Chill

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My eBaying continues at a fairly relaxed pace. Money isn’t as tight as usual at the moment, I’m just keeping pace and keeping the eBaying moving. There is only one of my own constructions on there, a repainted class 47 body shell that might interest an N gauge model railway enthusiast. The rest of that engine is a class 56 now 🙂

The little Austin 7 van is complete but it’s not for sale. I gave this one to my son, who has steadfastly refused to take any boat or truck models into his house. He knows if I get one in there, it won’t be the end of it. The van now looks like this –

van1

Ignore the dust and fluff. It’s N gauge, 1:148 scale and only 2 cm long. I didn’t notice dust when I took the photo. I took it off later. And yes, I glazed the windows and I’ll reveal the trick in a later model making post. There is another little van in preparation. It’s even smaller.

Making these little things is relaxing. It’s like meditation but there’s a product at the end of it. Something I can give away… or sell. It occurs to me that all railway modellers love this kind of tiny detail but most just want to concentrate on the trains. Background stuff – buy it and put it on the layout. There is a market for my ability here.

The point though is the relaxation part. Life is stressful these days and not just at work. We have people telling us what to eat and what to drink and how much exercise we should do and how much salt we are allowed to have and we mustn’t smoke or drink booze or eat meat or we’ll die.

You know, if you follow all the health rules to the letter, you’ll still die. You realise that, right? And you won’t necessarily die any later than you would have if you didn’t stress about the made-up crap that poses as science and instead just did whatever you felt like. In fact you’ll probably die sooner than you would have if you could just chill, and live. Live your life, not the one scripted by arses who think they know best. You never know, you might even enjoy it.

They don’t like the idea of you enjoying your life, these Righteous. They want you controlled and living as they direct. They will tell you you are fat when you aren’t, they will tell you you’re stupid when you correctly ignore the crap they spout, they will tell you that your life is unhealthy and wrong but who should decide that? Who decides how you live? You, or someone else? It’s up to you. Nobody controls you unless you let them. Do you really want to live as someone else’s puppet?

There is a doctor who doesn’t think prescribing pills for everything is the right way to go. There used to be a lot of doctors who thought that way. Now there are few. And yet even this one has missed the point.

Only his meditation suggestion has real merit. I don’t have my blood pressure or cholesterol checked. I think my cholesterol was checked once and it was normal, whatever that means. I know my blood pressure tends to be low and I compensate so I don’t spontaneously fall asleep too often. A good dose of salt in my diet helps with that – and you’d be hard pressed to find a modern medic who would dare suggest that an essential nutrient like salt was in any way good for you.

Sure, I’ll take medicine if I get sick. It’s rare but it can happen to anyone. I’ll take antibiotics if I have an infection. I’m not totally anti-medicine. What I will not do is take drugs ‘just in case’. I was not born to fill Pharmer bank accounts.

I am over 50. I am on no routine medication at all. I weigh a touch over 12 stone and there isn’t a lot of fat on me. There used to be when I was deskbound but not any more.

I only ever use real butter. I use salt whenever I feel like using salt. No measuring. I use real sugar, no chemical sweeteners. I drink energy drinks and other fizzy pop. I eat bacon and burgers and curry and chips and ready meals and crisps and chocolate and biscuits and cakes and I have never, ever counted a single calorie.

I eat deep fried haggis in batter, dipped in curry sauce. If you haven’t tried it you really should. I eat pakora and pizza and pasta. Tonight I had fried bacon in a garlic and coriander mini naan bread followed by tortelloni in a bacon and tomato sauce. Olive oil and butter included.

You can ram your lifestyle advice where the sun don’t shine as far as I am concerned. I will smoke and drink and eat as I see fit. I will not count calories. I will not measure how much salt and sugar I am eating. I don’t care.

That’s the only secret as far as I am concerned. I don’t worry about any of it. I can chill with model building or writing or just relaxing with a smoke and a whisky. None of this ‘you will live as directed’ shite bothers me because I ignore it all, and I am fit and healthy at 55. The NHS would love to deny my existence but here I am.

Forget all the diet plans, ignore anyone who tries to live your life for you. This is your life. Who is running it, you or some scriptwriting moron who neither knows nor cares what you want or what you enjoy? Someone who wants you to be an obedient drone and who cares nothing if that makes your life an absolute misery. Who is in charge of your life?

In the end, it’s up to you to decide.

18 thoughts on “Chill”

  2. If I understand correctly, vegetable oils such as sunflower and corn oil when heated create carcigenic chemicals. We are now required to cook with butter, olive oil or, BRACE, BRACE, LARD. Having chased us away from staples that served for hundreds, nay thousands of years, we are being chased back again. I suppose we have to be kept in a state of near panic for the benefit of our shepherds.

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  3. I happily tell everyone, I don’t need to worry about any of the health “advice”.
    I’m a smoker. The fags are gonna kill me before anything else gets a chance. So no need to worry.
    If something else does kill me, then I’ve got away with smoking! Either way, I win!
    I explain this with a big smile.

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  5. The advice on salt mostly comes out of America, and it is garbled by a bastard mixture of stupidity and political correctness.

    A good few hundred years ago, some people hit on a wonderfully profitable scam. Pretty much every human ever born likes sugar; this is natures way of saying “Really nice food here”. Sugar is therefore a product you can sell at a profit. It is, however, quite hard to obtain. A strange grass called sugar cane is a great source, but farming it is a dog of a job; hard work in tropical sunshine means you have to pay people quite well to do the work.

    But, if you use slaves, you don’t need to pay them. There were (and are) plenty of Africans perfectly willing to sell members of the tribe over there into slavery (quite often, their own tribe were the original vendors), so all you have to do is get them from Africa to the Carribean. This is easier said than done, because people really resent being enslaved, and so while ever the slave ships were in sight of land, the slaves were kept chained below-decks, in tropical heat and humidity, with limited access to water.

    This tended to kill the most susceptible to dehydration; only the ones best able to hang onto water survived at all well. These were the people naturally disposed towards hanging on to a lot of salt in their bodies. Thus slave-derived populations (i.e. pretty much all blacks in America) are disproportionately disposed to accumulating salt.

    Everyone else in America is close to wild-type human, and we all tend to quite like salt. Humans living away from the coast didn’t historically get enough salt hence a lucrative trade in it, so we all like and crave it. When the foods of a society are mostly grown, prepared and chosen by rampant salt-lovers, and a sub-section of the society are super-accumulators of salt, you have a recipe for trouble.

    Western Europeans don’t have much trouble with excess salt. Feed us too much, we piss it out again. We also don’t have trouble with milk thanks to a few thousand years co-evolving with cattle farming; we also don’t have trouble with alcohol again due to thousands of years of co-evolving with it. Recent immigrants aren’t troubled this way either; they too co-evolved like this. The descendants of slaves, derived from a salt-accumulator selected initial population, do definitely have a problem with salt, and the hypertension that too much of it brings.

    Political correctness forces medical researchers to treat “Americans” as all one homogeneous population, when they quite clearly are not. Historical Darwinian selection queers the population genetics, and makes the results invalid.

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  7. Ditto with me Leggy although I’m a few years older. Anyway, I’ve made a decision from a health point of view. Whenever I hear some leftie, PC, greenie, do Goodyear etc. Etc. Tell people what to do I’m going to do the exact opposite. They are NEVER right. They know nothing,

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  8. “…….You can ram your lifestyle advice where the sun don’t shine as far as I am concerned. I will smoke and drink and eat as I see fit. I will not count calories. I will not measure how much salt and sugar I am eating. I don’t care……..”

    Well, you see, young man, the NHS has to pay to fix you when you break. The NHS has every right to insist you choose a lifestyle that optimizes your health and hence reduces their cost. If you had to pay for your own health care you’d soon adopt an EXTREMELY healthy lifestyle. Research how much just one myocardial infarction costs to treat – you’d have to sell your house to pay for it. Private health insurance will run you thousands in premiums a year – with a large deductible or co-pay. Socialized medicine- after a few generations – usually produces an unhealthy population.

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    • But I’m paying the NHS. They waste billions on telling me how to live instead of spending it on fixing problems. If they concentrated on what we pay them for – fixing us when we’re ill – they wouldn’t cost nearly so much.

      And they have diseases in their hospitals that are exclusives. You can’t catch them anywhere else. You haven’t even heard of some of them 😉

      So far, I have paid in far, far more than I have ever cost them. in 55 years I have spent 2 nights in hospital and they had to pretty much tie me down both times. But they had pretty nurses, which I think was unfair.

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      • “….You haven’t even heard of some of them…..”

        I bet I have! I darkened the doors of a prestigious Med School for 7 years. Your NHS is trying to shift the Health Care system to one of disease prevention from one of disease care. You believing that preventive measures are a ‘waste of money’ makes it harder for them to make the shift. The people can understand the concept of we cured 10 cases of cancer and it cost 100,000 Ducats. Easily measured and a bench-mark can be set. BUT, what if they spent 10,000 and x number of cancers were prevented from developing. How can you measure and bench-mark that? The 10,000 looks to be a waste of money because we will never know how many cancers were prevented. The money goes where its efficacy can be measured easily. That is not good for a Health Care System. A re-think is needed and that is what is being attempted now in Canada at least. And in the UK as well. Soon, if you are a smoker, you will not get free health care – you’ll have to pay out-of-pocket. I reckon folks will quit/not start when that happens. Innit?

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        • Free health care isn’t free. I’ve already paid for it, and so has everyone who’s been paying tax and NI 😉

          So if the NHS won’t treat me after I’ve already paid, then it’s just a protection racket.

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