A friend has just sent me details of The Plant Paradox, a book about supposedly good plants that actually contain lots of lectins, a chemical which protects the plant but isn’t necessarily good for humans…..apparently. As I have just been banned from consuming dairy, sugar, processed food, carbs, alcohol and anything else that could qualify as vaguely interesting and tasty, this comes as extremely bad news. Having been assaulting fruit and vegetables with a voraciousness normally reserved for chocolate in a bid for better health and reduced girth this brings my speed march to (and over) Beachy Head ever closer. I’ve yet to delve into the pages of this depressing tome but apparently red peppers fall into the “could kill you one day” bracket. Red Peppers! Those deliciously sweet, harmless vegetables that taste good and add important colour to the plate. A small plus in favour of the unread manuscript is that it apparently comes down in favour of sheep’s and goat’s cheeses. The bonnie ba-baas of Sussex are producing some quite delicious fromage, which I have been forced to abandon under the new regime. Could I yet be allowed to return to the Barley Sugar cheese counter?
It brings to mind the whole question of experts. For every expert, be they scientific, financial or economic, that tells you one thing, you can invariably find another who will swear by the polar opposite. The whole Brexit debacle has been strewn with “experts”, who for the most part have been spectacularly wrong and we’ve now had months of medical and scientific experts offering all sorts of conflicting advice about the coronavirus, which the politicians have felt duty bound to slavishly follow. Take masks as an example. Despite the fact that they have long proved an effective way of preventing the spread of diseases in the Far East, we were assured that they were medically useless and we didn’t need to wear them. Now (volte face number ?) they have become an obligatory fashion item in the war against Covid 19.
Our Rotary Club Zoom lunch today was visited by the local MP who kindly gave of her time to speak to us and then answer questions. Well “answer” is probably being a little generous, unless a longwinded ramble around the subject and anything vaguely related, qualifies as an answer. What did get a lot of mentions though was “the science”. It’s become a political byword for obfuscation and lack of leadership. Let’s blame “the science” then if/when things go wrong we’ve always got something or someone else to blame. Her answer to a question about Schools was interesting. Apparently the biggest problem with getting our children back to their respective seats of learning has been that too many parents think it’s dangerous. This whole thing has become so distorted it’s almost laughable. Children are the least vulnerable to Covid of anyone in the whole population. Will our little darlings be prevented from returning to school for fear of catching a cold? Or nits? Statistically, boys and girls are at much greater risk of harm from playing sport than catching a nasty dose of Covid. I fear Social Media has a lot to answer for this, as well as our saintly media who insist on prefacing every mention of the virus with a horrifying adjective; “deadly”, “fatal”, “scary”, “terrifying” etc etc.
I fancy we’d be a whole lot better off if we switched off every electronic device we have and just sailed through life in blissful ignorance.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 