Healthy, Hand Made and Solidary

I bought this sandwich, at La Cervecería in Barcelona Airport’s Terminal C. This building is dedicated, if that’s the right word, exclusively to processing Easyjet’s customers. Spending an hour in an abattoir would probably be less pleasant still, but it would at least be salutary. There is nothing to be gained in an hour spent in Terminal C at Barcelona Airport, other than a more realistically despondent appraisal of the prognosis for Homo sapiens than the one you subscribed to prior to entering the temple.

Of course I did not buy the sandwich with the intention of eating it. Notionally, it’s a ham and cheese sandwich but its ingredients included no fewer than sixteen – yes sixteen – E-numbers. The first ingredient listed, ‘pan blanco molde’ was at least accurate, assuming the words were written in GSCE-A* English. I’d been under the naïve misapprehension that E-numbers had been banned under the Geneva Convention (or do I mean the Treaty of Rome?) but, if so, La Cervecería is either oblivious to the legal situation vis-à-vis slow-acting poisons or indifferent.

What caught my eye, as I shuffled silently forward in a queue of bovine conspecifics, was the intriguing headline claim on the sandwich box: ‘100% healthy, hand made & solidary’. Of these three claims, the first is obviously a lie. Nothing with so many flavour-enhancers, fungal-inhibitors and sogginess-suckers incorporated into its being could be anything other than seriously injurious to your health if consumed. The second claim is plausible, though hardly a virtue. Given that I paid only two Euros for the sandwich, the labour component cannot have amounted to more than a Euro cent or so, implying that the unfortunate assembler probably cannot afford soap. The third claim is fascinating. What could it mean? That the sandwich is all alone and in desperate need of a friend? That, when not for sale at Barcelona Airport, it is on the picket lines with the dock-workers of Vladivostok? That, on account of the anti-deliquescent (E-666), it has not yet decomposed into its natural liquid state?

‘Cuina Justa’, the brand name, means ‘Fair Cuisine’ in Catalan, according to Google Translate. I think that must be a sophisticated, multi-layered joke but I don’t get. Would you eat this thing? Would you feed it to your children? Or your dog? If so, can I recommend you slip a prophylactic dose of Ritalin between the slices of pan blanco molde?

Before I leave the subject of this extraordinary sandwich alone, here is a gratuitously offensive image of the results of a dissection I conducted.

As a result of my investigations into La Cervecería’s sandwiches, I boarded my flight simultaneously hungry and somehow lacking an appetite. I felt that a packet of nuts and a plastic cup of red wine would probably fill this paradox-shaped hole. First we had to get through the rigmarole of safety demonstration, take-off, ascent to cruising altitude and rush to the toilets of returning stag party members. Allowing for the announcement that the toilets are no longer in service, rush to toilets of returning stag party members, descent and landing, this left about 20 minutes during which the cabin crew could sell us stuff. My nuts didn’t so much fill the hole as disappear over its event horizon but there was no opportunity to buy more (at about ten cents per nut) because the cheeky chappy, who’d earlier told us he was on board primarily for our safety, was busy flogging scratch cards to the returning stag party members, whose ability to calculate odds was evidently impaired.

Out of curiosity, who believes that the cabin crew on an Easyjet flight are primarily there for your safety? Even the plumpest beneficiary of the company’s positive discrimination policy could hardly provide sufficient cushioning between you and certain death in the event of a genuine emergency. In a similar vein, I cannot help wondering whether seat belts on aircraft have ever saved lives. Has anyone ever gone on daytime TV and tearfully thanked the late cabin crew for instructing her in seat belt fastening techniques prior to the catastrophic explosion that killed everyone else on board? In fairness, not everyone knows how to fasten a seat belt. I was once on a flight between Quito and Buenos Aires when the woman sitting next to me picked up the two ends of her seat belt and contemplated them in the manner of the ape eyeing a thighbone in Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2001. A Space Odyssey.’ She is hardly representative of the travelling public, however, and one wonders whether the time has not come to dispense with this pointless and embarrassing routine. Do the airlines’ lawyers really imagine that the inconsolable relatives of plane crash victims are going to sue (successfully) on the grounds that their incinerated loved-ones weren’t told how to fasten their seat belts?

The Road to Hell

Ghosts do not exist, of course, but if they did the road from Obrovac to Sveti Rok in Croatia would pullulate with the outraged spirits of dead young men. These days the A1 motorway plunges underneath the Velebit Mountains through a five kilometre tunnel above which Serbian separatists fighting for an independent Krajina, 'ethnically cleansed' tens of thousands of Croats during the war of Croatian Independence. I have driven through this tunnel many times and often wanted to leave the motorway and explore the surrounding hills but have never previously found the time to do so.

I finally had the opportunity last week to drive the brilliantly engineered but now redundant road over the pass by Mount Alan. The landscape is ravishingly lovely. The brilliant white limestone has been sculpted by aeons of rainfall into spectacular, rounded forms that seem almost organic. On the seaward side of the Velebit range Juniper and Hornbeam have been topiarised by the incessant wind into rock-hugging blankets that obscure all sharp edges and accentuate the spine-tingling sense that the entire mountain is alive.

I drove the road from south to north and immediately encountered signs indicating that the land is still littered with landmines, fifteen years after the end of the fighting in this part of Croatia.

 

Further along the road frequent memorials appeared, dedicated to the men who died here trying to kill similar young men on the other side. It is really impossible for an outsider like me to understand what drove the politicians who sent so many ignorant, innocent soldiers and civilians to their deaths, in the name of an independent Croatia or Krajina. Nationalism is surely a deadlier virus than any of the other plagues to which our biology make us vulnerable. It has proven over the centuries unbelievably easy for charismatic leaders to unite a people against a manufactured foe of 'others', in pursuit of the leader's ambitions. Here is one poignant shrine, nearly at the highest point on the road.

 

I saw only one other vehicle on the road, parked, with two men standing beside it gazing out at the view. They smiled at me as I passed. All the dwellings, bar one, had been destroyed.

 

Driving the few miles of this road took me a couple of hours. The juxtaposition of astonishing natural beauty and the sense that evil had been done here was mind-bending (for the avoidance of doubt, I don't intend the word 'sense' to be understood in a supernatural sense, but I've never been anywhere else where the intuition that truly awful acts had been committed was so tangible).

Clinically tested*

On an Easyjet flight it is impossible to ignore the back of the headrest in front of you because it is approximately six inches closer to your face than the length of an average human male’s femur. Most people think that Easyjet only does short haul because the economics of low fare airlines don’t work over four hours but in fact it’s a neat way of ensuring that most of the deaths from deep vein thrombosis occur when the passengers are in the terminal building and someone else’s problem.

There are few things that cause the cock of an MBA student to twitch more reliably than a captive audience, which I assume explains the fact that, obscuring the vomit stains on the back of every Easyjet seat there is an advertisement. Did you know that the soft drinks sold on board are now available in larger cans? You do now. Larger than what? is the obvious question but the seat back is silent on this subject. In fact I had to consult the seat back in front of my neighbour, half the length of an average human male’s humerus to my right, to glean this intelligence on soft drinks. My own advertisement was for a gel that allegedly* causes eyelashes to grow by up to 2.5mm. Putting to one side the question why anyone with an intellect superior to a camel’s would want to encourage such growth, I read the small print. The clinical test involved 12 (sic) volunteers (sic), monitored for 28 (sic) days and this is apparently enough to satisfy the advertising standards (sic) agency that it has fulfilled its duty to protect the great British public from itself. What would we do without it? I was tempted to buy a pot of this gel, if only to determine whether its application would encourage the elongation of nipple and anal hair too but the logistical difficulties of conducting a clinical test* seemed insurmountable, so I didn’t.

Anyway, the advertisement got me thinking, another victory for the law of unintended consequences. On my short journey from Gatwick to Kingsdown, how many instances of the moronic speaking to the lobotomised could I count, without going out of my way? Here is my short but, I think, revealing list.

On inserting my (valid) ticket into the ticket barrier I got, instead of an open barrier, the message ‘seek assistance’. Why? And from whom? In the absence of available assistants I hauled my three heavy bags to one side, ignoring the curses from behind me, and went in seek of help. The representative of ‘Great Western’ eyed me as though I were a criminal (which I am, but not WRT train tickets) and eventually opened the barrier next to the one in front of which I had placed my bags.

Sagging wearily into my seat I noticed that there was a leaflet in a pouch on the seat back, mercifully further in front of me than the length of my femur. ‘Please read this safety notice. It is intended to help you in the event of an emergency.’ It said. Just below this request, printed in bold, were the words ‘Do not remove’. If I were autistic I’d probably have committed suicide before reaching Swindon, having tried vainly to reconcile these mutually exclusive instructions but, in the event, I went to the buffet.

A large notice invited me to purchase one of the new ‘premium’ sandwiches. Unfortunately for those on a limited budget, there were no sub-prime sandwiches available, so I was forced to splash out on a premium BLT (same soggy bread, pig meat oozing pale, sticky fluid and limp lettuce, new higher price). I presume that the sign asserting that ‘All our sandwiches are made with specially selected ingredients’ was designed to reassure me and other potential sandwich buyers. ‘Ooh, look, they’ve selected the ingredients specially. Well, I think I’ll take six then.’

Arriving at Chippenham a genuinely nice bloke offered to help me carry my bags over the bridge to the exit. I’m sure that it says more about 21^st Century Homo sapiens than it does about me that this small act of kindness struck me at first as suspicious.

‘Lose 4kg in 28 days without going on a diet’. So read the front page of ‘Men’s Health’, a magazine devoted to, I presume, men’s health. If ever an asterisk were needed, this is surely the situation but there was no sign of *by running a marathon every day or * by committing suicide and allowing your corpse to decompose.

Here is a serious question. Is anyone reading this stupid enough to imagine that it is possible to lose weight without metabolising more calories than you consume? If you want to lose weight you can: eat less; exercise more or buy pills that cause your intestine to absorb less of the stuff you feed it. If you adopt the latter option you’ll have to put up with shitting liquid fat every few hours, an undeniable fact that the advertisements probably don’t mention. If you’ve found another way to convert matter into hot air, I beg you to publish in Physical Reviews, not Men’s Health.

So here I am, back home, having either survived or surrendered to the bullshit in which we are all permanently submerged. I am not a fan of regulation (feel free to disagree) but here are some ideas that I think actually deserve an asterisk but which will never receive one.

The meek shall inherit the earth.*1

Smokers die younger*2

Investing for a new world*3

Homeopathy*4

1.     …after a few thousand years of purgatory.

2.     …but a lot happier than tambourine-players

3.     … is not clever.

4.     …there are better ways to waste your money

How many children is your car worth?

Dr Melanie Nichols, an epidemiologist working for the British Heart Foundation, has determined that 4,500 lives per year would be saved if the government changed its advice regarding the safe limit for alcohol consumption to a quarter of a glass of wine a day (that's about a mouthful). In this insightful front page spread, The Daily Mail claims that 'Cutting consumption could stem the epidemic of alcohol-related chronic diseases set to cause 210,000 deaths during the next 20 years.' 

No Shit? Cutting inhalation would undoubtedly reduce the number of cases of infectious diseases although, because everyone would be brain dead, there seems little point in recommending this as a policy, even for the Liberal Democrats (though one doesn't need a focus group to see the obvious political benefits for the party of fairness). The only relevant difference between suggesting that people stop inhaling and that they stop drinking alcohol is that anyone following the first set of advice would die whereas those adopting the latter would merely wish they were dead.


Melanie seems to have assumed that deferring (she said 'preventing' but let's assume she's not as stupid as she sounds) 4,500 deaths is a good so obvious that it requires no further analysis. If you think about it for just a second, however, you will immediately see that some lives are worth more than others. I seriously doubt you disagree with this. Imagine yourself in the philosopher's balloon. With you is a healthy child and an old man, with cancer. You have to chuck one of them out, or you'll all die, and you are bolted to the floor, so you can't sacrifice yourself. 


In fact, we all implicitly calculate the value of an average life every day. The question posed in the title of this blog asks you to consider how many kids you think it's OK to kill every year in exchange for the freedom and convenience associated with driving yourself where you want to go. If you answered 'none' you are either an idiot or a hypocrite because a world in which cars driven by amateurs roam the roads implies that some children will die. Come on. How many do you think is reasonable? Ten a year? Twenty a year? A hundred? If the speed limit in towns were reduced to 10mph, the number of child fatalities on the roads would fall dramatically - I dare you to disagree with that claim. So surely you support a 10mph speed limit in towns? No? Well then you are implying that a certain level of child mortality is an acceptable price to pay for your freedom to drive through towns at a speed that gets you where you're going reasonably quickly.


As it happens, I agree with you, sicko. There is an acceptable level of child mortality - a price worth paying for the freedom to drive. Likewise I'd argue that, given we all will die eventually, the question we should be asking ourselves is not how long we shall live but how well? To take my own case, I could extend my own life, perhaps by decades, if I stopped drinking alcohol. I might also enhance the life of my wife and children and others who love me. But my own life would be diminished, a lot.

Blighty

So I land at Heathrow after three fantastic days in Turkey. Extraordinary flora, delightful people, nice kebabs, Turkish Delight, an enlightened attitude to alcohol. Need I say more?

Joining the queue accessible only to those with a new passport containing a chip enabling iris-scanning cameras to do the job of customs officers, it immediately became apparent that the line of people waiting to enter the UK the old-fashioned way was about half as long and moving much faster. Many of the people ahead of me voted with their feet, ducking under the barrier and presenting their passports to an actual person but I was determined to test my theory that the new technology doesn't work. I was not disappointed. Two in front of me was sternly expelled from the queue for having a baby with him. 'What? Aren't babies human beings?' He loudly asked as he was marched away. One in front of me was a black man who made the mistake of wearing spectacles into the booth where your iris is scanned. A helpful lady told him to remove his glasses, which he meekly did, but it then became obvious that without glasses he was practically blind, so he started swaying around, trying to see his own image on the screen. Eventually the system rejected him and he was led away, muttering. I approached the booth, fairly confident, being childless, sighted, white, middle class and still closely resembling my recent mug shot. No deal. The computer detected an 'intruder alert', which turned out to be the small rucksack I had been carrying as hand luggage. So far I've used the new system four times and it has allowed me to enter the UK once.

On the Turkish Airlines flight home I had drunk a certain quantity of wine and, having been grudgingly readmitted to the land of my birth, I urgently needed a pee. Following the signs after arrivals I was directed out of the terminal building to a bog in a bus stop. Both the male and female toilets were out of order. Diverting all available resources to my sphincters, I made haste to the Heathrow Express ('Enjoy The Journey' said the advert in the terminal. Given that it costs about £1.20 per minute, in the highly unlikely event it's on time, that's a particularly stupid suggestion). I didn't have a ticket, so I approached the ticket desk and, not unreasonably I thought, asked to buy a ticket to Chippenham. 'Sorry', said the bloke with the air of someone who had heard this question before, 'I can only sell you a ticket into London.' 'So I have to queue again when I get to Paddington?' 'Yes.'

The 7pm train to Chippenham, the first one of the evening that doesn't require a mortgage to finance, was late leaving. It always is.

My question for Boris Johnson, David Cameron and other apologists for this shit-hole of a country is this: when visitors from the USA, elsewhere in Europe or from a developed country such as Singapore arrive to witness the Olympic Games, what are they going to think when they encounter the series of entirely routine inconveniences that we place prominently in the way of travelers at every port of entry? There can be few British subjects less patriotic than I am but even I feel genuinely embarrassed by the shoddy fashion in which we greet tourists and returning inmates.

Life in the Freezer

Some old friends and I have a long running competition to nominate candidates for the world's worst job award. I believe that my inaugural entry, on behalf of the guy employed to scrape human faeces through a slot in the rear wall of a brick shit house on the shores of Lake Volta in Ghana, is ahead by a nose. My friend S avers that the equivalent of the graduate trainee position at the Addis Ababa abbatoir is worse. This post requires incumbents to haul the skeletons and inedible - even in Ethiopia, where bits of an animal are prized in exact inverse proportion to their comestibility - offal of slaughtered beasts to the top of a vast mountain of rotting flesh and bone. I suppose that in the end there is little to choose between these and countless other extraordinary affronts to human dignity and I sometimes think that the people who complain about hard working Eastern European immigrants taking 'our' jobs and doing them well and cheerfully for the minimum wage should be sent to do a stint as a toilet scraper in Kete Krachi. What it would teach them I'm not sure, but I'm sure they'd learn.

The closest I have come to being in a position to nominate myself for this prestigious gong came this afternoon when I embarked on a task I had unwisely been putting off for several days, emptying the contents of a chest freezer into bin bags and dumping the dripping, reeking sacks into several wheelie bins, most of them belonging to my neighbours. When you defer a task of this nature for several days, during which time the freezer is unconnected to a power source, it becomes infinitely more painful than it would have been if tackled while only the most superficial layers had begun to putrefy.

I considered, I confess, softly closing the lid and tiptoeing away. But in the end I decided that being responsible for pebble dashing the entire street with lumps of putrid flesh following an explosion caused by methane build up in the freezer would render me even less popular in the village than I am currently. As I worked my way swiftly through the Pleistocene, disinterring the remains of what had been a hare, several rabbits, a pheasant and various other still extant animal taxa, I concluded prematurely that this was going to be easier than I'd thought. Beneath the geologically recent deposits however, stacked as neatly as strata in the Grand Canyon, were layer-upon-layer of tupperware boxes containing solids and liquids identifiable only by virtue of the fading labels on their lids. As I reached, gagging, into the noisome pre-Cambrian depths of the cabinet I swear I could hear David Attenborough murmuring 'and here, in the unlikely setting of a dimly-lit garage in Wiltshire, are the astonishingly well-preserved remains of creatures never before seen by human eyes. To capture them on film, our crew had to endure conditions as extreme as exist anywhere on the planet.'

The worst, of course, was to come, for I felt bizarrely obliged to empty and wash the boxes. This experience resulted in the discovery that a deep freeze, while slowing the rate of bacterial multiplication, does not halt it altogether. I can report that a container of my wife's mussel soup, which smelt as bracing as Grimsby harbour in the teeth of an onshore gale when it entered the sarcophagus in 2006, had become considerably more pungent by the time of its exhumation. As an aside, and for fear of reprisals, I should add that my wife has many talents, including great virtuosity in the kitchen department, but her recipe for mussel soup (scrape all the revolting bits of molluscan gastro-intestinal tract left at the bottom of of bowl of mussels after the good bits have been eaten, add water and a tin of tomatoes and blitz) is an abberation. Just as I was sluicing the last of the deliquescing freezer contents down the plughole, my daughter came into the kitchen to complain that the program she and her brother were watching on TV was a bit scary. Since the channel in question was CBeebies, where the scariest thing that ever happens is Iggle Piggle having a domestic with Upsy Daisy, I decided not to invite her to look into the sink.

When Elsje grows up, I hope she has the good sense never to buy a chest freezer, the only function of which is to defer the feelings of guilt that accompany throwing away vast quantities of perfectly edible food. Whoever dreamed up the idea of freezing the stuff for years (decades in our case), thereby pointlessly consuming yet more of the earth's finite resources, must have been an evil genius on a par with the inventor of the Vacu-Vin. As I discovered this afternoon, guilt can be deferred but it can't, in the end, be evaded.

I can make you rue the day you met me.

Have you ever bought a 'self help' book? Given the popularity of the genre, it is surely surprising that there isn't an obvious surplus of intellectually satisfied working mums bursting with energy at the end of another exhausting day; well-rounded children entirely undismayed by their parents' divorce; kitchen-table entrepreneurs who have turned their off-the-cuff dinner party idea into millions and 'new' men who are fabulous lovers, caring fathers and never, ever forget their wedding anniversary.

It would be interesting to see a graph correlating sales of self help books per capita and some index of well-being by country. In the absence of data one could remain silent or one could speculate. So here goes.  According to this authoritative source, the self improvement market in the USA is worth $9.6 billion per annum; 40,000 people work as 'life coaches' and in 2005 $693 million was spent by Americans on self help books. That's $2.2 per capita, including children. The USA in 2011 ranked 31st among nation states in this quality of life index. Glancing at the countries flanking the USA in the survey: Poland, Estonia, Croatia, Lithuania, Chile, I guess that the self help book market in these places, while quite possibly flourishing, has not yet gone viral. As I said, I have no data, I'm just saying.

Is it just me or does everyone agree that $9.6 billion would do more good spent on, say, hunting down and exterminating, like the vermin they are, practitioners of female genital mutilation? Or even just sending about $1.20 to every human being on the planet, including many to whom that would represent a day's wages or more. Put differently, $9.6 billion equates to about 1.5% of the US defence budget, which gets you about a dozen dead Arabs, at the current rate of exchange.

Help me out someone. Why does anyone buy these books? In the self-esteem stakes, I'm up there with the unlucky inhabitants of Zimbabwe and Somalia but I have never sunk so low as to think that Paul McKenna, or any other loathsome charlatan can make me rich or even save me from poverty.