Two new sports...

Last month I was introduced to not one but two new spectator sports.

The first – rowing – is hardly a surprise in this town, but I initially dismissed it as little more than toffs in tubs. 

Yet anyone who braves 6am training in freezing water deserves respect.  And there’s no denying the strength and stamina needed to move a boat at pace – we had to sprint to glimpse our friend Hollie, star of the Lincoln College crew.

The speed is partly thanks to ultra-light boats – but these demand poise as well as power.  This much I know from experience: my only attempt at proper rowing was a few sessions on the Clyde.  And believe me, the Glaswegian water is quite an incentive to keep your balance.

But it’s the co-ordination which really impresses – when individuals work so tightly a team it is an stirring sight, and the synchronized movements of body and oar are undeniably graceful.  As with most of Oxford, there’s a strong incentive to conform – get the stroke a millisecond out or the angle a few degrees short and you risk wood in your face or a paddle in the water.

The second sport – ice hockey – was even more novel.  The nearest I’d come was a (field) hockey-playing friend, famous for his talented goalkeeping and for having the best student summer job of all: testing padding.  Is it entirely ethical to rate protective sports equipment by the wince volume of an impoverished student? 

The pads are also there on ice, along with helmets.  This time we followed Hollie’s Canadian boyfriend Tyler, who comes home battered and bruised each week despite the protection.  But all that padding makes punch-ups look a bit like handbags:  if you want to see fat boys fighting (and why would you?) then Oxford offers an irritatingly high infection of rugger-buggers despoiling parks and pubs alike.

What really made me laugh was that as soon as a player smashed an opponent into the boards they were instantly substituted – an infuriating lack of payback!  And what a lot of subs: 6 a side is tiring, but a lot easier with a squad of over a dozen… 

But there was plenty to admire.  Ice hockey is fast, sometimes furious, and at its best skillful and athletic.  Like 5-a-side football, control, passing and movement are all key, and when a player is sin-binned it is impressive how the attackers press their advantage through a ‘power play’. 

Some things were strange: handballs are allowed, refs dress as magpies, and it’s damn cold.  Others were irksome: the tiny puck is barely visible through the thick nets around the rink, and frequent stoppages are filled with dodgy rock music.  But overall it was great fun, despite an 11pm start:  a party atmosphere with as much action off the ice as on.

Both rowing and ice-hockey took place in bitter cold, at unsociable hours, and are probably more fun to do than to watch.  But these days, where else will you get such flashes of excitement, impressive teamwork and weekend entertainment for free?

Famous Belgians

Can you name 10 famous Belgians?

The best beer and chocolate in the world, what’s not to like?  I’ll always thank my friend Philippe for showing me to the ‘right’ way to drink Hoegaaden, and VSO colleagues Wim and Dom for bravely enduring jokes from friendly Dutch neighbours (I wrote a poem in their defense, but that’s for another day).

It’s not all good – King Leopold’s colonial legacy was worse than the Brits’, as I saw when volunteering in Rwanda.  And I didn’t appreciate my previous (involuntary) visit, when the hapless national carrier dropped me in Kigali not Nairobi (SABENA:  ‘such a bad experience never again’).

So how’s your list coming on? 

If you’re struggling, sports stars include not only multi-Tour de France-winner Eddy Merckx and Wimbledon champ Kim Clijsters, but also Jean-Marc Bosman, even if he’s famous for his ruling not his running.  I draw the line at unknown goalie Jean-Marie Pfaff, though such a silly name deserves fame.

I can’t mention le plat pays without Jacques Brel, and there’s a rich canvas of painters, from Breugel and Rubens through to Magritte.  Even screen goddess Audrey Hepburn counts as Belgian (real name Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston).

But surely top of everyone’s list must be the incomparable Hergé?

And the good news is that his timeless creation Tintin is now back with us, in a fabulous film, easily the most enjoyable I’ve seen this year. 

3d has transformed since the days of huge screens and bulky glasses, and the animators have a ball with soaring effects and clever set-pieces.  The 'motion-capture' is incredibly lifelike, but still has a likeable comic-book simplicity.

All the favourite characters are there, brought to life just as I imagined them as a boy.  The charmingly bumbling detectives Thompson and Thompson are consistently outsmarted in a tangental plot by a devilishly ingenious pickpocket.  Meanwhile the main action pits Smarmy evil Englishman Sakharine against Haddock, the jovial boozy Scot, aided by the intrepid Tintin and fearless Snowy, the true hero.

It’s everything you could wish for – lovable characters, inventive cinematography, bundles of action and archives of Hitchcock references for the filmbuffs.  Admittedly it has a flimsy plot, unnecessarily violence, and no female characters - this is glossy Spielberg not gritty Dardenne brothers.  But even the blatant engineering for a sequel can be forgiven, just because it's so damned enjoyable.

Get on down to your local fleapit right now – just as soon as you’ve finished your list.  Looking back I think have at least 9 – who did I miss out?

None so blind as those who will not see

Why can’t we just see when to give up, rather than blindly stumbling back for more?

I’ve just returned from Boots, after another humiliating failure to fit contact lenses.  I tried years ago, but was persuaded back given the apparent leap in ocular technology - and the fact that playing footy in bendy specs makes me look less like Beckham and more an accident waiting to happen.

But I’m a terrible pupil, and just can't get them to work.  At some level I think I don’t want them:  my failing sight handicaps my ball skills, but does that justify my eyes being jabbed by fingers, and foreign objects covering my cornea?

Yet I hate being a quitter – and this is the second such failure in a month, following my attempt at another kind of contact – trying to enjoy a massage.  How hard can that be?

A few years ago nobody would have foreseen we would now rely on daily disposables or a weekly spa.  Except me: not only have I shunned contacts, I’ve never enjoyed a relaxing massage either.  

It's hard to even get started.  I’m blind to subtle social signals, so spotting a suitable venue is a challenge, especially when I was in Cambodia.  How do you tell a spa dedicated to ancient oriental body art from the front-end of a brothel where a ‘happy ending’ is just the start? 

After an embarrassing first attempt, I persevered with a foolproof strategy:  I’d visit a posh place, on a main road, during the day, and with backup. 

On entering I locked eyes with the girl and stressed I wanted it “very gentle”.  Khmer style, like Thai, is seriously physical – fingers and toes bent back, arms and legs pummeled, they’ll even climb on your back to get extra leverage on your torso. 

But she turned a blind eye to my request, and the full torture regime was implemented as usual.

Worse still, others’ thought I was actually enjoying the experience:  Katja claims that from her perspective – on the next couch – my pleasure was clearly visible to her and all the masseuses!

Physically and emotionally scarred, it was nearly two years before I tried again.  The cunning plan this time was to be massaged by a blind man - genius!  No fear of misunderstandings, just a guarantee of a guy acutely in tune with his remaining senses. 

Not so!  This wasn’t seeing hands so much as fingers in ears – how else could he have so consistently ignored my screams for mercy?  Never again, I swore – that was it between me and massage. 

Until, that is, arriving back in the UK my great friend Pree announced she had qualified as a massage therapist, and to celebrate was offering ‘free’ sessions with just a contribution to a good cause.  My judgment clouded by the forces of charity and friendship, I headed to south London to give it one last try.

It was the best massage I’ve ever had! 

The atmosphere helped – a flat I know well, relaxing music, aromatic oils and a friend’s reassuring touch.  Pree obviously knows her stuff, worked hard, and was clearly delighted at the number of knots she removed from my lumpy trunk.

But the truth is, it’s still not for me.   Gentle rubbing is fine, tactile good, stroking great - but those aren’t massage.  You see, it’s about doing you good, not you feeling good.

So I’ve come to my senses.  I see my future sporting bendy specs and a knotted back - but mercifully free of the humiliation, manipulation and pain of either contact lenses or massage!

An Experience To Treasure

For the past two months I’ve been living in a single room in east Oxford.  It’s not an enviable experience, but it’s actually ok – we’ve squeezed a lot in – but however hard you try, there’s a limit. 

So for now my brother’s loft still hosts 17 boxes of my precious books.  Fingers crossed we’ll move to our own home round the corner soon, with shelves aplenty for storage and show.

So I sympathise with the university’s Bodleian Library.   They too have hoards of priceless, underappreciated manuscripts with too little space to keep, let alone exhibit them.  At least they have a firm date to move them to the adjacent Weston building, even if it’s not until 2015.

In the meantime the only treasures they can display are crammed into one room, with barely two score of texts on view.  What’s more, it’s dimly lit, and everything is a thick layer of glass away from sticky plebian fingers.  Not a promising start for an exhibition.

Oh, but what a top 40:  diminutive, dim and distant it may be, but I was blown away by the treasures of the Bodleian!

The tone is set from the start:  no less than an original first Folio of Shakespeare plays.  Next is a Guttenberg bible, one of the first books ever printed in the west, flanked by a mystical, ancient-Egyptian parchment.

Each was beautiful, even awe-inspiring.  But what I loved was that the library didn’t stop there, but instead offered some wonderful nuggets of extra information.

So, looking closely at the Shakespeare, you can still see the iron ring which was used to securely chain it to a rail.  This may imply that the library appreciated its value, but when a new edition came out it was discarded, and had to be bought back at huge expense.  Apparently they still keep a roll of names relating to the fundraising appeal – a list of those who refused to contribute!

Similarly, the bible marks a seminal moment in the history of printing, but for me the best part was noticing how the first letter of every sentence was picked out in red, making it not only beautiful but easier to read.  I actually preferred the ‘colophon’ next to it, hand-copied by an amateur scribe called Maria in 1476.  At first it looks old and impressive, but on close inspection it’s actually pleasingly imperfect, with inconsistent spaces between the letters and lines which start to slope down at the ends, just like my niece’s wobbly writing.

The Egyptian papyrus trumps others on age, but is also one of the most surprising subjects – not a worthy philosophical or religious tract, but rather an angry note from a petulant schoolboy complaining bitterly about being left behind while his father went off to Alexandria.  This is no literary masterpiece, just a timeless teenage tantrum, unofficially translated as “oh dad, it’s so unfair!”

This is what’s so great about this exhibition – the stuffy Oxford academics actually seem to have some humanity and even a sense of humour!

They even allow modern objects into their very limited space.  Early handwritten drafts from Jane Austin and Wilfred Owen may be monetarily less valuable, but are still priceless.

Again it’s the quirky details which catch the eye:  hearing Harold Macmillan’s speeches right at the time British colonies were gaining independence is intriguing – but it’s only by seeing the original typed drafts that you notice his timeless ‘winds of change’ phrase was actually a hurriedly scribbled afterthought.

And whilst it is laudable to include documents on suffragettes, the one which jumped out at me was a postcard from the seldom mentioned women’s anti-votes movement:  a primly-dressed lady with the simple message “No Votes For Women.  Thank You”.

Finally, I just love the first ever Penguin books.  The iconic design and borderline-autistic coded jackets are just my thing.  More importantly, the Bodleian, that bastion of dusty, rare manuscripts, makes the brave and unusual decision to include these colourful, populist books amongst its top treasures.

Perhaps this is the greatest success of all.  The curators of such a valuable collection could easily have settled on showing things worth a lot of money.  But to their immense credit they go further, seeing treasure as also something we do – to cherish what is valuable, influential, inspirational. 

Applying this enlightened approach to such an amazing collection - this truly is an experience to treasure.

Cheating birth or medical magic?

I'm charmed by the Scottish play, but always feel cheated by the witches’ prophesies.  Really - how does carrying a few branches as camouflage constitute a wood moving? 

Worse still is the reassurance that Macbeth should fear “none of woman born”, only for his rival Macduff to be exempted as he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”.  What a rubbish trick!

Nowadays mothers are cast as the cheats:  they’re ‘too posh to push’ so ask surgeons to magic an unnatural birth to keep them honeymoon fresh.

This is particularly controversial in the UK just now, with the latest guidelines (released at Halloween) suggesting caesarians are now so safe they should be offered to all women, not just those with complicated pregnancies.  Midwives are cursing in their covens!

Here I must declare an interest.  Since Katja started her spell as a student I live vicariously as a midwife.  My breakfasts are dominated by birthing options, dinner chat is of breast feeding, even nights out focus on female reproductive anatomy (though not in the same way as most boys on the town). 

But at the risk of being spellbound by my nature-loving sisters, I think there is something to be said in favour of the latest guidance.

My starting point (as with everything) is that pleasure is good, and pain bad. Birthing guru Sheila Kitzinger says a natural delivery should feel better than orgasm.  But the detailed illustrations in midwifery manuals make me wince:  that’s got to hurt!  Surely we must sympathise with any mum who chooses delivery by a quick, safe and relatively painless surgical procedure?

And shouldn't this be about choice?  For years the natural childbirth movement rightly pushed for informed decisions and the opportunity for a ‘normal' birth.  But if caesarians are now so safe and easy, why can’t women choose this - even if some midwives may prefer otherwise?

Not spooked by a four-fold increase in complications, risk of obesity and post-natal depression (as you reflect on the dreadful magnitude of your failure)?  Haunted by wind, allergy to sex, your legs falling off and baby turning into a frog?  Of course pregnant women are not all ill, and must not be beguiled into undue medicalisation.  But as Catherine Bennett notes in the Observer, we should be suspicious of some of the pressure by the natural birth lobby to scare women from dodging a proper labour.

What is a natural birth anyway?  It’s certainly not the sterility of a hospital labour ward or theatre.  But what’s so normal about a thermostatic birth pool, amplified whale music and gas, air, scissors, suction or a waiting ambulance? 

And isn’t science good?  You could argue - as does Cristina Odone in the Torygraph - that nature is flooding my friends in Cambodia just now, not to mention shaking Turkey and plaguing Africa with malaria.  Meanwhile, technology has moved us from quacks to labs, leaches to laparoscopes.  Even if science isn’t better, can’t it work together with nature for a greater good? 

After all, if natural birth is so great, why are we working so hard to reduce maternal mortality in developing countries, where there are so few caesarians?  Please tell me I didn’t waste the last two years!

I’m equally unconvinced that a UK caesarian rate of 25% is simply due to greedy, arrogant doctors tricking vulnerable mums.  This slur could equally (and just as unfairly) be hurled the other way - as by Odone who rants that “beyond their calculated use of mystifying jargon, the midwives' agenda is to keep themselves in business - no matter what the risk to the women in their care”.  This is so not my experience of caring, dedicated midwives or doctors.  Obstetricians are no more bewitching mums into the latest expensive trend than midwives are promoting natural birth just to cloak their own insecurities or to sell kits, birth classes or alternative potions.

Let’s be honest – it really comes down to money.  As a health manager, I have the thankless job of conjuring world-class health services from a Sunday league budget.  I hesitate to suggest home births are cheap, as they disperse skilled midwives and require back-up.  But whilst surgery has economies of scale and location, it also requires an expensive team, kit and drugs (just like any Premiership club).

Even if they cost more, caesarians may be worth it.  Perhaps Odone has a point when she complains that if this were a male operation it would have been freely available years ago.

But dismissal of midwives as “placenta-munching Gaia-worshipping thugs” is hysterical.  Whilst caesarians may become even more common, some women will always choose a ‘natural’ birth.  They will therefore need caring and highly skilled professionals to help them. Natural birth cannot be dismissed as stone-age medicine, and midwives - unlike witches - will not be relegated to the mists of time.

10 reasons why you should support Oldham Athletic

I know what you're thinking.

But this is a blog, so I had to limit it to just the top 10 reasons.

1.  Sing the blues.  Did you know that teams who play in blue (like Oldham) win more than reds?

2.  Be distinctive.  Don't be a boring Town, City or County, let alone United, when you can be the only Latics fan - who else has such a unique name?

3.  Support your local team.  A proper, real club.  Connect with your roots.  Remember, your team chooses you, not the other way round.

4. Feel special.  Nobody outside Lancashire supports Oldham, especially if you live miles away (like in Oxford... or Cambodia).  You're not excluded, you're exclusive!

5.  Find an Oasis.  If you're stuck in the south of England and really can't make home games, simply join Oldham Athletic Supportors In the South (yes it really exists:  http://www.oldhamathletic.co.uk/page/OASIS)

6.  Enjoy winning.  Not often, it's true - but that's why you truly savour a Latics victory.  If you follow the big bad Manchester monoliths you expect to win and hate to lose - where's the fun in that?

7.  Get a ticket!  No queues, no membership, just push the creaky turnstile and pick from banks of empty seats.  True banter included, truly awful pies extra.

8.  Savour an atmosphere.  Hear 6,000 Latics fanatics fill the ground (not ripples of polite applause drifting from 60,000 gentrified Gooners at the Emirates).  And laugh at away fans who actually paid to come to Oldham - and to the highest and most inhospitable ground in the country, where the away stand doesn't even have a roof!

9.  Keep the peace.  Appease your 'friends', who never feel threatened by League 1 nonentities (Division 3 in old money).  Even seasoned yobs will show pity when you declare your allegiance - it's like a Glaswegian supporting Partick.

10.  Watch the highlights.  To see overpaid Premiership primadonnas you must stay in on a Saturday night, or buy a rip-off box / dish / gadget.  Not so for the lower leagues - just click the iPlayer on t'interweb and you'll be singing the blues.  Here's to another famous Latics win on good old council telly!

Sculpture - what’s the point?

You may not think of Wakefield as an artistic Mecca, but just a few miles south towards Barnsley there are 500 acres of beautiful parkland dotted with a several sheep and a cracking range of sculptures.

Last week was half term, and there’s only so much swing-pushing this aging uncle can manage, so by the Monday we headed off to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  Our aim was complete exhaustion of kids and cultural stimulation for grown-ups.  It may have ended up the other way round, but at least there were great muffins in the café.

My brother and sister-in-law were fascinated by Jaume Plensa’s heads made of alphabet shapes, which are undeniably clever (though I’m not sure why).  Katja was taken with Anthony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’ installation, interestingly situated up a tree but otherwise rather like his other stuff (is that the point?). 

Mum admired Henry Moore’s ‘draped seated woman’ - though I doubt the model was quite as impressed with her huge body and square head.  Dad's favourite was the ‘deer shelter’, a wide concrete bunker with a large skylight so you lie and gaze upwards, whilst all kids love the Greyworld musical planks, which make different noises depending on where you jump (but are these really sculptures?).

We all found Magdalena Abakanowicz’s 10 seated figures rather disturbing, I think as she forgot to give them heads.  And I tried not to like the giant hare with a female bottom, though at some level I found it rather attractive.  I do unreservedly love Dennis Oppenheim’s plant-like installations of toilets and other furniture, which make you both laugh and think, surely the point of modern sculpture?  I just think they should be called ‘lavor-trees’...

All a long way from the old commemorative tradition of public art, which in Britain’s Victorian cities generally consists of forgotten imperial duffers on horseback.  

But even these may have hidden depths.  For example, have you heard that if the horse is rampant (both front legs in the air) the rider died in combat; one front leg up means he was wounded or died of war wounds; and if all four hooves are on the ground, the rider died outside battle?   Or of the distinction between such equestrian statuary – that is, those including a rider – and equine statues such as the huge ‘angel of the south’ White Horse planned for Ebbsfleet on the Eurostar line?   And at least the old generals now have competition in places like London’s Trafalgar Square.

Arriving back in Oxford I started to notice more and more public art.  Of course there’s plenty of great old sculpture here, such as gruesome college gargoyles and fabulous busts outside the Bodleian library.  But there’s also striking newer stuff too, from animal carvings cleverly integrated into wooden benches in Bury Knowle park, to the fun oversized Simpsons characters in the new Atomic Pizza restaurant on Cowley Road.

Most famous of all is the huge fiberglass shark crashing into a suburban house in Headington.  I’m not quite sure how the shark expresses “someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of anger and desperation”, nor how the owner Bill Heine links its meaning to CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.   But I still love it, and was delighted the council failed to have it removed.  For once I agree with the Times, which described it as “delightful, innocent, fresh and amusing” – and had a justified dig at the council, noting these are “all qualities abhorred by such committees”.

The shark sent me on my own sculpture trail, reminding me of the fantastic pair of legs sticking out of the Duke of York’s cinema roof in Brighton, round the corner from where I lived for a while.  Not surprisingly, these turn out to be by the same sculptor, John Buckley.  

Interestingly, Buckley is a trustee of Mines Advisory Group.  Having just returned myself, I couldn’t agree more with his recent exhibition summary:  "I doubt anyone can go to Cambodia and come back the same".   For him this led to merging prosthetic limbs and landmine fragments to create powerful reminders of this ongoing tragedy.  

Whilst they are undoubtedly harrowing, they do give me a pleasing conclusion:  these works at least show that sculpture can be both attractive and have a powerful point.

Cast off your watch!

How can we free ourselves from anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, governments, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melancholy, pain, depression and waste?

The question was in a book that I randomly picked from the tiny shelf in my friend Tim’s reconditioned caravan.  But it was hardly chance that he happened to be reading Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Free – it was pretty much what brought him to live on the windswept Scottish island of Coll.

And what an appropriate read it was:  where else can you find chapters entitled ‘Stop moaning, be merry’ or ‘Reject career and all its empty promises’?  

Most pertinent of all was the section headed ‘Cast off your watch’.  How apt, in a place where nothing seemed to open. To be fair, the population is barely 200, so it’s lucky to have a post office, petrol pump, pub, general store and community centre.  I swear there were more post and phone boxes than people.  There’s even an organic food store, The Ethical Supply Company, more suited to Edinburgh’s leafy Collington than barren Coll of the western isles (locals call it TESCo!).

So for a few days I was liberated from the ‘expensive manacle’ of the watch.  We watched corncrakes at breakfast, took picnic lunches as we cycled between the 23 deserted beaches, and swam in the breathtakingly cold Atlantic before tea (we were at the same latitude as southern Alaska, and the gulf stream is a monstrous lie). 

At Totronald we wondered at the standing stones which had stood facing each other for thousands of years, fittingly called Na Sgeulachan (teller of tales).  The sunset over Breachacha castle was stunning:  in James Boswell’s account of his journey to the western isles he says Dr Johnson dismissed it as a ‘mere tradesman’s box’ - I beg to differ!

No watch, no mobile phone signal, and no telly or radio - it was like being back in my Cambodian village!  But even in Tim and Jane’s cosy caravan we were fed grandly and amply amused by dexterous dominos and spirited Scrabble (the curse of the traveler is he must always play by the local’s rules: is there really no such a word as ‘tonnages’?)

Nevertheless, after a few watchless days the novelty wore thin.  I enjoyed my trip to neighbouring Tiree, in particular the timeless ‘spotty’ houses where only the pointing is painted white, and the more modern trend to pick out the odd windowsill or gatepost in pillarbox red.  However it was rather marred by abundant ‘closed’ signs, the worst greeting me after a ten mile detour to the highly-rated and expertly-hidden Elephant’s End restaurant. 

I deeply admire Tim and Jane’s steadfastness.  And there’s much to be said for Tom Hodgkinson’s ideas.  But by the end of the week both me and my mate Nick were ready to leave, as much for our love of central heating as timepieces.

I have certainly had my assumptions challenged, but wasn’t quite convinced to cast off my watch for ever.  Perhaps I’ll be moved to action by the next chapter, the snappily-titled Self-important puritans must die!

Shall we say Grace?

The food arrives.  Mum loads us with spuds and steaming veggies, I slice the crusty bread, dad charges our glasses.  Now - let’s get stuck in.

Wait!  

I gently take Katja’s hand, and we clasp those of our neighbours.

Concern flashes across the hungry, tolerant faces of my parents.  Has his beautiful German girlfriend lured him into some kind of dodgy cult?

“Piep piep piep” we chant, “Wir haben uns alle lieb.  Wir wollen keinen Krieg.  Guten Appetit!”

Phew.  We all love each other, and we want no war - can’t say fairer than that.  We can all now tuck in; mum and dad are both nourished and relieved.

Saying grace before meals has gone out of fashion, in much the same way as church on Sundays or prayers at bedtime.  But whilst I’m happy with our modern, secular society, I still believe we can find value in traditional rituals. 

After all, the desire to give thanks for having enough food on our plates doesn’t have to be linked to religion - it is universal across all societies and throughout the ages. 

Whilst we are less religious, we also seem to have become less thankful.  We think a full plate is a right not a privilege.  Yet the parents who load my portions saw food rationing in their younger years - not just during the war, but well into the 1950s. 

In contrast, as a spoiled child I was sometimes allowed to choose my latest breakfast cereal fad.  When, after a day or two, I was distracted by the next packet’s coloured stickers or plastic toy, my father didn’t complain - but neither would he let ‘good’ food go to waste.  He’s probably still dutifully chomping through choco-animal-sugar-pop hoops.

But he’s the exception.  As a nation we are becoming ever more wasteful.  The Waste and Resources Action Programme revealed earlier this year that in Britain we throw away a staggering one fifth of the food we buy.  That’s 3,600,000 tonnes, costing over £10,000,000,000 (ten billion quid!) every year. 

Waste on this scale is truly shocking.  In a world where millions of people still don’t have enough food to eat, it’s unspeakably scandalous.

Perhaps we wouldn’t be so profligate if we took a moment to reflect on how lucky we are to have enough to eat?  The fact that I’ve been drawn out of my temporary blogging retirement is thanks to today being ‘blog action day’, calling on people across the world to write about food. 

So here’s my promise.  From now on, before I tuck into my meal, I will say grace.  I’ll use my own words, and don’t worry, I’ll not cause upset by speaking it aloud in a public place. 

“For what I am about to enjoy, may I be truly thankful”. 

That’s all.  Now we can get stuck in!