July 2007

On smokes, booze, food and brains

I could take up an exercise programme. Actually, I probably should. I can pretend that this is for my health and fitness. But it's not. I simply, frustratingly cannot fit in to my clothes. Nor, I might add, do any of the lovelies that our shops offer want to love me back. I just look fat, at worst, pregnant at best (which I'm not, thank Jesus. My beautiful 10 year old is enough for this mumma).

Or I could give up the food I like. Nothing schmansy, though I do like a good salmon steak cooked well (no Japanese nod to the middle: i.e. raw - sorry chefs, but it makes me barf), placed on a bed of mashed potato and surrounded by blanched veg. Most of the time, I have simple tastes: good beef or fish or lamb cooked just so, with a big lashing of 3-veg or salad (in Summer) on the side. I guess, my problem is a like lots of it. Please.

Or I could stop drinking. I have been drinking way beyond the healthy level (according to the wowsers - really healthy Protestants - who write about this stuff) for a few years now. If I'm to be honest (and it's not hard because I've already had three big madam-sized glasses of wine - it's Sunday; even god drinks, for Christ's sake!), I drink more than a bottle a day. Just about every day. Hence the wardrobe woes and the department-store doldrums. I realise that, according to statistics, I'm drinking more than most people. I wonder if this is true. Frankly, I don't care to know. Many ways to live, as they say in the Classics.

Fashion is just not designed for the young-mid-aged woman who loves her tucker and her booze. It's designed for those girls we used to be. Well, actually, it's designed for those women like me who dieted at the age of eighteen because they thought they were unattractive, or not attractive enough to ever deserve the attentions of a man. I look back now, and, well, hate myself for hating myself. Is there a problem here?

Now, every health expert will say "Cut down on fats, salt, carbs, and the vino." O, and give up the fags. Yes, we apparently know how bad they are for us. I say, apparently, because even the image of mouth cancer, lung cancer, a beacon of coke-like sludge, even that poor little girl in her hospital bed hasn't effected a recovery, on my part, from addiction to the most evil, legal, tax-booning substance on offer. Jeez, I wonder why they are still legal even though lethal. Thing is, sure, it's not good for you. Nor is breathing. And, well, birth is a death sentence. If we sat down and analysed just what we did every day that might, according to the experts, cut down our life expectancy, we'd have to stop just about everything we find enjoyable. Even everything that sustains us, like breathing.

A colleague, a German fella (a Professor at UQ) , recently told me about an article in a German newspaper that he'd read. In this article, the author quoted from nineteenth century German popular health literature. Apparently, back then in Germany when you recovered from an illness the common "welcome back to health" response was: "Now you are well! You can smoke again!" Funnily enough, they believed this - that smoking was a sign of health - as much as we believe it is the sign of poor health. Sometimes I wonder if we give science too much credence (whether it's wrong or right does not matter).

Wellness can mean many things. For most of us, it now means sustaining a long, long (too long?) life. For some of us, it means taking it to the MAX. For the rest of us, it means knowing that life is based on quality not quantity. A million ciggies with my girls, washed down by a million chardies (apparently "back," so Kris tells me) while we talk about our kids for a nano-second, followed by hours of truly important chats about our fellas, our work, our ideas about literature, about horse-racing, about clothes, about our mums and dads, about our holidays, about what we think about the poverty in the world and how we cry when we think of those women, men and kids overseas who can't eat because they have nothing, or want to come here to actually survive (somehow), about Wimbledon or cricket, about how we might as women have a better idea about how to run this damn world. Etcetera.

And that, all of that, means questioning our so-called experts who tell us how to live. Like we didn't know.

Or, I guess, we could take up exercise. We'd be so much more attractive. We wouldn't NEED to speak up. We'd just be pretty, and the world would just go on without our silly little opinions.

Julie Kelso e julieanne.kelso@uq.edu.au