Project Life

Good-bye and good-luck

2007-07-20T07:07:00.000-04:00

I wrote my first blog post two months ago on May 15. I remember the day well. I was hungover and stopped for a bacon sandwich on the way to work that I destroyed in record time as the glistening fat ran down my sleeve and congealed in the hollow of my wrist. I slurped it up and continued walking.

I should get healthy, I thought to myself as I passed by Bloomsbury Square uncertain as to whether I would make it to work without being sick in a bush.

And so in a fit of self-loathing I begun my fitness odyssey. I emailed my friends and asked them to recommend some fitness crazes I should trial.

The responses I got ranged from the bizarre to the delightful and go to show that everyone has their own ideas of what constitutes good health.

James, a mate in Dubai recommended I drink camel's milk, a popular Middle Eastern delicacy. I didn't.

Matthew Philp in New York wrote: "I was talking to someone (who works in marketing…) the other day about the Master Cleanse diet where you just drink a mixture of Lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper diluted in water and it acts as a detoxing fast. He said it was fascinating how springy you feel afterwards. I want to try it but I have to schedule it in. "

We never did schedule it in. It seemed somehow unappealing.

Jessica Halloran, a sports reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald recommended Bowen Therapy, for seemingly no other reason than "it originated in Geelong."

Jackie Dent, a former CNN.com journo now working for the UN in Kabul pointed me to Five rhythms dancing at Tufnell Park. It turned out to be the Shamanic Trance Dancing which I had trouble convincing anyone to attend with me. One day... one day....

Julia May recommended floatation tanks, which I tried and disliked and the CSIRO diet which I didn't try but I also dislike.

London-based journo Elizabeth wrote "I tried Kundalini yoga at the weekend and it damn near ripped my shoulders from their sockets. I haven't been able to raise my arms the past three days and each time i reach for the mouse next to my keyboard I let out an inward scream. Will keep an ear out for more radical treatments."

Errr - no thanks, I like to keep my limbs.

Australian film-maker Colleen Hughson suggested "I'm not sure if they have the 'Art Of Living' (Indian Breathing techniques) in London but you should give that a go. I did the breathing course 18 months ago and If I had any will-power I would have kept it up..."

I never did make time to learn how to breathe properly. Maybe one day I'll regret it if I forget how to breathe and I die.

Tom in Melbourne also sent me the name of a guru who may be passing through London on some sort of corporate speaking tour. The definition of 'health' is as elastic you want to make it.

Dan Cass, yoga enthusiast and Bondi man offered the following bit of advice "there is a new vitamin therapy for pregnancy etc that's $700/mo you should look at. Sounds nuts and costs a fortune. Can't remember the name of it. " But Dan - I'm not pregnant!

Political hack at the SMH, Stephanie Peatling was optimistic: "Sharing your ambitions publicly is probably a good way of making sure you don't renege on it!" Not necessarily Steph. I reneged like a...umm.. politician.

Cairo based photographer Penny Bradfield was also a bit optimistic on my behalf: "'Capoiera' is a traditional Brazilian-martial-arts come dance. It is done in pairs or in a group. When done correctly it looks truly amazing. It involves a lot of fitness. "
I dance alone. In my pajamas. To Amy Winehouse. I don't do groups.

Rachel Patterson in Melbourne (who has known me since I was in nappies) obviously thought I had serious issues. For my health kick she suggested I try "hypnotherapy. People use it for all sorts of things including weight loss, recovery from illness, trauma, abuse and addiction." Euuuwww... heavy!

Adam from Sydney also send me a thinly veiled message in his suggestion: "If in New York you must go to the Albert Ellis institute. He founded CBT and is 96 and still does large group therapy in his upper east side Jewish home. This really is a complete trip. Very personal development. Very New York. Also I suggest doing some psycho drama."

I Googled psycho drama. It's for people who can barely cling onto the notion of being people. All I want to do is lose a few kgs...
But still the 'helpful' suggestions kept coming.

Vivienne of Sydney said "I would like you to try the NO HAIRWASHING challenge – it’s ok to rinse it in water, but no ‘product’, no shampoo, conditioner…nothing! Apparently, once the oils adjust, your hair is lustrous and just fine. In other words, we’ve been conned into thinking we have to use all that stuff when it’s NOT necessary. I think you should post daily pics of your hair on the blog, and it is one you could do while you’re doing – say – the seaweed detox or the circus skills training workshop."

But apparently your hair smells and no one goes near you and by the time your hair is at that lustrous phase you have have so completely ostracised yourself that you have no friends left. Which means you have more time to go to the gym I guess.

Jo Fox also wins a prize for the most unappealing suggestions: colonic irrigation and pole dancing. At the same time?

Back in Sydney Louise advised that my health kick should include "Arnica cream for neck aches (you can get it from the chemist) and found it really works. My brother was beaten up really badly about ten years ago - with a metal pipe. Someone suggested using Arnica (maybe in tablet form though) and he has virtually no scars, despite looking like the elephant man after the bashing. Seems like a bit of a miracle cream to me."
When I get attacked by a metal pipe Lou - until then....

But the most practical suggestion was by Damien who said the best way to get healthy was to spend "three months in a London City Law Firm."

See you there kiddo.

P.S - This blog has been more fun than I have ever deserved to have. Thanks for supporting the blog and hopefully I'll be back blogging for CNN in the near future. Good luck on your own journey to health. Me thinks its not as simple as all the pundits make it out to be.
Love Brigid

Ethics and illness

2007-07-19T11:40:00.000-04:00

Oh no! Second last post. I must stop mooching. But there must be an upside to ceasing my blog about health: I will become well again.

As I write this I am sitting at my terminal in the CNN bunker clutching my stomach with a suspected case of dysentery (picked up maybe from the dry-retch inducing latrines at the music festival).

I can add it to my list of 18th century diseases that I have picked up since starting Project:Life.

Prior to commencing 8 weeks ago I smoked, drank, ate bacon sandwiches and hadn't been ill in years.

Now I haven't touched a cigarette in a month, sup wine moderately and will cross the road to avoid bacon sandwiches but have suffered from

- consumption
- nerves
- fatigue
-anxiety
- and now dysentery.

My only conclusion is that trying to be healthy will make you sick.

If I had of continued this project much longer no doubt I could look forward to such Dickensian diseases as Scarlett Fever, polio and syphilis.

Gym dilemma number 2389:

As we know the gym these days is a sociological jungle with rules and norms separate from that of 'normal life.' So it throws up some ethical dilemmas - like this one:

I was at the gym and had put in a particularly valiant effort on the stepper. I was grunting like a poodle choking on a lamp-chop, I was sweating like my dad when he wears polyester in the sun, I had climbed 65 imaginary flights of stairs.

I fell off the stepper and headed for the showers to wash off the grime.
Uh oh, I discovered as I prepared to step under the comforting jets. I didn't have a towel.

So gym dilemma number 2389: is it okay to dry yourself using an article of clothing you wore at the gym in lieu of a towel? Or is that completely gross? Or is it not as gross as not showering?

Say no to legal drugs

2007-07-18T10:19:00.000-04:00

There is a lot said about the dangers of illegal drugs. The scary ads where the kid takes ecstasy at a party and then suddenly they are in a grim hospital room (tight shot of the patient gaunt like a figure in an El Greco painting, everything blanched out by a painful white light, a sense of aloneness pervading those little rooms) and the kid has gone from having lots of friends and dancing at a party and everything being really fun to eating hospital food and looking really, really freaked out and being in massive trouble with their parents.

Or the campaign where we are shown the bridge of a coke user's nose being eroded, then collapsing in a mass of cartilage and blood. Or when the person taking crack starts frothing at the mouth and looking like a Gremlin.

Through drugs awareness campaigns, kids know not to accept illegal drugs from the dodgy guy standing next to the DJ booth in the clown hat. And just because the person with the drugs is a 'friend of a a friend' doesn't mean they can necessarily be trusted.

But how come anti-drug commercials have never warned about accepting drugs from people who go to countries where there are fairly loose laws on buying pharmaceuticals?

A case in point - friends of mine recently returned from the Middle East with the joyful news that one can just walk into a pharmacy and buy Valium without a prescription.

"What you don't even need to fake an anxiety attack or a broken pelvis or a long haul flight?" I asked incredulously.

"No! You don't. You just walk in and ask for them and they give them to you."

With this we were all silent. "Wow," exclaimed someone with a low whistle. "Just like that?"

"Yeah, just like that."

The silence continued as we all were lost in our own private reveries: all the pharmaceuticals we were given when we broke our arms, or had panic attacks, or had ADD or fallen off our trail bikes during holidays in Vietnam. They were great. Would it be possible to access those drugs now when we were well? God - the bliss. What could be!

The thought was seductive but also faintly worrying. Legal drugs such as Valium are highly addictive. There are reasons why many doctors are reluctant to prescribe it and why they will only prescribe it in controlled doses. And yet my friends have stumbled on a land without regulation.

Should I succumb maybe I will be starring in the next anti-drug commercial.

Voice-over: Brigid Delaney was an obscure blogger who ironically wrote on health issues when she succumbed to the lure of legal drugs.

Wide-shot of BD at the gym. Flash to shot of BD running around Regents Park. Shot of BD walking a Dalmatian with guy wearing Abercrombie and Finch. They are drinking lattes and laughing. Shot of BD hiking with parents in Lake District, cheeks rosy, eating a peach.

Voice-over: Then Brigid's friends came back from the Middle East with Valium that they obtained without a prescription from a back street pharmacy.

Tighter shot: BD swallowing the blue pills while walking the dog. Flash to shot of BD asleep under a tree looking happy. Shot of BD finishing the packet of Valiums. Shot of BD asleep. Shot of BD having panic attacks trying to obtain more pills.

Voice-over: Addicted! There'll be no more peaches or beaches for Brigid.

Tight shot of BD in a grim hospital room, gaunt like a figure in an El Greco painting, everything blanched out by a painful white light, a sense of aloneness pervading those little rooms and the BD has gone from having lots of friends and dancing at a party and everything being really fun to eating hospital food and looking really, really freaked out and being in massive trouble with her parents......

Age-orexia: the new anxiety

2007-07-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

It was with some alarm that a month or so ago I picked up the Observer Woman magazine and came across this cover story: 'My name is Christa. I'm an age-orexic'

Great! I thought. As if women (and men these days) don't have enough hang-ups about their appearance.

Weight of course, is a perennial intellect drainer. When we could be spending brain power on how to halt global warming, or cure diseases, or spread resources more equitably, we instead spend our brain cells obsessed with bits of ourselves that are too big.

It's boring. And now it seems the absolute fear and obsession around aging is catching up with our hang-ups about weight. Boo - I say. Even as you've read this sentence you are closer to death. Where you will be in the ground. Rotting. And eaten by maggots. We can't escape it. Life reminds us that we must come to an end through the changes that appear on our faces and our bodies.

So you can botox all you like sister, but the reaper ain't fooled by your botulism filled forehead. We all get picked off in the end.

D'Souza in the Observer writes of her obsession:

"I'm not alone in thinking the idea of being 50 is an absolute outrage. I'm not alone in believing middle age happens only if you are ornery or slovenly enough to let it. Here is clear-cut, concrete proof that, up and down the country, it's all pretty much the same. We are now, amazingly, more obsessed about being young than we are about being size zero......In other words, if you want to insult the average British woman, don't guess her weight, just guess her age."

Cripes! She really knows how to make things hard for herself - doesn't she?

I must confess to a spot of age-orexia. There was a time (a while ago now) where I used to be asked for my ID at the pub. And at the pokies. And buying matches. And seeing an R-rated movie. Each instance made me bristle with injustice. How dare those trunk-necked bouncers think I'm 16. Big hair and loads of make-up, climbing in the toilet windows of pubs, carrying a copy of Investment Property: A User's Guide, were some of the ruses I tried.

Then one day they stopped asking. I was let in without questions. I was aging and, well - the process goes on. And on. And now on bad days I look like I've slept on jagged rocks.

I haven't been asked for ID for quite a while and although I haven't reached the point where I have to start wearing foundation makeup, that day is not too far away.

That is why my parents are such a breath of fresh air. They have been staying in London for a few weeks and have had a grand time. Could it be the museums, the walking holiday in the Lake District, the art, the culture, seeing me - their only daughter? No - it's the senior discount.

As newly minted 60 year-olds they have been shouting their ages to the roof-tops.
'We're sixty!' they tell ticket-sellers at the theatre without any hint of embarrassment. 'Do we get a seniors discount?'

'Oh god - have you no shame?" I murmur. " The seniors aren't my parents.." I say to no-one in particular.

To bus-drivers they cheerfully disclose their age and are not even asked for proof of their ancientness.

"Aren't you worried that he believed you were that old?" I asked.

"Not really, " says my mum. "We get to travel for half-price - you don't."

But if you are getting old - then I am getting old, I reasoned with them. So stop it! Now!

But on reflection I reckon Christine D'Souza and all age-orexics, should meet my parents. They reckon turning 60 is great. It halves many of the costs of expensive old London and entitles you to seats on public transport.

As for botox, they can't be bothered. Before dinner every night mum has a brandy and dad a beer. They sink into the couch at my place - tired from walking all day.

They look relaxed and happy. And you know what - when you are relaxed and happy, you don't look so old. Maybe that's the cure for age-orexia.

Moshing for health

2007-07-13T09:36:00.000-04:00

This weekend, Brigid's Blog heads to the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. That's not health related! you well may scoff, but if you've ever been in a mosh pit (the impression of a teenage boys sweaty nipples indented on your grubby t-shirt, the barest squeak of air entering your lungs, eardrums shattered, internal organs compressed) you know you need to be quite healthy to survive.

I am told this festival is quite delightful and a bit more 'mature' than other festivals. There'll be poetry readings, film screenings, gourmet camping and the kind of intelligent pop that you grow into after a teenage hood in your room listening to the Smiths and Nirvana.

The last mosh pit I was in, The Beastie Boys, resulted in an anxiety disorder. I was trapped in a mosh with a heap of rough blokes. We were cheek-to-jowl in a sort of a clothed group shag. Then the Beasties started playing Sabotage. The writhing shag got excited. There was mud. Shirtless blokes slipped in mud, pulling on the sleeves of others to help them up. The helpers fell on the people in the mud. A sort of human whirlpool occurred in the middle of the massive crowd. People were falling in. The people on the bottom couldn't breathe. The crowd behind us were surging forward crushing those trapped in the whirlpool. "LISTEN ALL Y'ALL ITS SABOTAGE"! The band played on. Would this be the end, I thought? At the Beastie Boys?

I lived. I'm not sure how. I am feeling ill just typing this. I haven't been near a mosh since. But somehow I can't imagine the same experience occurring during Jarvis Cocker's set on Sunday. Or when the Good, the Bad and The Queen play their lovely mid-winter-vibed melancholy dirges. I can however, imagine a lot of people like me, the anxious and afraid, enjoying the music from the edge of the fields.
___________________________________________________________________

This blog wraps up in a week, and although I would love to continue taking all of you with me on my 'fitness journey, ' sometimes there are times when you must walk alone.

The burden of taking my international audience to the grim gym with me each week was obviously a huge liability, inhibiting me from achieving my fitness goals. So like a sherpa discarding a white man's overstuffed backpack, so I must discard you all.

But stick around next week, as I cram some incredible fitness experiences into my blog (sour cream facial, horse-whip massage, warm coca-cola bath) and attempt to lose 8 kilograms in a week through the revolutionary orange peel and herbal tea diet.

Weight loss by hypnosis

2007-07-12T06:30:00.000-04:00

Losing weight by doing absolutely nothing? Sounds like my kind of diet...

So it was with great interest I read Rachel Cooke's piece in the Observer last weekend about losing weight after attending seminars by hypnotist Paul McKenna.

She writes: "I'm not convinced that our little chat is going to have any effect. Then something weird happens. I don't start thinking I am Christy Turlington but, over the next few days, I notice that I eat more slowly, and feel full more quickly. This involves no effort on my part; it just happens. By the end of the following week, my trousers fit better."

While its sensible to be skeptical of anything that promises to take all the work out of health and fitness, McKenna's program is based on sensible advice.

As for McKenna's 'system', it's "very, very simple. It consists of four golden rules. Follow them, and you will lose weight. One: when you are hungry, eat. Two: eat what you want, not what you think you should. Three: eat consciously, and enjoy every mouthful. Four: when you think you are full, stop eating. That's it."

It seems we know how we should behave, we just lack the will do to it. Can hypnosis replace willpower? I bet there's a hell of a lot of people willing to give it a shot.

_____________________________________________________________________

In the meantime I have locked on my own secret to weight loss - chip your tooth!

It only happened yesterday (on a pistachio nut) but already I have vision of the chip turning into a crack and the crack running up to my gums and my front tooth snapping off, leaving me looking like Nanny McPhee.

As a consequence I have been avoiding eating. When it has become unavoidable I put the food in the 'good' side of my mouth and laboriously chew on it. Its unpleasant and even the most innocuous soft looking foods I now view with some anxiety.

Forget losing weight the Paul McKenna way - try the Brigid Delaney method and get someone to half knock out your front teeth.

The black lung

2007-07-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

The visions we entertain of ourselves are at best wistful, at worst a dangerous fiction.

My vision: rosy cheeked and glowing with health from my detox, I would make my way with startling speed along the fields and up the mountains of northern England’s Lake District.

Stopping to admire the scenery I would quote the region’s favourite son, William Wordsworth: “Which is the bliss of solitude/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the Daffodils.”

Pastoral delights – sheep, squirrels, butterflies would accompany me – like children following the Pied Piper and the air would be scented with mountain dew and wildflowers.

I would return to London like Heidi’s pal Clara coming back from the mountains: restored, vital, healthy, glowing and alive.

Instead I have come back half dead, suffering from what I believe to be consumption.

(Readers: revolting ‘too much detail’ warning….) This morning (as I have most mornings on the mountains) I coughed up blood. At night I lie awake, body wracked with a hacking cough that makes me appear as if I am in the throes of an exorcism, trying to expel Satan himself from my lungs.

I emerge feebly to the horrid, damp communal dining rooms of country B and Bs and try not to gag as yet another plate of bacon and eggs and black pudding is put before me.

Against the grimy window panes it rains and rains. Inside my lungs black stuff ferments then congeals.

Other residents of these wretched B and Bs shun me as the sound of my nocturnal hacking, splutterings, spitting and throat-clearings have obviously penetrated the thin walls.

Is it an elderly dying man: they may have asked themselves at 4 am? Shall we call an ambulance? Is it a dog whose voice-box has been partially torn out? Shall we call animal welfare?

No, it is moi: consumptive, delirious from fatigue, damp of lung, full of good intentions to walk in the Lake District but destroyed by those very intentions when the walking involved setting out in a grey swirly gale, with the wrong clothes on.

My travelling companions, hardier than I of lung, have grown weary of my morning dissections of the increasingly frightening appearance of my phlegm. As a consequence, I breakfast alone. Just me and my black lung and scrapped and bloody throat and a dozen abandoned black puddings.

Ahh a health blog. Since taking this three month assignment on my health has declined to its present low level.

In my weakened state I do not have the energy to contemplate my next health challenge. But I have a month – a month to turn it all around.

Straying from the righteous path

2007-07-02T10:56:00.000-04:00

Although it's fashionable to blame your parents for everything from adult bed-wetting and rubber fetishes, to being locked out of the housing market and for there being no fresh mangoes at Waitrose - I am sitting here eating Indian sweets wondering if I can blame mine for the grande interruptus of my fitness journey.

I mean - how selfish of them - they locked themselves for two days in the fetid, pressurized cabin of an aircraft, enjoying the delights of the 'chicken option' meals, and an entertainment system that was down between Hong Kong and Heathrow - just so they could wreck my mojo.

They have insisted on restaurants and red wine and 'family time' (I haven't seen them for a year) rather than the deeply solitary activity that is the gym and semi-starvation.

They have reintroduced coffee into my house. Dad brought a bottle of wine home. The other day at Hampton Court Palace, they brought me a scone. They look me to an Italian restaurant on Saturday evening and discussed pizza in an unhysterical manner.

Yet I cannot resist their wicked ways because they are my parents, and as we all know if you go against your parents you get whacked on the backside with either:

a) a wooden spoon
b) a Mason Pearson hairbrush
c) a rolled up newspaper

I guess what I am trying to say is, that after the masochism of the detox, I have now slipped back into my bad old ways - but IT IS NOT MY FAULT. IT IS THEIRS.

Fortunately, my parents are not slipper-wearing, sherry imbibing, wizened OAPs on Zimmer frames. In fact they are probably fitter than I am. So this week when we go walking in the Lake District it could be a chance to regain some fitness ground lost in the past week.

But I'll let you know if they try to drag me from the path of righteousness.

Good-bye cigarettes

2007-07-02T09:37:00.000-04:00

It’s hard to be healthy and a smoker. Some sportsmen can manage it – darts champions, snooker players and Shane Warne have smoked and played sport, sometimes all at once, but for us mere mortals a commitment to being fit often involves saying farewell to the fags.

A smoking ban in pubs and clubs across England has further made dragging on a ciggie a bit trickier – not to say illegal.

There are various libertarian arguments one could make against the ban, but the heat goes out of any argument when you consider that smoking increases not only your chances of dying a miserable, grisly death in the cancer ward, but can drag your non-smoking pals to the same ward by the virtue of breathing in your second-hand smoke.

I didn’t give up the cigs because of the smoking ban, or because I am on a fitness kick, or the fact that the detox I have been on has given me a cold where my body’s production of mucus would thwart any attempt to smoke – in fact I didn’t give up at all. But it’s been ten days since my last cigarette and I don’t think I will have another one.

At a party on Saturday night, I pulled a lit one out of a friend’s paw and had a drag. It tasted terrible. I screwed up my face and handed it back. Could it be as simple as that? When cigarettes taste bad the addiction is over? I hope so – I don’t fancy standing like a pariah in the rain trying to light my soggy cig while my friends are warm and clean-lunged inside.

Increasingly smoking is becoming an unsustainable lifestyle choice.

Yet, strange as it may sound, I will miss smoking. As a mostly social smoker I associate smoking with two activities I really enjoy: being with my friends at the pub and being contemplative.

Both activities usually involve a cigarette: it’s as if the act of smoking heightens the experience and takes me out of the everyday.

Whilst no baby-Chav I did have my first cigarette aged 12, and when I was 15 or 16 I was buying my own packets before settling on Marlboro Lights when I was at university. Lately in a bid to kid myself that I am not a ‘real’ smoker, I have been buying my cigarettes in little junior packs of ten.

I have probably ‘borrowed’ more cigarettes than I have brought: to all those people I scabbed smokes off at pubs and at parties – thank-you. I can never repay you.

Being a ‘social smoker’ has also been my entre-nous of choice with the opposite sex.
If you were a male smoker, I have probably have had a fairly clumsy crack at you. Being fairly gormless when it comes to chat-up lines, I have usually opted to target male smokers using their cigarettes, matches and lighters as a ruse to start a conversation.

And so it comes to the real reason for smoking.

Smoking is never just about smoking: its about so many other things: its a crutch, or a ladder, a prop - and throwing it away reminds me of a line in Yeat’s poem The Circus Animal’s Desertion.
It’s one of Yeat’s final poems and, broadly speaking it’s about loss. He writes,

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Smoking has been my ladder, my companion at a thousand cruel bus shelters waiting for the bus that never comes. It’s been there for me at sunsets and sunrises, heartbreaks and coffee breaks. In the grimy little bars of Barcelona, the coffee shops of Melbourne, the pubs of Sydney, the youth hostels of Dublin, in the back-yard of my house in London. When I've been anxious or ecstatic or bored or tired. At celebrations and defeats and everything in between.

But sometimes the things you love are not particularly good for you and its time to kick the ladder away.

It’s a bittersweet good-bye to the cigs, but better that than saying goodbye to the habit in some hospital ward, years from now, when it’s too late to be nostalgic.

The Aspirational Gym

2007-06-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

Sodden with snot, greasy –cheeked, throat colonised by bacteria and something scratchy, ears achy: being sick is good for only one thing – time off from the gym.

Instead I drift in a rummy-eyed ether, remembering gyms-past.

There have been a lot of gyms over the years, but none I remember as fondly as the Aspirational Gym (not its real name). Ahhh AG– you took all my money but in return gave me some of the most comfortable, inert hours of my life.

An Aspirational Gym reflects what we want to be, rather than what we actually are. So for example, say you are a poorly paid, unfit, ciggie-puffing, alco-pop quaffing cadet journalist – on entering the AG suddenly you feel like a member of the jet-set; a juice squeezer, a marathon-runner, an owner of an Aga and a wine cellar, rich.

How do you know you have become a member of an Aspirational Gym?

Try this checklist:

· They provide towels that feel toasty. They are not stained, threadbare, frayed or anyway indicate expense spared.
· The reception desk is staffed by highly groomed, good-looking people. But they are sort of fake-nice
· It is quiet. There is usually an inverse noise/classiness ratio with gyms. The noisier the gym, the cheaper the membership
· There are never more than 5 people in a class
· The change rooms are spacious, clean and band-aid free
· There is a pool that is always empty except for one other person
· There are newspapers, magazines, real coffee and fruit for FREE
· The vibe is part airport lounge, part 5 star hotel
· Celebrities exercise there

When I joined the most expensive gym in Sydney, I went most days. Not to do exercise mind you – but to hang out.

After work I could be found in the wet area: an oasis of calm in the middle of the city. I would wash away the grime of journalism in the spa, sweat it out in the steam room or do a few languorous laps before putting on a tasteful robe and repairing to the café to read the Financial Review.

In the steam room one might see a newsreader or a model. The talk was industry gossip or the best wineries to go to in the Hunter Valley. The vibe was quiet, discreet, convivial and relaxed. No one seemed to raise a sweat at the AG. There was a sense that to get sweaty, to raise the heart rate would somehow not be in the spirit of this wonderful, languorous club.

Which essentially is what it was – a quasi-private club – not a gym.

Club culture is alive and well in Britain. You are nominated, you are selected, you pay your dues and you are admitted to the club. At the heart of joining many clubs is not what your membership fees give you – but what they relieve you from. Queues at the bar. People who talk loudly. People who are vulgar. People who wear polyester. People who in subtle or quite profound ways – are not like you.

Australia, being ostensibly egalitarian (but scratch the surface and there is inequality aplenty) does not have a culture of private clubs, but it does have a couple of incredibly expensive gyms that function almost as de facto private clubs.

Or it used to. My aspirational gym has shut down apparently. It didn’t have that many members and had been running at a loss for years. Even paying 40 per cent of my cadet journalist wage into their coffers was not enough to save it.

Vale Aspirational Gym. I never stole towels from you.

Demystifying hot stone massages

2007-06-26T06:33:00.000-04:00

Hot stoned massages… sorry I mean hot stone massages. Whatever they are called, I can’t escape them. As part of my job reviewing the spas of London for CNN I have been practically pelted with offers for hot stone massages.

I was, however, initially reluctant to experience them.

Would it be like what happened to maidens of medieval times, who when naughty would be taken to the village square and pelted with hot stones?
And if not, what if the stones were too hot and I ended up walking around with a stone sized burn on my back?

What if a hot stone(d) massage was beauty-therapist lingo for smoking marijuana whilst getting massage? There’s no way I’d be up for that.

Yes, I was deeply suspicious of this treatment. I lumped it in with other faddish treatments such as the Wimbledon massage (you are pelted with tennis balls), the 20 hand Re-fuel massage, where they call ten random people from the street to rub you down with petrol, or the Baste and Bake massage, where you are coated in oils and then put in an oven.

There was only one way to find out if this treatment was kosher. That was to try it for myself. Twice.

My first hot stone experience was at a spa in Knightsbridge.

I don’t remember much, as I fell asleep. Later when I returned to work, I felt sick so I had to be sent home. “They must have spiked the massage,” I mumbled unconvincingly.

Today I went to a spa in Mayfair determined to stay awake. “Turn off this trip-hop dirge and put on some Rollins Band!” I asked nicely. The spa didn’t have any Rollins “What about Slipknot. Do you have any of that?” I asked.
Unfortunately the closest they came to heavy was Moby.
I soldiered on. “Make the stones and the massage burny so I stay awake,” I said.

The stones used were basalt and came all the way from Australia, just like me. I wondered if maybe I had encountered it in the past – cut my foot on it down at the beach, or used it to bully other children. But when it came time for me to meet the stones I felt not even a speck of recognition.

The masseur (who I also failed to recognise, but that’s maybe because I didn’t know her) started by lining the table with hot stones that followed the line of my spine. I lay on them. They were nice. Sort of like a hard hot water bottle.

She then put a stone on my face – not a large one that broke my nose – more like a hot little pebble that one might find on their shoes.

Heavier stones were placed on each shoulder and I realised this may be an opportune time for the masseuse to rob me as I would be pinned down on the table and unable to give chase. Then I realised I was sans clothes and had naught to steal.

Stones were placed on my abdomen. I started to feel very….slllleeeppppy.
“PUT ON THE ROLLINS BAND!” I asked again, struggling to stay awake.

Then she started doing something to my leg – with the stone! She was rubbing the stone with vigour along my shin. Weird. Stop being so weird! But I didn’t say it because it felt quite nice actually. The pointy end of the stone was sort of sliding around of my bones with enough pressure to make me wince. I get it now. The hot stones were the tools, and the masseuse was a tradie and my body was the thing being repaired. Mmm, so that’s what its all about.

But just when I had it figured out – odd things started happening – vis a vis the stones.

She got a lot of little hot ones and placed them between each toe. Nice one, said my toes. She placed stones in the palm of each hand where they just sat while I channelled Virginia Woolf at her most unhappy. She did something to my ear lobes with another stone, a sort of rubbey, warmy thing. The ridge of a stone skidded along the top of my brows like a pebble on the water.

Ahhh hot stones! What benign, giving lumps of minerals they are. Who would have thought?

Sodam burned and so did my resolve

2007-06-24T11:16:00.001-04:00

I must admit I walked a bit taller on the second last day of my detox. Pride really does straighten the spine. 'I've done it!' I told myself and anyone else that would listen, I had successfully detoxed for almost a whole week.

Considering I've never been on a diet in my life, it wasn't particularly easy, which made the fact that I stuck to it all the more triumphant.

But I shouldn't have crowed so loudly - or at all.

Feeling self righteous I went for an after-work drink with a friend, where I piously sipped lemon and ginger tea. Then I went to the gym. On a Friday night. Oh I felt smug! I looked at all the poor unhealthy people around me, spilling out of the Soho pubs. They couldn't swill their drinks fast enough, they couldn't drag on their cigarettes hard enough, they could stuff their faces with crisps quick enough.
What wretches! They would have their day of reckoning.

I had the gym to myself. Upstairs, out on the street, Sodam burned around me. I did my exercises. Then as an afterthought I paid a visit to my old enemy- the scaly old scales. Ha scales - you cannot hurt me this time, for I have been on a detox, I told them as I approached. I leapt on, as light as a feather. Or not. It seems I was not as light as a feather. I was more like as light as a MRI machine or a pre-1980s IBM computer or a wilderbeast or a rubbish skip.

Whilst detox I had managed to put on 2 kilograms. In a week. On top of the other 2 kilograms I had put on whilst working out with a personal trainer. Being healthy was making me enormous.

I reeled off the scales in genuine shock. And also anger - was all this deprivation for naught?

I threw my evil gym membership card against the mirror in the changerooms (it bounced off), I threw a handful of body wash at the mirror (it stuck) and I stamped my foot on the ground (nothing happened.)

Then I met my friend Tim, who had met his friend from Andrea from Italy, who had his friends with him and the whole merry gang were at a bar in Soho drinking bottles of chenin blanc like it was a Friday (which it was) and smoking like they had a week to go before the smoking ban.

"Do I look fatter than I did before my detox?" I ask Tim. He was very diplomatic (even though he is not a diplomat). "Maybe the scales were wrong when you weighed yourself initially," he suggested. His other suggestions over the course of the evening also included,"Maybe your portion sizes on detox were too large. Maybe you drank too much juice. Maybe you haven't been doing enough cardio. Maybe your body is not sure what to make of the detox so is storing energy. You need to go on the stepper."

Maybe, maybe. But I felt like a failure. With one day to go of the detox, I broke it in spectacular fashion. I drank wine. I smoked Tim's cigarettes. I ate curry with naan bread. And I was slumping. That wonderful few inches of height that came with the feeling of pride left me the minute the scales shredded my dreams.
And so Saturday morning rolled around. I had a semi hangover. The low level feeling of failure hung around like the day's grey English summer skies. I actually felt quite depressed.

Detox be damned. Fitness be damned. I gave whole thing up when at midday I opened my emails and got this:

Hey Brigid-When I read your comments on going to the gym, well,I had to smile-ok, I really laughed out loud. I started going everyday (except Sunday) to a gym four months ago. I hate-I mean really really hate-going to the gym. But what I do love is how my clothes don't fit my body anymore! I am a 51 year old Nanna of 5 grandchildren and I vowed to myself to be around to dance at my grandchildren's weddings, and being from the South, oh do we love to eat, I knew I had to do something. (I resembled Santa's wife) I had a trainer for less than 30 days, that was all I could afford, and everyday I do the exercises that I can with as much intensity as possible. I don't talk when I work out, I use an old fashioned Walkman, and do I sweat! After I am done with my work-out, then I will talk. Keep up the great work! I know it is a big pain, but I promise it is well worth it. Remember, it is a life change that you are doing.

Thank-you Karen Mac of Alabama. You made my day and made me rethink giving up so easily.

Now I am back on the detox. I have returned to the gym with a glint in my eye like I mean business. I have wiped the body wash off the gym's bathroom mirror and I have kicked the scales in the goolies. I have introduced myself to the stepper. I've stopped slumping.

Day six of the detox

2007-06-22T06:07:00.000-04:00

Well it's day six on my vegan, no-caffeine detox and I think I am over the worst. After drinking strong coffee three times a day for fifteen years, the physical and psychological withdrawals from this powerful stimulant have been unpleasant.

I have had a constant headache since I gave up, plus lethargy, irritability and a sort of glum, mid-winter feeling.

I walk past my favourite cafes and peer into their cosy, steamed-up windows with a sad wistfulness - sort of like some Dickensian waif who peers into windows of rich and happy families eating pudding, while she must go home to sleep in a cardboard box and eat toenail clippings.

I also haven't gone out this week. So it's been boring on detox. I've watched a lot of those diet and makeover shows where dreadful posh harridans find obese chavs and then bully them into eating pulses. I've been on Facebook alot, cyber stalking my friends. I cooked a vegan meal at a friend's house and we drank 'mocktails'. I've drank a lot of juice and eaten a variety of vegetables. I had a Kitkat in a moment of weakness. Otherwise I've been sleeping a lot. I haven't been near cigarettes, non-organic food or red meat.

It's over tomorrow and I have to say its been a good thing. My skin is quite fresh looking, eyes sparkly and I feel quite chilled out despite the headaches. Maybe I'll even carry over some of the habits of the detox into my normal life.

The long and winding road

2007-06-20T06:08:00.000-04:00

It’s been a bit over a one month since CNN’s Project:Life launched and I have been blogging on ‘wellness’ and my ‘journey’ daily.

In that time I have:

-Investigated the benefits of Shamanic Trance Dancing
-Joined a gym
-Employed a hardcore South African personal trainer
-Been killed by the personal trainer twice a week
-Been told by the personal trainer that my cardiovascular fitness is a "two out of ten."
-Been in a floatation tank
-Been rescued from the floatation tank by concerned staff
-Had a ‘musical massage’
-Had four facials, including one made out of birds**t
-Been in a warm bath in Chiswick that contains Dead Sea particles
-Learnt how to meditate
-Been on a week-long urban retreat at a Buddhist Centre
-Been rambling in the county
-Seen two naturopaths, including one who told me not to eat wheat
-Have not eaten wheat for a month
-Have only been drunk three times
-Have increased sleep to 9 hours a night
-Have stopped drinking coffee and soft drinks
-Am on a detox where I only eat organic food
-Have become a vegan

Yet I have PUT ON WEIGHT! I cannot believe this! And I am exhausted. Being ‘well’ is tiring me out. I am sick of people touching my face – it only makes me sleepy.
I do not feel pampered, I feel harassed.

I never have any energy. My room is messy because I am too exhausted from meditating, lifting weights, running on treadmills, brewing decaff, booking massages, chasing Frisbees in parks, and checking the internet for the nearest African drumming class to do anything else.

And I have become boring (even more than before). And heavier (even more than before.) I do not understand what is going on.

My detox book by Max Tomlinson tells me this sort of existential crisis is normal during a detox - but still!

That self-righteous feeling

2007-06-19T10:35:00.000-04:00

One of the things Max Tomlinson advises in his detox book is to eat organic food in a form as close to their original state as possible.

Luckily my detox has co-incided with the opening of a brand new organic superstore – Wholefoods in London.

The store that specialises in organic produce in a supermarket environment has generated a large amount of coverage in the London media over the last week – so it was not a surprise that when I visited on Saturday it was almost uncomfortably crowded.

American readers will be used to Wholefoods but for Brits it’s something of a novelty. One checkout chick told me that people were queuing along Kensington High Street to get in. To a supermarket. That sells organic food. A sign of the times or faddish? I’m not really sure.

I was happy enough to trek across town to Wholefoods as it meant I could shop for the detox in one go.

The issue many people have with organic food is that it is more expensive than its chemical cousins.

Well it is and it isn’t – the trick is just to be discerning.

The receipt I have in my hot little hand tells me I was thoroughly ripped off when I paid £4.44 for a small bag of mushrooms. They taste good – but not that good.

But the seeds and pulses were a nice surprise. As Max advised that I made my own seed mix, I thought I’d spend big on the ingredients but at 15p for a tub of linseeds, 25p for sunflower seeds and £1.75 for a big tub of pistachios its quite good value.

As for eggs, fruit and vegetables, they were around the same price that I paid for them at my local Waitrose.

But there is something you get from shopping at Wholefoods that money can’t buy: a feeling of supreme self-righteousness.

You might be hungover. You might have just eaten McDonalds. You might be 70 stone overweight. You might be a prime candidate for diabetes and a heart attack. But as soon as you line up with your organic vegetables to take home in your cloth carry bag, you feel like the healthiest, most right-on person alive.

Diary of a detox

2007-06-18T06:25:00.000-04:00

It's day two of The Struggle and I'm not faring too well.

One kindly comment that came through this morning suggested I move to an Islamic country as evidently I have no self-discipline and need some sort of structure imposed on me by the State. But as my politics are Libertarian, that degree of interference wouldn't suit my sensitive political sensibilities. So instead I have decided to interfere with myself.

As you can see from my previous post, in a fit of self-loathing coupled with a hangover I decided to embark on a one week detox cutting out caffeine, alcohol, processed foods, red meat, lollies, junk food (see above) etc...

My last hurrah was Saturday night when my high-flying lawyer friend James had shore leave from his compound in Dubai. Carbohydrates and trans fats were on the menu while our glasses were never wanting for wine. Later we moved about a bit in a nightclub and happily inhaled second hand smoke. How joyless life seems now on detox - without the energy to dance, without the smoke to breathe....

Day one of The Struggle was yesterday. Without caffeine I felt like I had been injected with lead. I was all woolly and slow. I wrote a story but it wasn't very good. I went home and fell asleep. At 6pm. I woke up at 10 and then couldn't get back to sleep until 3am. I had to drink 1.5 litres of a foul smelling broth. I frequently felt like weeping.

This morning I tried to roast linseed and other assorted nuts for a homemade cereal the detox book suggested. But the nuts exploded all over the kitchen and without my morning coffee I lacked the deterixity to adequately marshall the mess.

When I added the nuts to some yogurt, the heat of them curdled the yogurt. The nuts tasted like gravel. The yogurt tasted like gravel. The gravel even tasted like gravel.

Now I feel weak and clumsy. I can;t typpe prop;ly. On my way to the kitchen to draw water for a herbal tea, I tripped on a box.

I licked the garbage bin and now I want to die

2007-06-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

It's curious how circular life is. An example: a month ago I blogged about wanting to take a fitness challenge as I was hungover, tired and felt like I'd licked the inside of a garbage bin. A month later I have returned to feeling exactly the same way.

I've come a full circle, I told myself as I sat in the fluorescent McDonalds on Oxford Street without even the solace of something to read. Instead I watched the ads on a plasma TV for McDonalds products and endorsements about McDonalds community projects, drank a coke and ate some product wrapped in some stuff.

Dinner parties are dicey things, I reflected as I chewed on the stuff and thought about what happened last night to bring me so low today.

Could it be called a success if at 11pm the guests disappeared to buy more wine and cigarettes, then stayed until 2am, sitting outside in the rain arguing if democracy was an absolute or a construct and were there examples where it had been imposed and failed?

Yes, that could possibly be construed as a success. But from a health point of view it was a disaster. It has lead me to the too-bright McDonalds. Its lead me to cancelling Sapt as I thought I may throw up on her. It led me to feeling depressed and questioning whether I can do this health thing. And worst of all it has lead me to the door marked DETOX.

That's right. I start a detox on Sunday. No booze. No ciggies. No lollies. No McDonalds. No caffeine. No refined sugars, wheat, dairy, red meat or processed foods.

I will still have dinner parties but they will be special detox dinners where guests bring pulses not Pilsner. It will be the sort of dinner party where guests are bound to leave early after discussing nothing particularly interesting and the next day I can see Sapt and eat a salad without wanting to DIE.

I'll let you know how the detox goes. I'll do it for 6 days with the help of naturopath to the stars, Max Tomlinson and the support of my boss Katie, who will also be detoxing with me.

The burden of fatigue

2007-06-13T11:52:00.001-04:00

I wrote yesterday in a jocular manner that I felt like a smudge because of all the treatments. But today I feel worse, like I have been killed but they didn't quite finish the job.

Who is my murderer? It could be Sapt, the personal trainer, who this morning made me flip myself backwards over a Swiss Ball, or it could be the masseur from yesterday who I heard murmur the word 'toxins' over the sound of whale song in the treatment room or it could be my boss who commissioned me to go into a floatation tank, despite the fact that its left me traumatised and confused, as I confronted what it must have been like in the womb?

Or could it be that trying to get fit means you hit a point where your body, freaking out from the newness of it all cannot get through the day without a nice hot cup of tea, a lie-down and a bit of a whinge?

It seems right now my body is rebelling against all this strangeness and all it wants to do is curl into a ball (not a Swiss one) and sleep. Forever.

As for the Shamanic Trance Dance I am meant to be attending tonight as part of this project, I think it (my physical self) likes the idea of trance (not too far from my normal state) but not the idea of dance. As for Shamanic, well it's not quite sure what that is.

I am a smudge

2007-06-12T11:14:00.000-04:00

"Ohh you lucky thing, another treatment!" less pampered friends coo at me as I explain I am off for a facial/floatation tank/massage/psycho-drama therapy/Shamanic Trance Dance classes.

Many of these friends work at the grubby coalface of news - reporting on what's going on out there in the world, with all its misery and its majesty.

But I on the other hand am as far from the coalface as its possible to get. This morning's assignment saw me lathered in essential oils, with some sort of cool goo on my eyes murmuring, "Yes, that pressure's fine thanks."

While fellow CNN reporters are in war zones or at least in press conferences, I could be found this morning in the chill-out room of the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge in a cream robe, lying on a chaise lounge, reading a copy of Tatler and eating grapes.

"Don't hate me too much!" I tell my worn-out, unpampered friends. "My job has its hazards and its heartaches!"

The chief hazard and heartache is that I feel peculiarly blurry all the time - as if I am some sort of smudge. Like now - I am at work but I don't really feel present, I'm not quite sure that I'm real.

Maybe its a side effect of all the essential oils that have seeped into my skin. Maybe I have been rubbed so much by masseurs that they have rubbed me out. I have been exfoliated to such an extent that my very borders are on the back of some scouring pad somewhere in Knightsbridge awaiting the furnace. Oh no - not the furnace!

The heavy robe is but a cage, the grapes are but the Grapes of Wrath.....I am in the words of T.S Eliot: "Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;" or at least this is what I tell my friends who envy my spa treatments. Don't! I say. I am a smudge.

Walking in the country

2007-06-11T06:56:00.000-04:00

Maybe I would enjoy exercise more if it combined one of my favourite activities – going to the pub with friends.

The Evil Gym doesn’t have a bar – it does however have a couch where you can have umlimited top-ups of fizzy drinks and read the Daily Mail. Errr - no thanks.

A search of other gyms in the area also failed to yield a bar or at the very least a comfortable environment where I could entertain my friends whilst continuing with my fitness challenge.

The only thing for it was to get out of town and exercise in the open air (so I wear a hat - see above).

On the weekend we drove out of the city in my friend’s convertible. It was fun. I sat in the backseat wearing a puffa jacket backwards and shouting “What? What did you just say?”

The sat nav didn’t work, meaning we spent most the day in a very unlovely part of London where it would not be out of the question if I was stabbed. I compiled the reasons why I may be stabbed: I looked like a wan**er, I was in a Saab convertible, I had lost control of the broadsheets I was nursing and the books’ pages were flying into the cars behind me (“Give me back my Delillo review!” I shouted to a white van man) , we were listening to folk music – and even worse - singing along, I was wearing a puffa jacket backwards, we were going to the country for a walk. I had turned into my parents. Stab me! Stab me now.

But we made it down to Kent unstabbed. We went to the pub first. It was a ye olde find – made for English midgets about 400 years ago. I had a warm beer and a steak and ale pie with gravy. My pals had the same. We passed a happy hour in silence – reading our mangled newspapers and inhaling our pies.

Now for the exercise bit. We had a book of walks. We appointed a navigator. We appointed someone to carry the backpack. I carried a small stick and a mini pinecone.

The walk was 10 miles and it was stunning. It was like being on the treadmill in the Evil Gym but instead there was fresh air, and my friends, and conversations and some really interesting things to look at. Instead of looking at video clips of Beyonce or Britney gyrating on the borders of porn we saw the following things on the walk:
- birds of prey circling a field
- a steam train with a whistle that sounded like a hiss
- trainspotters at intervals along the tracks, some wearing fluorescent vests, others in corduroy
- a sewerage treatment plant
- a red fox with a glistening, healthy coat and its almost Britney-like come-thither stare
- rabbits the same colour as dry grass
- a man walking through the woods in a tuxedo who stopped and said Hello
- a man on a blue plough who didn’t
- half a dozen chicks in the darkened hollow of a tree – their eyes bright in the dark, their mouths huge and chirps that sounded hungry
- a woman playing a harp in an inn we passed along the way
- a large snail without its shell
- a massive bumblebee

It was lovely. What a civilized way to exercise, I thought. Maybe it’s the surprises in nature that makes it feel so not like a chore.

On the way back to the city I thought of the gym I could open for city people who can’t get to the country for walks. I would set them up on a treadmill next to their friends, after everyone had eaten pies and drunk a beer. I would make sure it was only dear friends – not someone you only half-like. I would dapple the lighting to make it look like sunlight coming though the canopy of trees.

Then I would throw things at the treadmill – things that would delight the walkers: a porcupine, a child’s pony, a flower-girl on her way to a wedding, a tuba player, a friendly squirrel, some blujays, bunches of wild flowers and an ancient stag.

And the people on the treadmill would walk for hours and hours hardly aware they were exercising and exclaim to their friends at all the amazing things they had seen.

They would step off the treadmill and go into a room where the ceilings are low and the fires are lit and there is a cheery barman with rosy cheeks – and drinks are drunk, before puffas are put on backwards and everyone goes home and lives happily ever after.

The Plastic Surgery Myth

2007-06-08T06:12:00.000-04:00

I was but a spotty teen in 1991 when The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf was released, yet I read it with interest and not a little alarm.

It said women are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty and the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. She claims that this system keeps women under control through their own insecurities.

Fifteen years have passed and surely Wolf must survey our current preoccupation with a homogenized beauty ideal, with alarm and also depression.

In 1991 Wolf used the example of women having cosmetic surgery as an endgame of sorts, where women so insecure with their own appearance, so afraid of the aging process, so vain, self obsessed and unhappy, resorted to the surgeon’s knife to cut themselves into the shapes society deemed as acceptable.

Her vision of women pouring dangerous chemicals on their faces to remove layers of skin, filling the place where their breasts used to be silicon and injecting their foreheads with botulism (used previously in the treatment of cerebral palsy) was apoplectic – a nightmare scenario that back in the 90s seemed a bit overblown, almost hysterical. Surely Wolf was over-egging the pudding to get a few column inches to promote her book.

But cut to 2007 and her worst fears have been realised. Invasive, dangerous and ultimately vain and pointless cosmetic procedures have been accepted and normalized through shows such as Extreme Makeover and trash-bag celebrities whose chest sizes inflate as their waist measurements contract.

There has always been the element of the freakshow about those celebrities and the makeover shows and I like to think that there’s always been an element of caution in some sections of the media in relation to plastic surgery.

That is why I watched horrified on Wednesday night as the BBC aired a show called How Young Can I Get.

It wasn’t just that the 41 year-old presenter's stomach was hung before the camera, flapping in a matter of fact way, after it had been disattached from her body in a Malaysian hospital (where surgery is half the price of an op in the UK, and yippee, there’s a 5 star holiday thrown in!) but that the person presenting the program purported to be a journalist and there is something that made me feel distinctly uneasy about seeing the journalist being cut open on camera because she was feeling fat.

There was not a whole lot of balance or caution in the program. The presenter was, in the end, delighted with her flat new stomach. Her friends cooed, and even her mother – who seemed like a sensible sort – looked vaguely approving.

It is through this process and these shows, that surgery becomes normalised. This is how an ideal of beauty becomes standardised. This is where journalism – which should be an independent, impartial and balanced arbiter of the facts, becomes perverted.

I didn’t think the journalist looked better at the end. She had botox, fillers, a chemical peel and the surgery. The smile was rictus, the eyes had a grim, desperate please-love-me gleem, and her stomach was flat. So what.

We all have a different ideal of beauty. I think the people who are the most beautiful are the least self-obsessed. This doesn’t mean that they don’t care about clothes or grooming, but they are the people who accord themselves a certain measure of energy and them have enough left over to spread around to everyone else.

It’s a simple equation. The more time people spend on Project Self (excessive amount of time, money and energy into their own appearance) the less interesting they become. I’d call them beautiful bores if I thought in any way unnecessary plastic surgery makes people more beautiful. But it doesn’t.

And it is those that have fallen most heavily for the beauty myth.

What you see walking to work

2007-06-06T11:21:00.000-04:00

Walking to work: is there a more lovely start to the day?

It follows the sweet fog of yawning after a deep sleep, of lying there puzzled at the evening’s dreams. A white swan washed up on a beach and speaking in verse, running to catch some feathers that have escaped from my purse, being chased by a long ago primary school foe, and then the cliff… the cliff, the cliff.

There is a lukewarm shower, the almost sensual appeal of the underfloor bathroom heating on drowsy feet. There is musings of what to wear and retrieving the clothes from the floor. There is the small ache of regret that I had not loved them enough to hang them the night before. There is the day’s first coffee: sweet and strong, rousing my nervous system, straightening my spine. I turn off the radio. I brush my hair and get ready to set off for work a pied.

Springtime in London is perfect walking time and the morning is an ideal time for a stroll. The day’s troubles are still light on my shoulders – if I apprehend troubles at all.

Walking into work seems like a civilised way to meet the day – to walk into its brightness or its rain and shadows and say ‘Hello, I hope things go well for us today.’

My walk to work takes me from Bloomsbury to Soho. It is a walk in two acts- from some of London’s loveliest squares, bookstores and the British Museum (pictured above), through to the back streets of Soho and the sex district of Little Amsterdam, before arriving at CNN. In forty minutes there is so much life teeming in the squares and on the streets that four novels could be plotted all before 11 am.

The First Act: parklife, gentile old Bloomsbury, ever-green squares, tourists with wheelie suitcases, men with museum faces, school children in red uniforms walking in pairs, stretched and moving along the street like a bloody river.

In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the narrator, a Bloomsbury native, now in a correspondent in pre-war Saigon, says, “I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square and the 73 bus passing the portico of Euston and springtime in the local in Torrington Place. Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden and I didn’t care a damn.”

But I am still new enough in this part of the world to be agape at the wonder of it all and “care a damn” about the flowering bulbs.

First square I walk through is Tavistock Square opposite the British Medical Association. The mood of this square is almost always quiet, reverent even.

People sit alone on benches, some reading, some smoking and taking in the morning’s newspapers, but many just sitting, eyes fixed above the shady plane trees, lips persed in silent communion with the conversations playing out within.

On the unoccupied benches, I stoop to read the dedications hammered into silver plaques. “For Martin who loved music and London: 1954 – 1987," "For our darling daughter, who lived in New York, loved London and worked all her life for peace.”

The next square on my walk, that Greene sometimes referred to in his novels as Bloomsbury Square is Russell Square.

It has none of the melancholy that tinges Tavistock Square- instead everyone who passes through it seems to be grinning like a loon.

There is a cool Rasta type dude that works in the square doing the garden including the almost hyper-real beds of tulips. He talks to everyone. There are little dogs off leads and children on leads, and squirrels that are unafraid of people and a sprawling café in the shade.

Even in deepest winter, it is a happy square. The first time I saw snow in London was walking through this square. It flew like ash through the air, and still people walked through the square with those huge grins plastered across their faces, the ash melting into their clothes.

Cross the road and there’s the British Museum. Each day outside its gates, someone asks me where the British Museum is.

Then along past the book shops, where I linger outside the London Review of Books bookshop and dream about all the books that I will read when I retire.

Usually around this time a man with baggy yellow trousers and dreadlocks passes on the other side of the road. He has a loping stride. I see him everyday – always at the same place, crossing at the same point in the road. We don’t say hello. I guess his name to be Leon and suspect he is a Hari Krishna who works the graveyard shift at community radio station. He always looks tired.

The Second Act: ‘The past is another country, they do things differently there,’ and so it is with Soho. It’s another country within London. And I love it.

Poised at Cambridge Circus outside the giant signs for Spamalot, I take a deep breath and brush the Bloomsbury blossoms from my hair and enter the grime zone.

There are men unloading dead chickens from crates, cleaners smoking in the streets, their industrial vacuum cleaners sprawled, spent and exhausted on the footpath.

I step over dried out puddles of sick, before taking a detour to Bar Italia for a coffee and a look at the Sun. On the outdoor tables are men with creative hair and women who got dressed in the dark and don’t give a damn.

Then its along an alleyway, up the proverbial arse of Little Amsterdam. This morning on the small shelf of cobblestones, Japanese tourists took each others photos in front of a sex shop while a man dressed in black rubber, his arms covered in tattoos and half his black hair missing from the left side of his scalp, is sweeping the dust from his shop and whistling. The sun is out.

Some times at 9am furtive looking men come and go from these shops, that sell DVDs, whips, poppers and SEX - but they never look as furtive as you imagine they would be.

Just before the fruit market there is always one menacing man or another speaking to a friend or into a phone about how he “wants to bash Harry. That dirty, filty, c***!” Each day by the fruit carts it appears to be a different man threatening to harm Harry or Barry or Larry. I shrug and buy blueberries.

And so the day starts. A bit of exercise, a bit of high-brow, a dash of low brow. Thinkers and children and dogs and squirrels and dominatrixes and hitmen and fruit-sellers and porn addicts and American tourists with squeaky wheeled cases and bicycles couriers and cleaners and me – walking through it all on my way to work.

Organics: middle-class drug of choice?

2007-06-05T13:21:00.000-04:00

I have this friend called Lee (not her real name) who’s little eyes glow like Christmas lights each week when the organic vegetable box arrives.

Lunches will be cancelled, plans forestalled, life itself put on hold while she waits for the vegetable box man to knock on her door.

Later there will be breathless emails: “In the vegetable box this week were leeks and strawberries and bananas!”

The next week it may be carrots, apples or dewberries. It's all organic with the little particles of pesticide free soil still clinging lovingly to the skins.

The beauty of the box, says Lee, is the surprise element. The contents change each week depending on the season and availability of produce.

I have long mocked Lee and her vegetable box. Organic foods, I argued, were the drug of choice for the health conscious middle classes. And just like drugs they sucked away all your money leaving you nothing to show for it but a mouldering compost heap and memories.

But the Project: Life health kick has forced me to reconsider my negative view of vegetable boxes. Maybe if I ate organic vegetables all week I would feel better.

I even went so far as to look up one company on-line. At £10 per week per small box, I’m not sure if its good value. Also what if I don’t eat at home that week? I’ll have a filthy steaming compost heap of whole vegetables and no fond memories of eating them (the vegetables that is, not the compost heap.)

Have any readers had positive experiences or otherwise with vegetable box schemes or are they just marketing hype?

Dearth of diet books

2007-06-04T05:47:00.000-04:00

I am writing this from the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, here for what is billed as one of Britain’s premier book festivals.

But when I scan the heavy program there seems to be some serious omissions. If this is the top dog book festival, where are all the authors with diet books to promote?

Books about fitting into a bikini in 12 weeks consistently top the best seller list yet their names don’t appear. And where all nutritionists promoting their low GI diet books? That diet is like, so hot right now.

Martin Bloody Amis - what does he know about calorie controlled diets? It’s all gulags and terrorists with him.

And what about Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai? Sure she’s done a lot for African development but can she run a half-marathon?

The dearth of health related writing at this festival is obviously not a priority for anyone here.
The festival goers are a pallid lot.

I’ve observed them for four days now. They move from tent to tent at the pace of ewes. They drink cappuccinos whilst reading newspapers. In the afternoon they switch to Pimms and signed volumes of poetry. They are fond of shawls.

On sunny days, they sit in tents that double as lecture theatres and talk about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of new anti-terror laws. But what about the place of carbohydrates in the modern British diet, I feel like screaming at them. Forget powers of political resistance! What about hot chip resistance?!

No wonder there is an obesity epidemic in Britain. Here are some of the country's greatest thinkers (all penned neatly into one Welsh field) and yet they are not being asked any health related questions. All anyone seems to care about here is the war in Iraq and use of the third person plural as a viable narrative voice.

I decide to take action and ask health related questions from the floor, thereby getting diet and ‘lifestyle’ issues back on the agenda.

I sit up the back of Derek Walcott’s lecture. He is a Nobel Laureate whose Odyssey version of Omeros is hailed as one of the great poems of the twentieth century. He looks quite good for his age. "Mr Walcott - what’s your skin care regime? Do you support facials for men…. mencials I think they are called in some parts of west London. Do you ever think the current gross beauty trend of colonic irrigation will make it into any of poems? And finally, Wordsworth in his poems celebrated the countryside. Why have we never spawned a great poet of the gym? Why are there no lyrics eulogizing the treadmill?"

To Mr Amis; "How do you stay so lean and avoid middle aged spread? Is it because writing about gulags makes you lose your appetite?"

To Marina Lewycka, "You’ve written about Ukrainian tractors and caravans. But what are your views of on the Ukrainian cabbage diet?

To Thomas Keneally, "In your book, the Great Shame, you write about the Irish potato famine. What lessons can we learn today about losing weight the Irish way?"

Actually I didn’t ask any of those questions. There is always some nerdy type on the front row (usually wearing a shawl) wanting to talk about the book.

Boo - I say. Books are making us fat. If we are going to read them they should impart useful things like how to live on a raw food diet and ‘Two weeks to a flat stomach!’

Fly away Nightingale

2007-05-31T06:57:00.001-04:00

The pursuit of 'wellness' is tiring and quite possibly futile.

It is 9pm and I am sitting on the couch with my friend Ryan telling him about my day.

I had seen the evil Sapt and spent an hour lifting 4 kg weights, my face screwed up like a used tissue.

I had gone to a meditation class and in the morning I went to South Kensington where a pretend Geisha in a very mellow room (where playing was dirge-like electronica designed to be soothing) rubbed Nightingale faeces into my face. "It's an ancient treatment," I tell Ryan who is moving away from me in a sort of horror. "Geishas used it in ye olde times and now some posh day spa has revived this ancient art."

Ryan is practically in the next room. "I don't smell of s***," I tell him. "They purify the faeces before they smear it on your face."

He looks sceptical and allows himself a bit nearer to my (fragrant) face.

"You don't look any different," he says. I must look crushed.

He sighs,"Maybe tomorrow... you might look different tomorrow."