So this week I’ve been thinking about health. Not a thrilling topic I know but it had never really dawned on me before how easy it is to take for granted something so fragile. These reflections are of course spawned from ill health, stomach cramps and crippling sugar highs and lows brought on by stress, sleep depravation and a diet based solely around the plastic packaged products of the aforementioned unnamed coffee establishment.
So my body is running down into a state of general disrepair with a flabby gut and sunken eyes and a snappy temperament, not something that has ever happened to me before. As I feel good health slip away from my grasp I realise just how precious that elusive state is. How many people I wonder live with health problems, however minor, and plod along in pain or discomfort. I’m one of those people who has always been able to eat anything, with little weight gain and absolutely no digestion problems, so this sudden junk food binge has caught me a little by surprise. I’ve started drawing up food schedules and buying rice cakes in a desperate bid to feel somewhat like myself again.
What I’ve discovered so far is that staying fit and healthy is an awful lot harder than you think. Finding the time to sleep more than six hours a night is hard enough in itself without also cooking a decent dinner, preparing tomorrow’s lunch and factoring in time to get up and have breakfast. I never knew that eating could be such a chore. I get home from work, take one look at my dingy rented-accommodation kitchen, see the teetering pile of crusty plates and the mouse droppings behind the microwave, and turn right around and march out to the chip shop. In the morning it’s even worse, I trade a bowl of cereal for a banana on the run and a croissant at work just to snatch ten extra minutes away from the bleak view of the city dawn.
I don’t know how many of you have seen Cardiff at dawn; it’s not a pretty sight. This city though lovely on the surface seems to take a great deal of night-time maintenance. In Cathays the world is silent and still, the last of the student revellers having long since fallen unconscious and the roads are ruled by the seagulls, enormous, ferocious beasts that tear bin-bags to shreds. They stand atop cars watching you pass before taking flight, shrieking and squabbling over a half-eaten kebab.
In town the streets are alive, a few people make their early morning way to work, but mostly the place is full of council cleaners. People empty the bins and pick up the rubbish and scrape the chewing gum off the pavements and power hose away the sick, the urine and the excrement of the Friday night clubbers. An unseen, unknown army cleans up the city, washing away the drunken debauchery of the night before, like a parent tidying up behind an unruly child.
I digress. So basically I want there to be some kind of neighbourhood soup kitchen where all of us overworked waifs and strays can sit down together and eat casserole and feel like we’ve gone home to our parent’s house and had a home cooked meal. I want a haven for each and every person trying to defrost a one person-sized portion of chicken tikka masala, all those peeling back the plastic on a single-serving ready made lasagne. At the risk of sounding like Jamie Oliver I just wish there was a way we could all club together, all of us trying to cook a meal for one when we’re tired and grouchy and poor. If we could all take it in turns and cook for everyone on our street say once every few weeks I think life could be so much easier. This is a plan I intend to introduce in my utopian state, cleverly uniting my aim to get everyone eating healthily and to eradicate the majority of social problems by making people sit down together at dinner time (although this is an entirely separate rant for another time).
In the mean time I shall have to continue spending my already sparse free time getting my housemate to show me how to make veg-rich, low fat soup while trying to serve customers at work without looking at the fat-jammed goodies laid out before me. Either that or cave into waning energy levels and persistent nausea. It is strange I think that signs of prosperity can have changed so. Only a century ago it was obesity that marked out the wealthy, now weight gain is the mark of the malnourished poor and the rich eat wheat-germ smoothies and oily-fish salads. How are we failing so dramatically to divide up the food produced in the world? The majority starve, most get by on processed rubbish and only a few manage to eat well. Are poison or starvation really the only choices?
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