A cold but beautifully
clear morning in the town of Loughton. Sitting in the Last Post,
formerly a post office – hence the wonderfully witty name – and
about to enjoy the benefits of a little Wetherspoons cuisine. The
fayre tends to be cheap and cheerful, but fits my needs of the
moment. I have but a few hours to go before setting off once more for
the joys of Heathrow Airport and the eleven and a half hour flight to
Guangzhou. As ever, there are a few odds and sods to sort out at the
last moment but, as ever, I am surprised with just how simple such
undertakings are in this day and age. Visa, insurance and tickets in
place, all that remains is the collection of a little cash, the
purchase of a couple of presents and suchlike, and….that's it!
Once more I set out with
the intent of learning Mandarin, once more I would guess the
resolution will last for just a few weeks, once more though I will
find that I am improving, even if progress feels disconcertingly slow
at times. In some areas in life, I can be quite an academic learner,
but with languages all that really seems to work for me is constant
exposure and a receptive mood. Chinese, in particular, seems a very
difficult language to learn if one approaches it via books or other
more conventional means. Day to day interaction, on the other hand,
seems to gradually coalesce into an almost unconsciously learned
ability. The language itself is something of a challenge as it is so
fundamentally different to any other language that Westerners would
be routinely exposed to. On the other hand, in many ways it has an
almost disarming simplicity as well. If one looks at a direct
translation of Chinese words, one is struck by the sheer sparsity of
the language; it seems to be cut down to the point that it reminds
one of the type of wording ubiquitously employed in the sending of
telegraph messages, or perhaps the modern equivalent, texting.
My relationship with China
and the Chinese remains ambiguous, so much so in fact that I scarcely
know whether I am looking forward to the journey or dreading certain
aspects. Certainly the levels of air pollution one routinely
experiences are no great attraction but, on the other hand, the
rather pleasant thought of enjoying the oh so much richer, and oh so
much healthier, food of China is very alluring. Having spent a month
in the UK, the thought of eating Chinese cuisine again rather than
what passes for food in this gastronomic wasteland is enough to start
the salivary glands happily doing what they do best at the prospect.
One wonders whatever
happened to the British in this regard. Other nations developed a
wonderful range of mouth-watering delights whilst the British
remained obsessed with such mundane fayre as fish and chips or pie
and mash or, pushing the envelope of culinary creativity to the outer
limits, sausage and mash. The only light in the darkness of the the
British food firmament seems to be provided by the importation of
foreign food, the almost ubiquitous Chinese, Indian, Greek or Turkish
restaurants that are found on almost every self-respecting High
Street in the UK. Even these oases of comestible indulgence are often
outnumbered by Americanised fast-food joints, the horrors of
McDonalds, Wimpys and, perish the thought, KFC (There was an almost
credible rumour doing the rounds that the latter had to change their
name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because there was not actually
sufficient chicken content in their 'chicken' to merit the name…).
As pointed out in a
previous blog, the damage done to the average Brit by succumbing to
the offerings of the purveyors of multinational fast-food are all too
self-evident. Indeed, another pleasant part of returning to China is
simply being amongst a people who seem both able to enjoy their food
(something of an obsession in China) and yet manage, for the most
part, to do it in far healthier ways that are currently the case in
the UK.
Time to finish up for
another week. At the conclusion of this week's offering I find myself
sitting on a rather hard wooden bench in the arrivals area (slightly
less crowded) of Heathrow terminal 4. As the flight desk is about to
open, and as my time is limited on this system, I fear I must bid a
hasty farewell for now and submit this particular offering sans the
usual editing and proof-reading. Apologies for any errors incurred by
submitting to this unseemly haste (not at all my usual habit!), but,
as the saying has it, needs must when the devil drives!
Today I find myself in a
wet and windy Exeter, enjoying the hospitality of the library in the
city centre which has been thoughtfully provided with a pleasant
little coffee shop in the vestibule. The castle backs on to the
grounds of a centuries old Norman castle which, in recent years, has
been thoughtfully landscaped to provide a very pleasing setting on a
warm summer's day. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, warm
summer's days are but a distant hope; the ground beneath one's feet
squelches to the tread and all is soggy and waterlogged, adding an
extra incentive to stay within the confines of the building and enjoy
the fayre on offer here.
Apart from a wide variety
of cakes and similar comestibles, the fayre seems reasonably fair in
this place, in contrast to most establishments I have visited since
returning to the UK. What passes for food in this benighted land is
normally high in fat, swimming in grease or comes pre-wrapped from a
factory, bearing little or no resemblance to anything natural or
organic. Quite often these packets come with pretty little labels
indexing all the various ingredients and percentages thereof and just
how much fat, carbohydrate and protein is contained therein. Little
or no food seems to come in its natural form, unprocessed or sans
addictive that add little to the nutritional value.
These days, such 'food' is
the standard fayre on offer in the UK; if one requires anything
beyond the range of these mundane offerings one is required to both
search far and wide and to pay out a proverbial arm and a leg. Most
don't bother, or simply cannot afford to bother, hence insuring an
unremittingly poor diet for themselves and their families.
For all my criticisms of
China, and there were many, the diet there is infinitely better (and
infinitely cheaper) than it is here. One comes across the odd rotund
person in China, but the norm, even into great age, is slim and
fit-looking people. The contrast with the UK could not be more stark,
and seems to become more and more obvious each time I return from
one of my sojourns.
The streets of Exeter seem
to be filled to bursting with the rotund, the generously-proportioned, the
wide-of-berth, the ample-figured, the big-boned, the plus-sized, the
hefty, the chubby, the plump, the obese and even, what we used to
call in previous, less politically correct times, the fat. They
wibble and wobble down the street, huffing and puffing, panting and
grunting; so much so in fact that one is concerned as to their very
survival whenever they are met with such severe challenges as an
incline, a few steps or a slightly more than normally substantial door..
A close friend of mine
insists that these people are their own worst enemies, that the
choices they make dictate the state of their bodies, that they really
should have the self-discipline to make appropriate food choices and
to take a little exercise occasionally. Personally, I feel that is a
tad unfair given the type of fayre that is normally on offer in the
supermarkets and hostelries of this land. There really isn't that
much choice, particularly if you live in straitened circumstances, as
so many do in what the Daily Mail insists is economically successful Britain.
Another good friend
espouses a type of conspiracy theory wherein the great mass (no pun
intended…) of people are fed rubbish in order to render them
suitable customers for the pharmaceutical industry as their health
inevitably deteriorates. Again, I would not fully subscribe to such
ideas, but one has to admit that the average UK citizen is usually imbibing
a copious cornucopia of tablets and other forms of medication by the time they reach the ripe old age of fifty. Huge sums do indeed seem to be made at both ends of this
equation, firstly in feeding people such poor food as to lead
inevitably to obesity, and secondly from the doomed attempts to deal
with the concomitant health problems such as cardiovascular disease,
high blood pressure and diabetes.
Many moons ago, back in the
nineties, I enjoyed an interesting, if somewhat challenging, trip to
India. As happens to so many who take on extended visits to that
land, I managed to contract a form of 'Dehli-belly' (appropriately
enough in Dehli) and came back from my travels some 10 kgs lighter
than when I left. The people of the sub-continent were, in those far
off days, more or less inevitably slim. A couple of months later, I
followed that trip with another to Florida, my first to the United
States. The contrast could not have been greater. On my first
morning, I came across my first mall and my first food section,
stuffed full of fast-food outlets. A few metres in front of me, bound
for the same outlets, was a woman of indeterminate age wearing,
perhaps unwisely, shorts and a singlet. She must have been at least
150 kgs, probably more. As I observed her ponderous advance towards
her fervently desired destination I found myself trying to work out
within which folds, of a very high number of folds in her ample legs, her knees were contained. The image reminded me oddly of the
Michelin Man in those wonderfully antediluvian French posters.
At the time it was known
that the US was in the midst of an obesity crisis. Little did I
realise that just a few years later many of those same fast-food
outlets would be littering the streets of the UK (and indeed, Europe
and the World) bringing with them the subsequent problems and
deleterious effects on the nations health, perhaps particularly on a
younger generation who have scarcely ever known anything better.
Back in the library café,
the rain is lashing hard against the windows as I finish this week's
offering. Currently in the West country, it tends to vary between
drizzle and violent downpour, so I await my chance to get merely
slowly soaked rather than drowned beneath a veritable inundation. In
the meantime I have treated my self to a second Americano but, in
view of the above, resisted the temptation to indulge in the various
cakes, muffins and sticky buns on offer ...
