Buffy's Salon

The 4 Rules to Follow for Good Health

 
Be in Good Health

A recent Europe-wide study found that we can cut the risk of common and life-threatening illneses such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease by 78% by following just four key lifestyle rules.  Yes, they are common sense, so why are most of us failing to do some or all of them?

In order of importance they are:

1. Maintain a healthy weight: avoid obesity (I have always assumed that smoking does more damage over long periods than being overweight, but evidently not.)
   

2. Do not smoke

3. Take moderate exercise (three-and-a-half hours a week, a daily walk being ideal).  Note there is no mention of extreme cardiac exercise. 

4. Have a healthy diet (a little meat and a lot of vegetables and wholegrains).  I think this is the hardest to do in the Western world because it's just not the way we're conditioned to eat.

I wonder how much we would save in healthcare and drugs if we all followed these four simple rules?

A Woman's Place?

Woman's Place in War

Writing in the 1970s, the author Ruth Adams chronicled the changing role of women in the twentieth century.  Woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ''feminine''; and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.  Three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.

A Woman's Place 1910-75 

Reading this, is it any wonder why women today are confused about their role in life?  Bear in mind that the last 30-40 years since this was written have seen increasingly bizarre pressures placed on the female sex.  We could perhaps add, being unhealthily thin, modeling our lifestyle on vacuous celebrities, dressing like a sex object, being a career woman, "having it all", being a domestic goddess and owning every new gadget and several pieces of designer gear as a start.  One wonders if we will have found any kind of equilibrium in another 50 years.

Shakespeare, Dickens & Austen

A Record Universally Acknowledged

This weekend fans of Jane Austen have set the record for the most people dressed in Regency costume (since Regency times, presumably) when they paraded through Bath.  As part of the yearly Jane Austen festival walkers made their way from the Roman Baths to the Assembly Rooms.  Other events at the festival included dance workshops and talks about dressmaking.

Sadly the roof of Holy Trinity church in Stratford is in imminent danger of falling down on top of Shakespeare's grave!  People have worshiped here since the thirteenth century, including, of course, William Shakespeare who was also baptised here.

The recent and excellent adaptation of Little Dorrit won 7 awards at the Emmies, including best mini series.  It's great to see this kind of quality drama being appreciated.  Those people who bemoan yet another costume drama should perhaps reflect why we produce so little modern drama which is of the same intellectual and moral calibre.  Well done BBC!  Read my review of the series.

A Vision of Manhood?

 
Bad Boy

On a trip to London recently I had the misfortune to sit close to four young men who passed the time drinking beer (before noon), shouting and singing loudly, and talking incessantly about sex and girls they knew in the crudest and most disrespectful manner, to the point that one of them phoned their girlfriend and asked her to if she would sleep with one of his friends for £10.  I assume (well, I hope) this was a joke.  I also hope she told him to take a jump off the nearest cliff the next time she saw him.  But who knows, maybe girls find this sort of talk entertaining these days?

Nobody on the train made any comment to the boys about their behaviour, although we all exchanged exasperated looks.  There seems to be a general consensus that this is a "stage" most boys go through.  And yet, as individuals these boys acted in a very different fashion.  They said "please" and "thank you" to people, they took their rubbish with them off the train and one of them phoned his mother and told her he loved her.  So how come when you get them in a group they regress to an animal state?

In her book "Authentic Beauty" Leslie Ludy includes some sections on manhood by her husband.  This is what he writes:

"young men in my generation have been shaped by a warped pattern of manhood.  It's no wonder that men today are so often referred to as jerks - the foundation of their manly behaviour is self-serving and self-gratifying.

Being a man, I'm well acquainted with the perversion process.  You see, we as young men desire to be "normal".  Whatever our culture defines as normal behaviour can very quickly become our manly pursuit.  I was told somewhere in my junior-high years that having sex on the brain was a normal boyhood-to-manhood issue.  I was told, even by women, that I, as a man, had only one thing on my mind...a fixation with the female body.  Well, if we as young men are interested in being normal, just hazard a guess as to what we are going to think about."

And the solution?

Men need someone to believe in them.  They need someone to tell them that they can rise above this mediocrity.  They need someone to tell them that they can have a lot more than "one thing" on their minds.  They need someone to raise the expectations of their manhood. 

Sunday Trading

 

Sunday, 1884

The BBC recently published an article remembering the ruling that deregulated Sunday trading in Britain 15 years ago.  Sundays have never been the same in this country.

I wrote some time ago about how Sundays have changed from a day of rest (even for the non religious) to just another day to work hard, shop hard and generally fail to relax, spend time with the family and ponder spiritual matters.  The article reports:

Sunday was a very symbolic day. It was a religious day and even for those people who are not religious it was a family day, a home day. So the idea of going out to the shops on this home day was genuinely shocking to people.  The act helped to develop a new shopping culture and a new leisure pursuit ... but at a cost. Going to the shops became an event, even if you didn't buy anything, because you'd go and you'd walk around and have coffee. The shopping mall as a new city centre was very much accelerated by the law.  But the shopping boom that followed is now coming back to haunt the country in recession.

From a personal point of view I must admit that I sometimes pop over to the corner shop on Sunday if I have run out of something basic.  Not the same thing as browsing through the shopping mall for hours, perhaps?  The argument in favour of deregulation was that we must have freedom of choice of whether we work on a Sunday.  However, the reality is that for many people there is no choice, only compulsion.

The law of competition means that if other shops are open on Sunday then you have to open too, especially if you are now part of a society that does a huge percentage of its luxury shopping on a Sunday as a key leisure pursuit.  Consequently thousands of people now have to work on a Sunday who didn't before.

Two arguments cited in favour of shopping on a Sunday within the article are that Sundays before deregulation were boring and that it is useful for working mothers to be able to shop on a Sunday.  To the first, I think this shows a deficiency in character that if you can't visit the shops you can't entertain yourself.  If you are not religious, how about reading a book, pursuing a hobby, having lunch with family or friends, taking a country walk etc.  And to say that a working mother needs to go shopping on Sunday only goes to underline that we created a society where there is no time for rest and relaxation.

Obviously it would be unfair and unrealistic to suggest nobody works on a Sunday.  However, I do wonder if this consumer runaway train we all seem to have boarded is really a worthy alternative to the time we could set aside to recharge our emotional, physical and spiritual batteries.

Chapter & Worse

 

The Ship of Fools is a Christian website which claims "Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith."

Recently they invited readers to nominate and then vote for the verses in the Bible that they found difficult to swallow.  They then published the top (or should that be bottom?) ten verses.  The results say as much about modern society as they do about the vagaries of the Bible.

The verse which was voted the worst in the whole Bible comes, perhaps surprisingly, not from the Old Testament but from 1 Timothy 2:12:

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." (1 Timothy 2:12)

As the Ship of Fools website explains:

St Paul did well to make the top place with his rules for church life in first-century Ephesus, beating genocide, infanticide, executions, dismemberment, human sacrifice (and donkeys) to get there. All the verses that were placed from fifth to second place resorted to violence to do so.

In second place, the Lord via the prophet Samuel instructs King Saul in ethnic cleansing:

"This is what the Lord Almighty says... 'Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'" (1 Samuel 15:3)

It seems like a rather disappointing elucidation of what the Lord did and didn't mean by, "Love your neighbour as yourself."

At number 3 is the only entry from the Hebrew Torah:

"Do not allow a sorceress to live." (Exodus 22:18)

This is not the only biblical death penalty, but it appears sorceresses elicit greater sympathy than blasphemers, rebellious sons, unfaithful fiancées and brides who fail to prove their virginity.

You can read about the remaining seven offenders at Chapter and Worse. 

The article ends:

It's an unedifying list, but we think the Bible can survive bringing these shadowy verses into the spotlight. It's not the all-or-nothing book that fundamentalists (atheist and Christian) say that we must either accept wholesale or burn. We need a view of the Bible that is nuanced enough to treasure its comforts and challenges, its classic stories and groundbreaking ethical wisdom, while facing the plain fact that some of it is unacceptable.

So what's your view?  Does the problem lie within the wrong-headedness of modern society, perhaps our lack of understanding of these verses or do we have to admit that there are a few "unacceptable" verses in the Bible?  Five hundred years ago one suspects this list would have looked different.  And in five hundred years time?

What are conkers?

 

I didn't realise this was a word peculiar to the British isles!

Conkers is both a game played by children and the item with which they play the game: namely a horse chestnut.  The conker is threaded on some string through a hole a responsible adult drills through the conker.   You play by letting the conker hang freely from the end of the string and then taking turns with someone else striking each other's conker until one of them breaks.  Ever time a conker breaks a rival one, its score (its racing form if you like) increases.  So a conker that has destroyed 10 others is a ten-er.

For obvious reasons conkers is traditionally played during the autumn months.  Serious players will collect horse chestnuts and save them for a year in order to harden them up, before bringing them out onto the playing field.

Horse chestnuts should not be confused with their cousins, sweet chestnuts which are very tasty and often used as a stuffing with the Christmas turkey or goose.