Looking Out To Sea

The BBC is doing its best to mock the requests made by the World Cancer Research Fund:

[The recommendations] include not gaining weight as an adult, avoiding sugary drinks and alcohol, and not eating bacon or ham. Everyone must also aim to be as thin as possible without becoming underweight.

The report of course has nothing to say about being as thin as possible. Instead, it’s the BBC who are taking this very unsubtle view of the BMI-cancer relationship. There is no ‘safety zone’ that exists between 18.5 and 25 on the BMI scale. It’s a gentle J-shaped curve which really is representative of a higher risk for people near the top end of the range than those near the bottom.

The recommendations are pretty comprehensive when you read the report [PDF] (the link the BBC provide was broken when I last looked). For all the major cancers there are breakdowns for effects of different food types, culled from the huge library of cancer research. The article here strips all this nuance and evidence and presents suggestions as commandments — I would even go so far as saying “deliberately”. These are also headlines on the BBC website at the moment:

• That’s enough: Are the latest cancer warnings asking too much of us?
• “These days, health advice changes from week to week,” London Lass

They cite the statistic that two thirds of all cancers are “not thought to be related to lifestyle” even though the more important message is the one third that can be affected by lifestyle changes.

I remember back in school, I took part in a school exchange with pen pals from a school in France. They came over to Scotland for some time, and we went back there a few months later.

When my pen pal visited us, I learned a lot of French. I’ve probably been more fluent at other times, but I’ve certainly never been more immersed in a foreign language. It was quite terrifying. I would talk to myself in French. I dreamed in French. I even counted in French. It was terrifying because I began to realise (a) how much I talked to myself and (b) how much of an obstruction not knowing the word for something can be, even when talking to myself.

The same thing is happening when I go to sign language classes. I leave class with my head spinning and have to refrain from gesticulating wildly at every passing person or thing. I can’t go past shop signs or street names without fingerspelling them or describing them, or at least thinking how I would describe them.

It was slightly easier when it was a Saturday morning class because by the end of the day I would normally have exhausted my signing fever and could sleep soundly. But last night it took me hours to nod off. It really was like a fever, where you toss and turn and the silliest things spin round your head for hours. And the lack of vocabulary would stall me all the time, as I rehearsed BSL phrases in my head. Then I would have to re-work what I wanted to say using the concepts I knew, and start again. It was infuriating and almost painful.

I’ve been doing BSL level 2 since the fourth of September. It’s not been as fun as previous courses, for a couple of reasons; though neither of them are because it’s harder coursework. For a start, it’s on a Tuesday evening instead of a Saturday morning, so we have to be ready to think and learn after a tiring day at work. Helen’s been finding it really difficult when coupled with her new job. Each lesson is also slightly shorter because it’s an evening session: 2 hours instead of 3, with a correspondingly shorter break too.

The class is also larger than before, with (to my mind, anyway) a much wider spread in abilities. It’s surprising what some people don’t know — or don’t remember — from their previous lessons. So there’s less cohesion than before; I had been hoping for a keener learning atmosphere, but instead it’s the opposite.

In a fortnight we have the first assessment for this course. It’s similar to what we’ve done before (a formal presentation about our jobs) but in more depth, and with more expected of us. I find it difficult to describe my work because there isn’t much that’s physical — physical things are easier to explain without sophisticated vocabulary. So I resort to the rather mundane description “find bugs, fix them”. I hope I’ll be able to expand on that.

Transferring stuff over from LiveJournal is a bit less hit, a bit more miss than anticipated. Most of the problems are caused by the fact that, while the LJ API offers all the tricks you’d expect for exporting blog posts, the web-based export tool supports very few of these features. You can’t save any of the comments for the posts. There is no “export all” function: everything has to be done a month at a time. Blech.

The good news is that Helen has agreed to do guest food blogging and, maybe, science blogging too. That will be cool beans. (And also probably fried beans, and maybe some kind of warming bean soup.)

I’m not really the cook in this household, though that doesn’t mean I don’t try. I’m just rather less sure of myself when it comes to ingredients, timekeeping, technique. I can follow a recipe but not in the same instinctive way that other people have.

One thing we’ve both been very sure of since moving in is making sure our food is good. In every sense of the word. We’re both still starting out in the world of work and we could easily be a bit slack in the evening and resort to pre-cooked pies and packets of supermarket sausage.

Instead we’ve been putting in the effort, and it’s been paying off too.

Good quality food sourced locally

The big step has been going to the farmers’ market on a pretty regular basis. We made the decision that it was better to buy one piece of good meat per week than buy factory-farmed rubbish on a regular basis. It costs more, of course, but we’re happy to reduce the amount of meat we buy in favour of the quality.

And buying more expensive meat means we actually have to make an effort with it, too. Like using leftovers to make stock (though we have a habit of forgetting about it until it boils dry). I’m trying to do more baking too. I’ve resolved to start making rolls more than once every six months, for example.

I think we’ll also try to limit ourselves to more seasonal produce in future. Some things (like tomatoes) we’ll buy all year because we can’t not have them. But if we can avoid buying stuff from New Zealand or somewhere in South America then we’ll do that.

Creative and interesting cooking

Having good recipes always helps (especially me, because I don’t have much in the way of kitchen-creativity). We have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, which I can highly recommend. I fall in that awkward spot in the middle, between vegetarian and care-free meat-eater. I love meat but I worry about the treatment of the animals that most people eat. I’ve been eating more vegetarian food when I go out lately because it’s not easy to tell where the meat comes from. This meat book is aimed at me.

Also, Nigella Lawson’s Feast is great too. How can anyone object to a whole chapter devoted to chocolate cakes?

The time has finally come to move away from LiveJournal. I don’t think the move will be as simple as all that, however. So I thought it best to explain why I’m going through the pain anyway.

The advantages of LiveJournal

So there will be a load of stuff that I’ll miss. In fact, so much that I’ll probably stick around there for a while. There are still a bunch of communities that I read fairly regularly, though I am not an active participant to any degree.

The biggest thing LJ has going for it is the friends page. Being able to subscribe to other people’s password-protected blogs in a really seamless way. So I’ll continue to lurk.

The shortcomings of LiveJournal

Of course, I am moving. And there are a whole bunch of reasons, not all of which will seem very meaningful. But I promise they all add together to make it feel worthwhile for me to escape.

Obviously, there’s the technological side. All those facilities that Six Apart have been dragging their feet over since they bought out LiveJournal? Well, they’re available to me now. Categories; pingbacks and trackbacks; proper spam filtering; and even getting to add javascript to pages.

And there’s a wee bit of aesthetics involved too. I can go mad with the themes and the style sheets! I can properly separate different parts of my blogging for those not interested in everything I do.

And there’s also a wee ethical consideration. Cos try as they might pretend to be a cutting-edge forward-thinking outside-the-box company, LiveJournal’s owners have demonstrated repeatedly that this is not the case. Instead, they’ve demonstrated that their morals are completely at odds with that image and with the majority of their users (and paying customers). I could have paid for a full account but I don’t want to give them any money. So I’ll leave instead.

I’m not gone yet

I’ll continue to get this place set up, piece by piece, and meanwhile the blogging I do on LiveJournal will reduce in volume. I don’t know when it’ll all be done, but I’ll let everyone who’s interested know in good time.