Healthiness and Socialism

Well. I really, really, really didn't expect this. We're at the end of Day 4 of the detox, and contrary to what every fibre of my being was telling me on Saturday morning, I'm actually quite enjoying this healthy eating lark. The meals have been small, but regular (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner), and generally quite tasty. Think steamed white fish (tilapia) with roasted sweet potato and red onion, or mixed rice (brown and wild) with kalamata olive pesto, or any number of brilliant soups.

I've also just been for a swim for the first time in months, and by god did it ever hurt. I pushed myself to do the full kilometre and am sitting here on the sofa feeling my shoulders turn slowly to stone - tomorrow might be a bit of a challenge, I reckon!

The weird thing, and possibly the most surprising thing, is that I've stopped craving things. Well, I've still got that ever-present background hankering for a kebab from our local place, but that's understandable. As long as I live I reckon there'll never be a time when I'm not secretly thinking of a kofte kebab from there. But on the whole I'm not missing anything except the odd glass of wine, and even that isn't that much of a problem.

Next week I think we'll roughly continue in a similar vein, although not quite as rigidly perhaps. Who knows, this might be a bit of a lifestyle change.

Which brings me to the book I'm reading: Orwell's England. I'd never paid much attention to Orwell, save for the obligatory reading of 1984 and Animal Farm, but I'm really warming to him. He's fairly disparaging of everyone in equal measure, but there's some fascinating insights into the English (note, not 'British') class system, written during the Second World War, when a quiet revolution was rumbling to its conclusion. His description of England is brilliant:

"England is not the jewelled isle of Shakepeare's much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relatives who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase"

We as a nation have definitely moved on, but I think some of the sentiment still holds true. Anyway, enough for today.