Supersize

A far person and a thin person engaging in some sort of competition. The title says it all really.

I was watching "Supersize vs Superskinny" the other day. This woman was a fan of pork pies and sausage rolls. So Dr. Christian thought it would be a great idea to get some unsightly bits of pig and dump them in a big bowl and say, "This is what goes into your pies." Fortunately for her, the woman reacted like he expected and doesn't eat nearly so many pies any more. However she missed a trick, she should have been like:

I just been watching Masterchef, yeah, and they are like always cooking pork belly and trotters and pig cheek. They serve it in all the best restaurants and whatnot and folks pay loads to get some trotters on their plate.

Some bits of pig in a bowl. It just takes a couple of hours and highly trained chef to turn this into a plate of food that costs £60. Notice I didn't say it is worth £60.

The thermostat must be broken cos they always seem to be wandering around the Channel 4 health-clinic in their underwear.

A train journey

The truth is, I thought it mattered - I thought that music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.

I think after all these years, I finally understand these words. (Obviously from the film "Brassed Off") I have been fantasizing about going to some awesome nightclub for a long time - since before I moved to a large city with an interesting nightlife. In the last few years it has started to dawn on me that such a nightclub does not exist. Not even in the most happening of cities.

This is completely down to changes in musical tastes. I could complain about how it was better in my day and try to hold on to how things were. That music was better back then. But, whatever, I don't need to do that. I barely scratched the surface of what was going on, even when it was my day.

So, tonight, I was sat on a train on my own, listening to music on my phone. Those friends that had bothered to turn up were on different trains going elsewhere. I realised that it isn't so much the music that is important, as the people you share it with. And of course, on this occasion I completely failed in both departments.

What I want is to hear some new music, music I don't know. And to let it take me wherever it will. And I want to share that experience. I guess this is the essence of the music I seek, but that no longer exists.

Mothering Sunday

It's a little bit after the event, but I have had to endure another once-religious event which has now been bastardised into yet another reason to encourage everybody to go out and spend money to keep the economy going. This time on the theme of motherhood.

Only it isn't. Or wasn't for a while. Instead it was all about going back to the church you attended as a child: your "mother church". It was an excuse for families to reunite if they had children that had moved to different parts of the country. You may notice that the date is tied in with lent and therefore Easter and so on and so forth. Over the centuries all that became forgotten and was replaced with remembering our mothers. Which is itself not too bad a thing.

What I really detest is being under so much pressure to buy cards and gifts and flowers and shit. If I choose to give something to my mother then that is up to me, and surely it means more if I remember of my own volition rather than being badgered into it by all the advertising. And it gets even worse than that, cos we seem to have to include every female in society somehow giving mother's day cards to grandmas and the like.

What with all this rushing around helping my kids scribble on key-rings or stick felt on pint glasses (what, you mean you didn't give your mother a decorated pint glass this year?) there wasn't actually much of a chance for me to remember my own mother. Which would have been nice.

Second Sleep

I saw a TV show a few days back about those unusual people who wake up in the middle night and do stuff for an hour or so then go back to bed; they have two sleeps each night. This isn't a new idea, quite the opposite it seems. But I feel just watching this show has affected my own sleeping patterns.

It wasn't even news to me, as a couple of weeks earlier I had watched a show about history - a rare thing indeed. This one was about the history of the bedroom, and in it I learnt that until quite recently people slept for a bit, then got up and did stuff, then had a second sleep. They obviously went to bed much earlier due to lack of light. And now people generally don't get nearly enough sleep as we insist on trying to run a 24-hour society.

Let's face it: history is rubbish. But when  Dr Lucy Worsley's cheeky smile and oddly coloured eyebrows appears on the TV there is a good chance I will put the remote down and keep watching. I might even learn something about history.

This all fits nicely with a factoid I have known for a long time: that we have two quanta of sleep at night, each lasting about four hours. Although we don't usually wake up in the middle of the night, we have two periods of deep sleep separated by a period of light sleep.

So, now I wake up at 4am and start thinking. Ah, it is that waking period between my two sleeps. It's perfectly natural for me to be awake now. I could maybe get up and read something or whatever. Hold on, it's 4am and I am wide awake - shit.

And before you know it I am too busy worrying about not sleeping to go to sleep.