Food for Thought

If there was a building in town that sold crack, crystal meth, heroin, cocaine and all that at reduced prices we’d be down there demonstrating outside the store(or in there buying).
Now just imagine that same store in a (roundabout) way being subsidized through our taxes.
Imagine that store being able to advertise their ‘wares’ to children and the rest of us through television radio and huge billboards, any thoughts?
Substitute all the drugs mentioned above with sugar ,fat and salt and you have your average food store.
Obesity is killing us softly and we let it happen, salt ,sugar and fat are the nice drugs ,the tasty drugs the legal drugs all washed down with a jerry can of colored sugar drink but they’ll kill you just the same, and their addiction rates are just as high as Heroin and Cocaine. That’s right folks, if you’re already obese you’re fucked, try as you may you are hooked- for life. For those of us that aren’t yet obese our time is a coming. Food manufacturers are after your money and as we speak they are looking at more and more ways to get more and more of us addicted to food.
Not obese? that’s just because they haven’t produced your drug of choice yet, but don’t worry your day will come. Food manufactures create almost twice the amount of food that we could possibly eat and they have hungry shareholders that feed on money (that’s why they call it ‘bread’) so they need to sell more of the shit they make to keep making profits ,so full or not you will be eating more in the near future.

Views from a harbour.

The grandfather, the appointed babysit to a slightly obese 12 year old granddaughter. He’s trying to get her to move, to walk up to the top of the hill, to run after a ball, frantic efforts doomed to fail. 

The girl is aware of her limitations ,such moves as suggested by granddad are already beyond her realm of  ability encased in the body passed to her by  nutritional failures of nurture, she feels no need for public exhibition. 

She continues to throw a stick into the water, her dog performs what he’s conditioned to do. Granddad sits on a bench trying to grasp the implications of generations, he used to play with his dog, his granddaughter watches the dog play. 

Doggy Paddle.

An almost identically clothed couple maneuver their  newly acquired canoe to the waters edge then push the trailer back to the car park where the four wheeled status symbol awaits, complete with dog, surprisingly small. The thought crosses my  mind that the dog should be called ‘Rover’ , Rover in a Rover. 

Doggy gets his custom made life jacket put on despite it’s obvious growling dislike, is this because it doesn’t feel right? or does the dog realize how sad it now looks? Back down to the beach and doggy’s water training can begin. The lady sits in the canoe, the man walks with the dog in and out of the water, or should I say dog gets dragged into the water and is then allowed to run out of the water. Multiple attempts to get doggy into the canoe fail miserably. After thirty minutes of  trying to adapt natural fear to fit their image of glossy magazine perfection the couple give up. Rover goes back to the back seat of Rover, trailer gets pulled back, canoe gets put on trailer, then Rover takes the couple and Rover back to a pub for lunch. Maybe a child would have been easier after all. A fisherman looks on, puzzled, as he scratches his ass.

Bores on tour.

‘Middle English’ is the preferred language here in this Pembrokeshire village, no Welsh or regional dialects.The neutral ‘middle english ‘ of the class that comes from anywhere and belongs nowhere.Suffocated in the boredom of possession competition, credit card struggles and mortgage madness they come. For two weeks of cottage inflicted relaxation, then it’s back, back to the the front line of the battle to belong, to be accepted for what they are not, and don’t really want to be. 

Mum and Dad.

The silence of this idyllic haven is broken by the arrival of the family that knows what fun is,their moment has come, Mum and Dad have the day off, no work today. Dad has invested in a fishing line for himself and nets on sticks for the four kids, he wholeheartedly becomes the clumsy fisherman, walking up and down the Harbour wall with his magical rod in hand. Local, more experienced fishermen, advise him to sit in one place and use actual bait on his shiny hook. Dad reflects at the boredom on the fishermens faces, he has no time to waste now ,this is ‘the day out’, so he gets back to entertaining the kids, who have in the meantime caught more crabs in their nets than Dad would ever catch in fish.

Mum unpacks the sandwiches and drinks made early in the morning while Dad packed the car. After the lunch of best sandwiches ever, fizzy drinks and crisps Dad gets his sand burial he’d promised in the car, Mum gets to rest ,castles are built the tide goes out. Years later the children remember this day and in conversation ask themselves if it was a day? or was it all summer?

whatever it was, it became the mirror of their youth.

Walk like a monk.

Having a bit of a “should I stay or should I go” moment in my stand-up comedy career I decided a walking holiday would be just the treat, clear the head, read, walk, think and catch up with some sleep (Stand-up comedy is a great sleep deprivation technique).

Wales! The Pemprokeshire coast to be more exact, the village  (tho’ they call it a town) of St Davids to be even more exact. We rented a cottage a few miles out of ‘town’ on a pretty busy road,we only noticed the traffic after a week, before that we were still getting over the ‘real traffic’ back home. By saying a busy road I mean Fridays and Saturdays when tourists like ourselves are coming and going. The rest of the time it’s a one car every five minutes sort of busy. 

I took a risk hoping the weather would be kind, Welsh kind, meaning only the occasional storm and maybe further just drizzle mixed with coastal mist. How wrong could I be! I came with anoraks waterproof leg gear, headgear and walking gear, the temperatures soared to about 30° C turning the coast into a sort of ‘Costa Dai Cymru’. 

So the walks turned out more strenuous than I was anticipating, and much more strenuous  than my new prosthetic knee had signed up for. 

The weird thing about being on Holiday more than a week in the same place I start to get all anti tourist after the first 5 days, the more I feel at home where I’m staying the more I shy away from tourists.How dare they! leaving their dog shit behind in little plastic bags all along the coastal route, it’s nature, let the dog shit in open air, it will rot away.If it’s put in a plastic bag it takes ages plus the plastic bag is an eyesore.  I see locals laughing at the tourists taking the wrong trail to get to the coastal path and I wink and laugh along with them as if I was a local and in on the joke, still laughing I turn a corner and realize I too am on the wrong trail and have to re track and face the smiles of the locals, I just act like it was meant to happen that way. 

Coastal walking is my kind of walking, reason being it’s almost impossible to get lost, if the sea is on your left hand side when you leave on your walk, make sure it’s on your right hand side on the way back, no compasses needed or satellite guided intricate gps systems (like the one I bought specially for this trip!. 

Every day, get up eat a healthy breakfast, out of the door by 10 pm back by 4 or 5 pm, tea + treat read or write then make food, read some more sleep and start the whole zen fest again.Oh yes , after the first week I’m feeling all ‘back to nature’ and part of the big picture, and there is nothing to get stressed out about, no internet connection and a mobile phone connection that makes the postal service look like high speed broadband , what more don’t you need? In fact it gets me so stress free I start to have fantasies of me being a local, I start buying local property magazines looking for something affordable to buy. I imagine myself becoming a local, living here , how I would financially survive is a mystery but I can still dream. 

So I read ,every day I read and I write and try to get my head around planning, what do I want to do with the remaining 20 or so years I have to go on this stone in the sky of ours? 

The more I read and walk the more I think, the more I think the more choices there seem open to me, the more I think of that the more tired I become and the more tired I become the less I give a shit about all the plans. 

The head is cleared, through not deciding, just going with the flow, a waiting and see attitude. Then I find a café ,there is one in the Village/town that has wifi , and I open my e-mails after two weeks of being the zen comedian or coastal path Kung Fu I see mails offering me gigs , even one from Sweden and I realise that stand-up comedy will probably be my ‘aggro-zen’ for the foreseeable future, the coastal path is just ‘my bit on the side’ . 

But in my heart I know I have what it takes, I could have been a local I have the skills.

St Davids, Wales. 

Our carefree 'Holiday abandon' is put to the test every evening after returning to our comfy rented cottage. Before sleep we watch television news of children being killed in Gaza and Syria, we learn of other conflicts as in Ukraine. We learn of the need for ‘economic growth’ the necessity to attack natural reserves on more and more fronts, because growth is all that matters. 

In our rented garden with views out to sea we stare out over natures’ beauty and reflect that we are maybe the last generation of homo-recreationalis , maybe the ‘time of the humans’ is coming to a close. 

We plunder, we drill, we mine, we frack we have a hunger for more and more to fulfill the insatiable hunger of the monster known as ‘economy’. 

On screen the children of Gaza are being pulled from under rubble, being carried to hastily dug graves, their bodies (already) seeds for the next conflict,  the middle east has it’s own logic, it’s hard to imagine the cycle of violence, war rhetoric and innocent death ever ending. 

YesterdayI saw a documentary of children in war zones by Lyse Ducet from the BBC. A father in Syria told the camera that although he loved his son he would gladly see him die if it is for the glory of his cause, he said “because our cause is the only thing worth living for nothing can replace it, and a son can be replaced”. I think that was the moment that I realised that we in the west can do nothing to end the madness until the madness ends it’s own logic.

In west Wales it’s a beautiful sunset, in the field next to where we are staying a farmer is mending a fence, a dog barks, swallows fly high “another good day tomorrow” the farmer says, I agree and under my breath add ‘for us’. 

Saints and swimmers.

While on holiday in Wales.

While on our 12km hike today we passed the Chapel and ‘healing well’ of St Non, the birthplace of St David. 

St. Non was St Davids mother, obviously holiness runs in the family. 

After St Non gave birth to St David the legend says that a Well suddenly appeared near his birthplace. Belief is that the Well has healing qualities, and looking into the well I could see quite a few coins had been thrown in by pilgrims who obviously don’t believe in free health care. 

A plaque on site says that the Well Water is know to cure all ailments,(it doesn’t say if mental health falls under ailments). My leg had been playing up recently so just to be on the safe side I threw 50p in the well and reached down to cup some water in my hands to apply to the leg in question. 

Now the stones around the well are quite slippery and just as I wanted to kneel I slipped and ended up with both feet in the cold water. I then had to walk the last 5km with ice cold water in my boots and wet socks. 

Now I’m 50p down and can feel a cold coming on. I should stick to candles and NHS waiting lists.

Sleep of the innocent.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night, I had something on my mind. 

So how does that work for Presidents , bankers and their kind?

I couldn’t get to sleep last night ,the thoughts went round and round.

So how do the famous and powerful sleep so cosy, safe and sound? 

I couldn’t get to sleep last night, I was awakened by a dream . 

It was of a small child dying, but no one heard the scream. 

butt shot

So I  sent a shit sample off to have tested for bowel cancer and I got the reply that my poop has some irregularities (?) . They say I have a one in ten chance that I have bowel cancer, now I have to check into hospital and have a camera pushed up my butt to see what’s up. 

Moments like that make you realize how suddenly this life-game could be over and out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of dying , that’s part of life, but I regard myself as a bit of a punk, so I don’t want to go out with colon cancer, it’s just not rock n roll. 

What a way to start the year! now I have to wait until February to get the results, hopefully it’ll be ok, maybe they got the shit mixed up at the lab, or maybe I took the sample after a spicy meal, we’ll see, whatever happens it’s no longer in my hands (the sample never was, by the way). That’s what happens when you get diagnosed , your existence is no longer in your own hands, you enter the universe of hospital waiting rooms and letters you daren’t open. As long as I don’t end up shitting in a bag all is well. I can’t see myself carrying my shit around with me, I mean how does that even work? 

So , wish me luck, you never know, I might even enjoy watching the camera up the butt experience on a tv as I lay there taking it like a man. Whatever happens my relationship with my body will never be the same. 

Take care blog, I’ll keep you updated on the ass stuff.