Healthy eating at Easter

Went to give blood on Good Friday, a little apprehensively since I’ve had a cold recently, and am still coughing from time to time. The nurses at the Blood Donor Centre in Edinburgh take a fairly relaxed approach to your suitability to donate blood. About as relaxed as an SAS admissions officer. If you’ve so much as recently walked past someone who sneezed, they’re liable to shake their head sadly and ask you to come back next time. Woebetide you if the person who sneezed as you walked past might have once had sex with someone in Africa. Then you’re for the high jump. You can see why I was apprehensive. Not only have I coughed recently, but I know a man with a Kenyan wife. So when I mentioned that my plane home from Australia in January had stopped off at BANGKOK… the eyebrows were raised sharply and she disappeared to ascertain my fate. I glanced nervously upwards, half expecting a hermetically-sealed container to drop from the ceiling and insulate me from society until I was safe.

I protested that I hadn’t left the airport in Bangkok, and had purchased nothing more than a book while I was there, but all to no avail. Apparently the plane even touching Thai tarmac knocks blood donation on the head for 12 months. Malaria hotspot, it would seem. So that’s that. Still, I came away with some mini-eggs courtesy of the Blood Donor Centre.

Easter Monday brought an expedition to St Andrews, after breakfast at the incomparable Indigo Yard. Kenny D, Broon, and Jen all made the trip, among others less infamous to the readers of this blog. We were all careful to suck on sweets as we went over the Forth Bridge, after Jen’s public assertion that her ears pop when she goes North.

The sun shone, the wind blew, and we had fun. The sun shone so much that Jen went slightly pink and declared herself to have sunstroke. The wind blew so much during our time on the beach that we all experienced exfoliation by sand-blasting, and are still finding sand in various bodily crevices. Actually, I can only speak for my own crevices. A long and satisfying game of beach cricket was marked by the usual events: dropped catches aplenty and Kenny D muttering darkly about the uneven surface every time he got bowled.

Dining in Zizzi’s that evening, I took a moment to read the advisory notice on my glass bottle of Coke. It advised me that 330ml of Coca Cola, ie one glass bottle or a can, contains 39.5% of an adult’s RDA of sugar. I pondered this for a moment, considering how I’d started the day with a breakfast soaked in maple syrup, and reckoned that with the syrup and Coke alone I must have been close to sugar saturation for the day. I looked up to see three year old Lewis polishing off the last of his own bottle of Coke, and breathed deeply. What percentage of a child’s sugar RDA, I wondered…

My sister and her partner were up over the Easter break, which meant I finally got the chance to meet my 11-week old niece. We got on reasonably well, I feel. She seemed to tolerate me when I kept moving, as if this held promise that I would soon hand her over to someone more competent. Childcare, at that age, seemed refreshingly logical and uncomplicated to my bachelor eyes. If she was crying, she was either hungry (hand her to my sister), or tired (hand her to my sister), or had a loaded nappy (hand her to anyone in sight. Except perhaps, my dad). If she wasn’t crying, carry her around for a bit for bonding purposes until she started crying.

On Saturday at our church’s music practice, two of the band, by necessity, brought their young kids along. Surveying the carnage in the church at the end of the practice, and the fraught look on the faces of the parents in question, I was reminded that childcare doesn’t stay logical or uncomplicated for long.

The weather was glorious in Galashiels today, which is where my job took me. Sitting outside at lunchtime, drinking my way through 60% of my sugar RDA, I looked up to see a bus with a question plastered over its side: “SALT. Is your food full of it?”

I checked the bottle. 0.0g salt.

Phew. Still eating healthily.

18 thoughts on “Healthy eating at Easter”

  1. “usual events”:
    Am I usually to be found muttering darkly?!

    My apologies if my muttering was too much but in the words of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind “the game is flawed!”

    As for healthy eating, too little salt will kill you just as fast as too much, if not faster.

  2. Ahhh Mr. Quinn – so good to get a blog update.

    Have you tried Twitter yet? I’d love to have updates on the finer (read more mundane) aspects of your life. Sugar intake for instance.

    Love,
    The Jones

  3. Good post Andrew.

    I was wondering: how does one become “infamous” enough to get a mention on the blog? Surely they need mentioned in order to become “infamous”?

    I feel this has created a circle of exclusion impossible to break through without resorting to dubious tactics… must speak to nasty jen and get her to steal your computer!!

    Keep up the good work.

  4. Colin

    If you pay the retention fee, same as the rest, you too can become infamous. Cash For Mentions.

    Jones, I thought my blog contained a fair amount of mundane details as it stands… still can’t get my head round Twitter, why would you want to know I was about to go and clean my teeth..?

  5. and I’m wondering when you’re going to include a link to my blog on your site….?! I don’t pay you out that much you know.
    I couldn’t remember my blog address today and had to go to yours to get to Ken’s to get to mine…
    that’s not only slightly time-consuming… it’s also rather embarrassing…
    Diana (once was infamous) B

  6. AQ: cheers pal!

    btw .. you do mutter a bit Kenny – but usually you follow it with a nice dose of full-voiced carol (excerpt) singing – which is always fabulous and much missed by yours truly!

  7. Unaccustomed as I am to this whole techno lark I feel the need to say that I am reminded of the reasons for which I refuse to get involved in it all. Reading the blog has not been good for my heart condition. As I read the entry I needed to reach for my tablets as I encountered the ‘S’ and ‘c’ words. Perhaps I should be checking that the entries into this blog do not corrupt the innocent and delicate minds of the younger or less firm, I mean more infirm reader. Shocked I am………………………!

  8. Colin – an alternative way of obtaining a mention on the blog is to “volunteer” to do a posting. You could, for example, recount taking da yoof to the climbing wall and how good the mats are for wrestling purposes.

    Rustic jumper – this has been by far the most risque entry of the blog thus far. I would encourage you to persevere. One should embrace technological advance where one can:-)

  9. KennyD…

    Interesting you should assume that Rustic Jumper is in fact female. This seems a tad, dare I say it “s”ist of you. I am more intrigued by where on earth the pseudoym comes from

  10. I know who “Rustic Jumper” is therefore there was no assumption.

    The nickname comes from a particularly fetching jumper she wore on the trip to St Andrews.

  11. afraid so, nothing more to it than that. unfortunately Quinn also has photographic evidence of me wearing that jumper too.

    I’m surprised there was no apology forthcoming for the only assumption in these comments – that I didn’t know the gender of Rustic Jumper and was therefore assuming it in a way that was a tad ‘s’ist.

  12. A great blog, Mr Quinn. You are to be congratulated. I particularly appreciated the musings on the emotive issue of childcare and music practises.

    Infamous People: I have seen several of you somewhere recently.. (You know who you are, message deleter). Where else will you all turn up? I’m about to join Bebo..

  13. hazyr,

    lately you seem to be spending almost as much time on the internet as I do! That’s not healthy – should you not be working or something?!

    haven’t seen wiseman but recieved an entertaining email from him, as you may have done, re weather websites etc.

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