I tried to make on Pancake Tuesday. Woe. Then there was the lackluster Chicken Korma, so inferior to my usual korma, which could have been easily adapted to my stringent regime. However, the "Thai Red Curry" was a hit, as were the "Thai Fish Cakes" until B.A.'s gag reflex decided fish sauce (i.e. fermented anchovy juice) is a kind of vinegar.

The "Guilt-free spaghetti" recipes were so good that eventually I bought my own spiralizer for the courgette (zucchini) "noodles". You really can trick yourself into thinking you are eating pasta when you eat a bowlful of "courgetti" with sauce.

"Fast off, fast on" is the usual advice about losing weight, but I have been weighing myself every morning since I ended my eight week regime, and I am still 15 lbs lighter than when I started. This is 10 lbs heavier than my "fighting weight" when I was a 20-something boxer, but I'm not complaining as I am not a 20-something boxer anymore.

The Low Blood Sugar Diet is predicated upon "lifestyle change", and my lifestyle changes include:

- drinking over a litre of water every day

- eating a lot more veg and berries

- not snacking (except on coffee, tea and water) unless in a social situation

- keeping the simple carbs to a minimum (so only small helpings of the ever-fattening potatoes)

- counting ye olde calories

- continuing to use the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook

- avoiding sugar

Not snacking and avoiding sugar are difficult in social situations, as I reflected the day I was handed a piece of sugar-topped mazurek during a mid-afternoon visit. I took it with thanks and ate every delicious morsel. I don't think the odd lapse made to please a hostess is hurtful in the long run.

However, I am keeping the German and sugar-loving part of my ancestry in mind.  My father's Great-Aunt Tilly features hugely in family legend as, thanks to her addiction to soda pop, she weighed well over 300 lbs. I appreciate that my German ancestors and relations were good at making money, loved to cook and loved to eat, but some of them had a fatal tendency to run to fat. And, alas, none of my siblings are naturally twig-like in adult life, and we all have to fight against the inexorable creep of fatness.

By the way, I cannot emphasize enough how silly it is to think we will keel over and die if we do not eat 2000 calories a day. A woman my height and weight who sits at her job and takes only mild exercise should eat about 1500-1660 (and these 1500-1660 should be full of nutrients). Here is a handy calculator.  Oh, and this is where I should say I am not a medical doctor, am just stating my layman's opinion, and am no substitute for a proper medical adviser, etc.

Update: Another lifestyle change: daily weigh-in. I've heard that's important.

Celebrating Easter with Food

Well, here I am again, 16 lbs lighter than I was in mid-February. At least, I had lost 16 pounds by Holy Saturday. (One day the scales claimed I had lost a whopping 20 lbs, but it [they?] changed its [their?] mind the very next day.) The feasting began on Easter Sunday and it hasn't quite  stopped yet. I am avoiding Mr Scales until tomorrow morning when I go back to low-carb, no added sugar life.

As far as I am concerned, the Low Blood Sugar Diet--strictly followed according to the recipe book--works very well. What I liked best was that no gym membership or boring exercise regimen was necessary. The only overall change to my physical activity was carrying out Spring Cleaning---and, come to think of it, a lot of rubbish and recycling, since my husband is not yet physically fit enough to take them out himself.

The funny thing about living on 800 calories a day is that I thought about food quite often, watched even more cooking shows than usual and read several books about cuisine. I feel a bit ashamed of that; I am relatively sure that when monks and nuns fast, they don't spend that much time dreaming about food.

Be that as it may, I very much enjoyed planning, preparing and--at last--eating special Easter dishes. We had up to four overnight guests in the house, so all this food was as necessary as it was enjoyable. Two of the guests were Polish, which gave me an excuse to make exotic stuff, not just solidly British fare.

The Home Cooking and Baking Menu

Good Friday: Hot Cross Buns

(It is traditional in the UK to bake hot cross buns on Good Friday.)

Easter Sunday Breakfast: Żurek (Polish sour soup with white kielbasa); coloured hard-boiled eggs; grilled white kielbasa with ćwikła (beetroot-horseradish sauce); potato pancakes; śledź w oleju (herring in oil, which I forgot to serve); chałka (braided egg bread); mazurek królewski (shortbread pastry with jams); baranek (cake shaped like a lamb--the centrepiece, not to be eaten yet); makowiec (poppy seed cake); coffee.

Easter Sunday Dinner (4:30 PM): prawn salad on baby gem lettuce; roast leg of lamb with butterbean-mint sauce, roast potatoes, gravy and peas; Easter Trifle; leftover makowiec, leftover mazurek; white wine; red wine; cava; pudding wine; Laura Secord chocolate Easter Egg; coffee.

Easter Monday Breakfast or Brunch : Random selection of bread, cheese, black pudding, bacon, fried banana, as half the household gets ready for a wedding, and the other half takes its time while waiting to go to just the wedding dinner/dance.

Easter Tuesday Brunch: Leftover żurek; black pudding; fried eggs; morning rolls with jam and/or butter; the baranek (eaten at last); coffee; tea.

Both my Polish Pretend Children and my Franco-Polish Pretend Son-in-Law were here, so Easter meals have been all very entertaining, with Polish Pretend Daughter insulting Polish Pretend Son at intervals by telling him that he is actually German.

Laetare, Ierusalem!

Hooray! It is Laetare Sunday--a Rose Sunday--and that means Lent is drawing to a close. At least, we are two-thirds of the way through, and tradition calls for a celebration. In days of yore Benedict Ambrose and I went to (or hosted) a dinner party featuring pink foods (like barszcz, ham and strawberry fool) and pink alcohol of varying quality. Since then we have become more abstemious and more prone to going to bed unsociably early, so today we had just had a late lunch at Edinburgh's Bar Napoli.

Another reason for celebration and thanksgiving: yesterday was Edinburgh's first warm day in weeks and weeks or months and months. B.A. and I carried folding chairs to the top of the Historical House's rather grand porch and basked in the sun. (I basked under my giant green straw hat.) The sky was as blue and cloudless as Our Lady's mantel, which was apt as yesterday was Lady Day.

But back to Bar Napoli, where B.A. and I shared a plate of calamari before B.A. tucked into a bowl of spaghetti carbonara and I chowed down on scallopini con limone. I also ordered a Big Glass of House Red, which was wild and crazy for me these days whereas B.A. made do with the bottle of sparkling mineral water. We were prepared to go without vegetables, but to our surprise, the waiter brought a side dish of green beans and cooked potato halves.

I was happy to see the green beans, but dubious about the potatoes as I have not eaten a potato since long before Ash Wednesday. However, I forked up an experimental piece of potato, and it was heavenly. Simply heavenly. We think it was roasted in garlic butter. Although we looked at the dessert menu, I decided that I would rather have another piece of buttery, garlicky potato instead.

Since it is Laetare Sunday and we may be frivolous, I shall reveal that I have lost 13 pounds since I weighed myself at my parents' house in Toronto circa February 15. I know this because I finally went out and bought a new bathroom scale, not only to how much weight I was losing, but to make sure B.A. wasn't losing too much. I am also--as you see--still alive after five weeks of eating approximately 800 calories a day--although I put this down to the fact that the most exercise I do is walk to the supermarket and back (2.4 miles, 1.2 miles with a knapsack full of groceries). Do not attempt this if you live in an agrarian society, work in a factory or find yourself in the gulag.

Five weeks of living on such a ridiculously low number of calories has its lessons. I should write them all up and sell them to a magazine. But here are some freebee observations:

1. When you have not eaten a potato or anything made of potatoes for five weeks (or more), a potato roasted in garlic butter is like CANDY. It is CANDY.

2. Real candy seems rather pointless and disgusting. The thought of a box of chocolates--even high-end ones like, say, Godiva--leaves me cold. THE most amazing sweetmeats in existence--as you can be sure I have told B.A.--are soft DATES stuffed with WALNUT HALVES. There was a day a week or two ago in which I went over ye olde 800 calorie limit because I kept filling the dates I bought for B.A. with walnut halves and then guiltily eating them.

When Easter comes, I hope B.A. painstakingly replaces the stones of dates with walnut halves, sticks the dates in ruffles, puts them in a fancy box and presents them to me as a gift. I recommend this also for our wedding anniversary, Christmas, my birthday and Valentine's Day. (He can reuse the fancy box.)

3. When on the Blood Sugar Diet, keep dates out of the house.

4. After a while, you do get used to the following:

a) eating breakfast very late
b) having only coffee for breakfast
c) never snacking
d) never eating bread, potatoes or rice or any prepared food
e) going for hours and hours without food

You never get used to eating only 800 calories a day, however.

5. The higher in cocoa dark chocolate is, the higher in calories it is. Cocoa fat is higher in calories than sugar. However, sugar is STILL worse for you than cocoa fat. Ponder the mystery and eat only one square at a sitting, preferably as part of your incomplete supper.

6.  There is absolutely nothing like eating when you are actually hungry, not to mention hungry and tired. When you eat lunch and feel like it has actually made a new woman out of you--that's a great feeling. Those Eastern Christians sure know what they're doing when they fast like it's 999.


Update: I have been reading up on dates. Apparently they are 60% fructrose or something ridiculous like that, so perhaps it would be a bad idea to eat more than one or two of my Date-Walnut Sweetmeats a day. Interestingly, they would be about 34 calories each; a square of 85% dark chocolate is about 52.

Food Without Nutrition: Are We Insane?

There's nothing like a carefully controlled 800 calorie a day diet to sharpen up your attitude towards nutrition. You want every calorie to count. Therefore, I am very glad I am using both the recipes from The Blood Sugar Diet Recipe Book and the menu plans in the back of the book.

By the way, yesterday I read a grieving mother's account of the slow death of her daughter from anorexia nervosa, so I feel guilty for writing about this. However, all around me Britons are dying a slow death from obesity, diabetes, etc. The crucial thing, for me, is when you get to your "target weight", you stop fasting and start eating for maintenance. Wondering "Oh hey, how low can I go?" and trying to find out is simply not allowed.

The first week of the BSD went pleasantly enough. Benedict Ambrose has graciously ceded his place in the kitchen to me, and I have enjoyed cooking up to three times a day as I follow the menu plans. The dishes really are tasty--and no, I am not being paid to advertise--and they solve the hunger problem for at least an hour each. There is no problem fulfilling the "Eat 5 a day" vegetable and fruit advice. Thank heavens for sparkling water and coffee.

On Saturday I prepared for a bride's "Hen Night" (shower/bachelorette) by eating the suggested breakfast (avocado and tomatoes) and then not eating lunch in order to partake of the Four O'Clock Tea goodies without guilt. This provided to be a mistake. I am not given to fainting, but I felt distinctly woozy when I emerged from the railway station, and a delay in my travels led directly to a café for a cappuccino. The smallest available jug of milk would have been more cost-effective, but I couldn't face the prospect of drinking a whole pint of milk in public on a cold day.

But the real challenge was facing the traditional tiers of the tea-room sandwich-scones-cakes offerings and realizing that very little of it had any nutritional value.  When it was not mostly sugar and white flour, it was mostly white flower and sugar. The tea-room did not stint on little cakes, but it definitely held back when it came to sandwich fillings. When I discretely pulled off the top pieces of bread, there wasn't much left. Interesting how British womanhood is conned into paying £17 for a pot of tea, half a bag of flour and a cup of sugar. Well, at least there is the cream.  I slathered the two mini-scones with cream sans jam and tucked in.

I also ate a pistachio-green macaroon, but it seemed innocent of any trace of pistachio. It tasted not of pistachio but of sugary death. The square of carrot cake was better, but after that I let well enough alone.

It was a nice hen party, incidentally, if quiet for a Saturday night Edinburgh Hen. I suggested we all run off last minute to Ibiza, but no-one fell in with this excellent plan. Instead most of us went to a cocktail bar, where I chose red wine from the list of sugars available. Half a glass left me overly loquacious on the subject of my diet and other shallow feminine topics. Another glass of red, drunk in the quieter precincts of The Scotsman hotel, left me in need of a taxi home. Socially, it was a very nice evening, but in terms of nutrition it was a wash-out.

Reflecting on this gave me a business idea: the nutritious tea. How viable this idea is, given that flour and sugar are much, much cheaper than vegetables, fruit, fish, cheese and meat, is a good question. However, it would be a nice option for high class hotels and for old-fashioned hostesses who invite friends around for tea. Meanwhile, as the UK has a "Dry January" to encourage everyone to stop drinking booze for at least a month, perhaps it should have a "Cakeless March" to get us all to  eschew the nutritionally empty, calorie-dense comestibles to which we are addicted. Incidentally, offices should ban homemade baked goods from employee lunchrooms. It's nice that British women love to share sweeties with their colleagues, but eventually someone will die from this, if they haven't already. (One also wonders if this is not generosity as much as an excuse to eat cake oneself or even an evil plan to make others as fat as one is oneself.)

Having a nutritional yet recognizably traditional tea would involve substitutions. Instead of sandwiches, one could have sandwich fillings tightly wrapped in lettuce. Scones are trickier, but I imagine something could be done with ground almonds or low-gluten flours. Jam is easily replaced by briefly cooked, mashed berries. The cakes and pastries could be replaced by strawberries dipped in chocolate, stuffed dates, nuts and clever cake-like concoctions made from eggs, nuts and dark chocolate or fruit.  And if this sounds ridiculous, what does that say about our sanity  that we would rather consume food with FEWER nutrients?

Come to think of it, I automatically put out bowls of crisps (potato chips) to go with cocktails everytime we have a dinner party. Why is it that, in English-speaking countries, so many of our party foods verge on the poisonous? Why Cheetos, not pistachios? Why cake, not exotic fruit with dark chocolate and whipped cream? Not to get all puritanical here--for I dearly love a good birthday cake--but what gives?

Eight Week Plan Side Effects

Starting spring cleaning without dish-washing gloves was a bad idea. The skin around my fingernails is red and sore, weep weep. This morning before I touch another dish or counter I will hie me away to Tesco to buy some Marigolds.

Meanwhile, I am surviving my 800 calorie a day diet. Besides falling asleep thinking about cake, the only symptoms are hunger, pimples and wanting to look at fashion magazines. Being well past adolescence, I don't get pimples. But, lo, there has been one on my forehead since Monday and now there is one on my nose. A quick check of the internet suggests a diet high in dairy, gluten, caffeine, alcohol and peanuts can lead to adult acne, but apart from Greek yogurt I haven't had much dairy and I certainly haven't had any gluten, alcohol or peanuts. Maybe it's the increase in coffee.

Poor B.A. came home last night exhausted and cranky and immediately began to rummage about for for a bag of crisps. Of course there were no crisps. I suggested he have an apple. 

"I need carbohydrates," he snarled. 

"Apples are high in carbohydrates," I observed. 

"I need something crunchy!"

Apples are also crunchy, but I saw I was on dangerous ground so I stopped everything I was doing and made dinner around B.A.  Not having found anything flat and crunchy, he was boiling a pot of white, glutenous pasta. He cheered up after dinner, which I understand is normal for good husbands who have just had a trying day. To paraphrase the co-dependent movement, never let your husband become too thirsty, hungry or tired. There was even a Picnic bar (a kind of British candy bar) in the cupboard when he asked plaintively if there was one, so the evening vastly improved. 

The maddening thing about B.A. is that he is thinner than ever, having stopped drinking wine. His family runs to thin, but then Scotsmen seem to be thin. Outside Toronto's Pearson Airport, I saw a short and fat young lady with a tall thin young man, and I pronounced, "They're Scottish." Sure enough, they queued up for the Glasgow flight. Whatever it is in the British air that contrives to make all women fat, it does not affect the as many men. 

Well, let's be honest. It's not the air; it's white wine and cake. 

Update: The National Health Service does not like Very Low Calorie Diets, by the way. I promise to end it on Holy Saturday. Also, I will be eating half a pączek on Thursday and very likely a scone with whipped cream on Saturday, followed by a glass of red wine.  (Hen party [i.e. bachelorette].) 

Too Sweet

An awful thing happened at my last dinner party. I tasted a forkful of my homemade raspberry bakewell tart, and it was too sweet. It was terribly sweet. I didn't enjoy it at all, and to my horror I realized what it has tasted like all these years to guests who don't eat much sugar. Okay, that's three people max, but still.

I have discovered the negative side effects of giving up sugar. When you give up eating sugar, you lose your tolerance for sugar. As sugary puddings (desserts) are an important part of British and Canadian food culture, this can be a problem. As for my raspberry bakewell tart, it was like being spurned forever by an old, trusted, highly amusing and lavishly generous friend. Boo.

Meanwhile, one of the negative side effects of giving up wheat is that you don't much enjoy eating bread. The last time I ate a piece of bread, I thought I could feel it biting holes in the lining of my stomach. This was probably a result of hypochondria more than of wheat; yesterday I ate half a Co-op " Stonebaked Roast Vegetable" pizza and I was fine. Possibly the solution--for a person not suffering from real life gluten intolerance (or full blown celiac disease)--is to eat small amounts of food containing wheat from time to time, so as to keep one's stomach in, as it were.

The upside to all this, besides fitting into my favourite blue Hobbs dress with a little room to spare, is that many other foods taste sweet. Carrots taste sweet.  85% dark chocolate tastes sweet. Blueberries taste sweet. Strawberries taste very sweet. Apples taste just a shade too sweet. I suppose all this is okay if you like your sweet eggless. It's not okay if you like a nice eggy, almondy, custardy pie filling, such as one finds atop my raspberry bakewell tart.

Presumably the solution is to cut the amount of sugar in my raspberry bakewell.  I wonder how little I can get away with, and if I can substitute Hemsley + Hemsley's beloved standby maple syrup for the sugar. H+H seem to sweeten all possible puddings with 2-3 Tbsp of maple syrup, on the grounds that (unlike cane sugar) it possesses some actual nutrients. However, I am unlikely to make a whole raspberry bakewell just for myself, so I will have to enlist family members to taste-test.

One great consolation is that it is strawberry season. I can eat vast bowls of strawberries (£2 a punnet) with yogurt while my husband and mother eat pineapple tarts from Marks & Spenser, and nobody envies anyone else.

Update: The family members I was thinking of say that my raspberry bakewell tart is perfect and that I am not allowed to subject them to my sugar-free diet. Actually, it's a low-sugar diet, but they know I know what they mean.

Bikinis and Badness

From the serious to the ridiculous. Yahoo News, which seems determined to lower the human IQ, today features a woman who did not feel "good enough" to wear a bikini but in a great act of self-esteem has decided to wear one anyway.

This interests me for three reasons. The first is that I tried on a bikini when I was 27 or so, as athletic as I am ever likely to be, and about 117 lbs.  I looked in the mirror and took off the bikini because, slim as I was, I looked all wrong for a bikini. Women in bikinis in photographs are all one colour, whereas some parts of me were white,  other parts were pink, and still others slightly freckled. Moreover, despite trying to feel all sophisticated about it, I was just not comfortable wearing what was really just glorified and expensive underwear in public.

The second reason is that goodness had been conflated in this woman's mind with looking a certain way when wearing the glorified and expensive underwear in public. I can understand doubting one's ability to please the human eye, but I simply cannot understand what  virtue has to do with voluntary near-nudity.

The third reason is that in our benighted culture, this is now held out as a human interest story and a woman overcoming great odds to-----have a great day out on the beach.

Here is a link to the article and the photo of the probably overweight heroine, with the advice that this is not suitable viewing for clerics and little brothers. I very much doubt the woman's appearance would be of any interest to anyone on the beaches of the Mediterranean where elderly ladies tanned inside with cigarettes and outside with sun wear such costumes all the time, heedless of the collops of skin hanging from their frames. That said, if she hadn't shaved her head, she might have attracted some interest from the men around, as men are rather less obsessed with thinness in women than are women.

Better than Candy

On the diet and exercise front, I am happy to report that, five weeks into my eight week diet, my favourite green silk dress (originally from Hobb's; I do love Hobb's) now fits.

The new goalpost is my powder blue early 1960s shift dress (Roderick Tweedie by Munrospun). I can already wear the matching coat.

Interestingly, B.A. has also lost weight and reports feeling better than he has all year. This provides more circumstantial evidence for the view that spouses influence each other's health, fitness, diet and therefore weight. B.A. may do most of the cooking, but I do most of the grocery shopping--and baking.

The Haymarket M & S as a Metaphor for the World

Simply food if you can see past the sugar

On Wednesday morning, I was still on a spiritual high from the Chartres Pilgrimage. My feet still ached, but I bounced out of bed, almost fell down, straightened up, and was at my local railway station in time for the 7:13 AM train and the 8 AM TLM.

Afterwards I retraced my steps to Haymarket station and popped into the  railway Marks and Spenser outlet so that I wouldn't have to go out again on my aching feet to buy groceries. I am, as regular readers know, on the Blood Sugar Diet, which means shopping carefully.

A railway M & S is small and naturally does not have the variety of foods of a big M & S food hall--which itself does not have the variety of a Tesco, Waitrose or Sainsbury's, come to think of it. It is a fast food joint of a supermarket, more of an upmarket convenience store. And although there are many more natural ingredients to be found than in your standard convenience store, and even healthy, calorie-controlled, 'superfood' salads for sale, it caters to the modern snacking habit. Suddenly I was struck by how many items for sale in Marks and Spenser are either composed of, or include, vast amounts of sugar--and if sugar isn't necessarily a poison, it certainly can be.

Row upon row, rack upon rack of delightfully packaged poison---so much poison and so ubiquitous that the shopper has to search carefully and read all labels so as to find a food that doesn't contain it. And suddenly I saw that the M & S was a microcosm of the world and all it has to offer--so much beautifully wrapped poison, so much work to screen it out and find the good stuff.

***

Once upon a time, there would not have been so much sugar on offer, or so visible, or so readily eaten. For one thing, before the 1980s, the British did not snack:  there was a strong cultural protocol around eating, which changed slightly from class to class, but always included a horror of spoiling your appetite for the next regularly scheduled  meal. There probably were no M & S's in railway stations, either.

High-fructose corn syrup became available only in the 1970s, and in the UK cane sugar was expensive and even, at times, unavailable. Thus, before the 1980s sugar-as-food was a rarity and a treat, generally confined to puddings, jams, and a lump in your tea, and it wasn't snuck into every prepared food, should you be eating prepared food. But today, of course, cake, chocolate and candy are staples of the British diet.

I don't care much for Emma Thompson's politics, but I was struck by her unpatriotic opinion that "Britain is a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island."  What made this clichéd self-hating British whine new was the mention of cake. Personally, I think Britain is delightful. It is not more misery-laden than, certainly, Toronto, and it isn't grey, it is green and gold and pink and blue and beautiful, and if it is as old as Arthur's Seat, it is also as young as the wee lambs gambolling on the hills. However, it certainly is cake-filled.

Does Britain appear so misery-laden and grey to Emma T because of the too-frequent cake? Yes, it rains a lot, but it is thanks to the rain that Britain is green, not grey. Too much greyness, of course, like too much sugar--and a culture of sin--leads to depression. I wonder if E.T. would have made such a gloomy denunciation of her homeland after a long weekend of hiking through the British countryside, far away from media, modernity and cake.

My feelings after a long tramp through a relatively small part of France--which included the sight of excited and curious little baby goats--is that the world, especially the European part of it, is an absolutely beautiful place, once you get away from the harmful things and the uglier aspects of modernity. (I'll say this for modernity: clean little hotel bathrooms with hot water, big towels and packets of soap.) There is so much nourishment to be found in European landscapes and cultures, as long as one stays away from the deceptively packaged sugar.

****
The Great Gifts of Our Otherwise Wicked Age to Human Happiness and Flourishing

1. Superior women's undergarments--so much better than before Vatican 2, not that Vatican 2 had anything to do with this, of course.

2. Clean indoor bathrooms with toilets, hot water, white towels, soap.

3. Relatively inexpensive hotel rooms with beds featuring clean white sheets, comfortable mattresses, locks on the door and no bugs.

4. Establishment of English as contemporary secular lingua franca. Controversial, but convenient for anglophones and an easier language to use than French, especially as anglophones don't mind what foreigners do to our native tongue. Mangle away, we don't care. (Naturally some of the most uplifting moments of the Chartres Pilgrimage was when 10,000 voices lifted together in our shared Christian Latin.)

Please add your own personal favourites to the list.

Native Talent vs Hard Work

Native Talent AND Hard Work

It is Polski Piątek, so let us complain about the unfairness of it all.

Why is it that some people are able to learn dozens of foreign languages while others try and fail to learn even one?

This is a very personal question for your scribe, as my whole family has a crack at languages now and again, some members succeeding more than others. When it comes to spoken languages, my sister-in-law wins the cake as she is completely fluent in French, English and her native Romance tongue. However, my sister Tertia is a French teacher who is also conversant in Spanish. My brother Nulli has been functional in French for his entire adult life. My mother reads massive German volumes while knitting. Benedict Ambrose has learned only a bit of high school Spanish (and Ecclesial Latin, of course), but he has the wonderful and annoying gift of mimicry, so his French, Italian and Polish accents are all better than mine, even though he usually doesn't have a clue what he is saying when he repeats--perfectly--what I am trying to say.  Like my brother Nulli, he has awesome listening powers.

My dad, who in his time has had to study a bunch of languages for academic purposes, e.g. Old Norse, is probably fluent in Anglo-Saxon, but he has spent his adult life pegging away, off and on, at his ancestral German. My Dad is my inspiration, for  he does not have an unusually gifted ear, like B.A. and Nulli, and he is not a German language whiz, like my mother. He is, like me, a Worker.

My mother might object that she is a Worker, too, but I would argue that she has a native facility for languages, and she can no longer expect a pat on the head for all the work she did in high school. I concede that she worked very hard in high school, but that was some years ago now, and I have never heard of anyone else taking up knitting in college so as having something to do with her hands while reading through the lengthy tomes of French and German classical literature.

I don't believe my mother has spent more than two consecutive weeks in a German-speaking country since 1965 and yet she can just whiz through German books, with occasional complaints about Bavarian dialect words. She had thoroughly wedged German in her brain by 1965, and not all that much of it seems to have fallen out.

I cannot say the same for me and French, which I was fed in school from the ages of 6 to 19, or for me and Italian, which I first studied between the ages of 15 and 18. The German I stuffed into my brain in 2006 has mostly disappeared, save for "kuehlshrank" (fridge), "fernseherraum" (TV room), a number of soccer terms and the all-important "Enschuldigung" (Pardon me, sorry).

Naturally I would like to know who or what is to blame, and I have come to the conclusion that the earliest culprit was childhood despair regarding the superiority of native talent. In short, I thought you either had it or you didn't, and there wasn't much point working if I didn't because I could only fail. (I'm looking at you, piano.) I suppose this was being rather like the chap with the one talent, who buried it in the ground. I have often felt that other people have been given the five talents, and I only have the one, but it now occurs to me that the chap with the one talent could have made even more talents than the one with five, had he been clever about his investments. To bad this did not occur to me thirty-five years ago.

Although I thought the author of Mezzofanti's Gift sounded like a right Charlie as he sat in an Italian library, not knowing any Italian, trying to find out if and why Cardinal Mezzofanti really knew so many languages, I found his book enthralling. Like him, I want to know the secrets of people who learn many languages. However, I got cross and almost gave up the book when he started looking at chopped up bits of German hyperpolyglot brain. If a few people are born with brains that can do languages and most others aren't, then that brings me right back to my childhood despair.  However, I kept reading, and it became clear that you can't tell from a hyperpolyglot's brain what it looked like BEFORE the hyperpolyglot learned all those languages. Learning anything, especially something as complicated as a language, creates new pathways in your brain. Scientists might scoff, but I could swear I could feel this happening when I dragged my eyes through Bernard Lonergans's Insight.

The book had a few useful tips right at the very end: chewing gum while studying, drinking coffee while or before studying, and using flashcards. The Mezzofanti's Gift author's big discovery about Mezzofanti is that he made stacks of paper flashcards. Even though Mezzofanti seems to have been the most supremely gifted hyperpolyglot ever recorded, he pushed his native talent beyond the limits of human achievement through a lot of  hard work.

In Polish class last night, the professor followed up on my request for listening training and played us monologues while we raced to fill  in the blanks in the transcript before us. It was really fun and really hard. The people best at this were a retired female half-Pole and a 30-something Frenchman. The person worst at this was a retired male Briton with a Polish wife. The rest of us fell somewhere in the middle, with the women doing better, I believe, than both male Britons, and I doing a bit worse than the women with Polish boyfriends/husbands.

Although I am not qualified to say, my guess is that the female half-Pole was so good at the test because she was in Poland last week, and so had been very recently speaking (and listening to) Polish in a Polish environment. (After a weekend in Kielce last October, my Polish listening skills were brilliant, if temporary.) As for the Frenchman, he has to operate in the foreign-to-him anglophone environment of Edinburgh day in and day out, so his listening skills get a workout every day.

Sugar Update: Speaking of brains, I think I have cracked the mystery of the fog that seemed to live in my brain from the ages of 12 to 26. Although clearly it had something to do with depression, now I don't think it was genetics, exactly. I think it was sugar. Almost no-one knew about the dangers of sugar back then, but we know now, so you may want to consider reading up if you are a parent.