Shadowplay

I got back from China in the early hours of Monday morning, and jetlag stopped me doing a stroke of work until yesterday.  There's lot I could, and probably will, say about China, but the one thing I keep thinking about concerns food.

 The trip was an official one, involving high living in plush hotels (literally high - the 87th floor in the case of Shanghai's tallest hotel, and above the clouds on some days), limo to meetings, and three banquets a day.  After about three days of this I felt unable to ingest any more food.  I seemed to have been eating continuously, and to have taken no exercise whatsoever.  All the hotels had fabulous gyms and pools, but the schedule was so relentless it was almost impossible to go near a sports facility without forgoing sleep.

 This continued for the full two weeks plus of the trip.  So how come I have lost weight?  No, I'm not actually size zero, but all the Chinese women were.  Kate Moss would have been bullied for her chubbiness in the land of the healthy waif.

It set me thinking seriously.  I felt like I was eating too much.  I was never hungry.  It's an objective fact that I didn't exercise, not even normal walking about stuff.  Yet I've lost about half a stone.  Comparing my diet there to my normal diet is interesting (to me, at least.  And this is my space.)  Normal breakfast: toast, tea with milk.  Breakfast in China:  Plate of melon, pineapple, mango etc., bacon & eggs and/or dumplings, and/or smoked salmon or sushi; danish pastries, green tea.  Normal lunch: sarnie or similar.  Chinese lunch: vast banquet of all God's creatures, e.g. frog, donkey, goose innards, eel, plus all the usuals and loads of vegetables.  Normal dinner: pasta, chops & veg, you know the stuff.  Chinese dinner: see lunch.

The key difference, I've concluded, was a relative absence of bread, and few carbs generally (tiny bits of rice or noodles), and a total absence of dairy.

Most young Chinese women are as slim as supermodels without the odd, sinewy look that comes from starvation, fags and over-exercise.  So I reckon that we're all overweight in this country, and that if we ate healthy food we'd realise that slim is what human beings are intended to be by nature.  That said, I'm back on toast and pasta, so I don't suppose my slinky new look will last.  Pity.  The husband has developed an obsession with photographing me, when normally I doubt whether he notices I exist.

I'm cheap, I admit it.  About ten years ago I bought a De Longhi espresso machine for £15 from one of those shops that specialises in disposing of surplus catalogue stock.  It was OK.  We used it regularly, even after I broke the glass jug in which the coffee was dispensed (I replaced it with an enamelled tin mug).  But a few weeks ago the thing started to malfunction, producing lukewarm coffee.  It looked like time to replace it.

My husband has a snobbish dislike of cheap shops; indeed, I never told him where I'd bought the original coffee maker, nor what I'd paid for it, because he wouldn't have used it had he known.  He went out to a number of places, starting with John Lewis and ending in a specialist coffee equipment shop.  He bought a Gaggia.

Gaggias, like all Italian kitchen equipment, come with a manual which bears no relation to the kit with which it is supplied, and is presumably translated from the Korean by a defective piece of software.  The first coffee produced by the machine was in no way superior to the old De Longhi.  Ha ha!

Husband is not deterred.  The coffee was not fresh.  It should be kept in the freezer and freshly ground each time coffee is made.  Yeah.  He buys beans, puts them in the freezer, and starts again.

The second coffee is magnificent.  It is piping hot, with a lovely crema, and tastes just like something you'd get in a bar in Rome.

There's no moral. 

What is adult education for?  Last year I signed up for a Beginners Spanish course.  It was mildly amusing to sit around role-playing asking directions to the cathedral with an accounts manager whose closest stab at a Spanish accent was something close to Geordie, but I wasn't thinking about going back this year.  Nevertheless, last week I got a package through the post advertising all the fun new courses they plan to run this year.  And believe me, the variety is staggering.  Do people really sign up for this stuff?

One of these courses is called 'Writing for the Web - Blogging'.  This is the blurb in full: 'Are you interested in finding your niche on the Internet?  Designed for writers with little or no previous knowledge of web journalism (blogging), this course guides participants through the process of developing a viable online journal as a means of creative expression and personal/professional advancement.  Each session addresses a specific aspect of journal writing and web publishing, such as establishing a writer persona, developing and sustaining a topic or theme, and attracting a target audience.'  

Who would hand over hard cash and turn up for ten weeks for such 'tuition'?  On the other hand, I find myself strangely drawn to 'Deciphering Old Handwriting: Palaeography for Beginners', or even 'Dragonflies'. Plainly there's one born every minute.

The RSPCA has, apparently, taken into care a cat found with traces of cocaine in its system.  The cat, which recently gave birth to a small litter of kittens, was presumably self-medicating to deal with the pain.  Then again, the cat in question belonged to Pete Docherty, so it may well have been a lifestyle choice on the part of the feline felon.

 This story has been doing the rounds presumably because of the celebrity angle, but surely the bigger question is why is the RSPCA going around dope-testing pets?  Talk about the surveillance society.

When I was a student, I had a group of friends who lived in what would have been a very nice house in other circumstances.  Several people in the (all male) group did a lot of drugs, and also kept cats and gerbils.  The gerbils lived in the sofa, a  skip-salvaged flea-fest with holes strategically ripped in the upholstery to give free access to the  rodents (are gerbils rodents?).  The cats were fed on spratts, which were tossed liberally over the floor, but they never seemed interested in the food, probably because they were permanently stoned.

My point is this: in the good old days the state and quasi-official paramilitaries like the RSPCA took no interest in pet welfare or human substance abusers, with the result that the pets lived short, happy lives, and the human wastrels eventually grew up to become civil servants, bankers and IT consultants. 

On the same page as the story about little baby @ (see below for details) was a tale about Scamp, the dog of death.  Scamp's story left me strangely unmoved, despite the fact that Scamp's picture revealed a suspiciously cute mutt as though he'd been cast for the role by the Disney Corporation.

Scamp was employed by a nursing home for elderly people in the USA, and had developed the uncanny ability to snuggle down affectionately next to whichever resident was about to die next.  Initially I thought my lack of interest in the story was because only about a month ago there was an almost identical story from the USA about a cat called Oscar.  However, on further reflection I concluded that it wasn't the copycat nature of Scamp's story that didn't ring true.  After all, there are wannabes everywhere, and why shouldn't Scamp crave a taste of  Oscar's celebrity lifestyle?  No, the problem was in the contrast between Oscar and Scamp.

Attractive puppy comforts the dying?  Yet another boring old tale of 'man's best friend' trying desperately to ingratiate itself.  But Oscar the cat is something else.  At the very least, the fact that patients died within 4 hours of Oscar ministrations (staff would call the relatives when Oscar chose his victim), suggests that this cat was having a laugh.  At worst one suspects that Oscar may have had a deliberate hand (paw?) in the patient's demise.

Hence, the Oscar story is interesting, because it is potentially macabre.  The Scamp story is dull because it's yet another Lassie Revisited yawn.

Baby @ on the other hand?  I still want to know more....