Forever Young: A Trade Secret


Canute is often depicted as trying to repel the waves as he sat on his gilded throne on the sandy shore whereas, in fact, he was teaching his courtiers a lesson. Sick of their sycophancy he was showing them that he was a mortal and had no power to control nature. Thus it is with all of us. Despite our attempts at evasion and distraction we get older and seem less immortal by the microsecond. The thought which seeds itself in my mind is a historical footnote before I have even become aware of its import. My body is ageing inexorably, bits of it doing less and less what they are supposed to do. It is a slow degeneration which only became vaguely noticeable at around thirty and has slowly accelerated ever since. Entropy, I suppose. The second law of thermodynamics or whatever. Order giving way to disorder.

A bit like Canute, there comes a time when you decide to make some show of pointless defiance. You take a look at yourself in the mirror, at the bulging midriff or those jug handles for a waist and you say to yourself that this year you are going to reverse the trend towards geriatric gormlessness and corpulence. I did this a while back, years ago, in fact and have had a little success. I am not saying that out of the decay there are green Adonis shoots or anything like that but there is a mild and appreciable return to what I used to call, form. Now in my upper sixties, I think I should share my secret with you all. This is a recipe for a gentler ease into old age, not the sudden vault into slippers, breathlessness and morbid self-doubt. If it was (easily) expanded into a self-help book, then I might make a lot of money. Imagine, The Sanger System of Self–Sustenance.

Here’s what you might do. (Note, I didn’t say should do. I cannot bring myself to impose my disciplines upon you!)

Get a high quality juicer. In Ghana I juice five vegetables and five fruit (together with raw ginger) to make a daily power drink of roughly half a pint. Here I use pawpaw, melon, oranges, pineapples, apples, pears as well as beetroot, carrot, cabbage, white radish, green beans. In France I use local fruit instead of the exotic ones I can find here. In the Uk it may be slightly different again. To juice takes about twenty minutes for two days worth if you have a worm-screw juicer which cold presses. Cheaper machines use a spinning disc which damages the ingredients so you have to drink them straight away.

Have your roughage at breakfast whether it is muesli or heavy brown breads which can give you energy for most of the day if you take the juice with it. I eat my main meal at around tea time and have protein and a cooked vegetable or salad. No carbohydrates! Then there is a snack in the evening just to stave of hunger. The additional add-ons I take are fish oils and glucosamine/chondroitin for the joints. On top of this you MUST exercise each day. Whatever you find agreeable and not too boring. Half an hour of reasonably challenging activity. Get the heart beating fast. I am lucky. I swim for forty minutes.

Drink plenty of water. It washes away the rubbish.

In case you think I am a Spartan and a fanatic, I eat butter and full cream milk, have chocolate when I feel like it and often have wine or even beer and good ground coffee. But the great thing is that I am the same weight as I was at thirty when considerations of mortality first began to make themselves known through the creeping impairment of faculties and physique. And my brain seems to go through all the gears.

There you are. You didn’t have to buy my book. Get a bit o discipline! Live longer. Live happier. Free yourselves up a little to do the stuff that matters to you! Happy New Year!

Labels: Diet, Fitness. Health. Enjyment. Happy New Year.

¶ 5:15 PM 0 comments

Labels: Ghana. Happy Christmas. Beach. Heat.

¶ 5:43 PM 0 comments

Can’t see Woods for shes


I’ll let you into a secret. I feel less of a man because I can no longer aspire to the perfect symmetries and successes of the Tiger. I stare at my Gillette razors in dismay. They no longer have the magical power to promote youthful skin and manly insouciance. I won’t ever work for or with Accenture again. The man with whom I could identify has morphed into something else.
Becoming a celebrity has its pitfalls, as we know. There is possibly a formula for correlating fame with acute self-awareness in that those who are blessed with it seem to avoid the recidivism of their less endowed peers who return time and again to the stocks and the public humiliation of tomatoes and rotten eggs. Examples of those who manage to keep celebrity and pride would be Nabokov who, after writing Lolita, only did interviews by postcard, Pinter who did few to none and Tony Benn, who records everything so that he cannot be misrepresented later. Joanna Lumley uses her celebrity status to further the cause of the Gurkhas without a sniff of scandal in her life. To wit, the brighter ones use the media and are not used by them.

But the media is juiced up to fuel the juggernaut of product selling. Ad agencies seek celebrities to endorse their dubious products. They lie, for that is the first imperative of their trade. Think of how the banks were telling us to trust them (and still are) a year ago as they were out, like pools winners, on the dog tracks of the world with our money, betting on flaky US property enterprises. If you are going to be mendacious, then you need an image to dispel the aroma of seamy selling. The cleaner the image of the celebrity and the more successful s/he is, the more the lie seems like a version of the truth. So, behind that very successful, clean cut, sparkling toothed, sweet-skinned, perfectly proportioned visage hide the serried ranks of global hawkers. Tiger Woods, with his platinum blonde trophy of a wife, his perfect child, his incomparable sporting prowess and his manicured, anodyne urbanity, was top dollar in this regard.

Now, in a month all has changed and he has metamorphosed into a serial womaniser, a cad and a bounder. It is as though the authentic, Dorian Gray-like picture in his attic slunk downstairs to claim its inheritance again. So the advertisers are leaving in droves, clutching their contracts with the fine print out-clauses that there should be no adverse publicity that might erode the image of their perfect specimen.
It’s an irony, since their products have a far stronger affinity with the newly minted, disreputable Tiger than with the old.

Labels: Tiger Woods. Celebrity. Waitresses. Gillette. Accenture

¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments

Ex-Pat pontifications


There was the usual shock of recognition as we disembarked from the plane last night in Accra. The temperatures were up near 30 degrees, the humidity was around 70 % and everyone on the plane had been pulling off their UK winter gear to reveal short sleeved shirts and tee shirts or blouses. Being Christmas, the customs was in eagle-eyed form, insisting that returning Ghanaians open their many suitcases. There are spoils to be had. Some returners have as many as five cases per head so the extra costs must be phenomenal. I was waved through with my paltry one big case and computer hand luggage.

Today I sit in my shorts, acclimatising and working in my office. We don’t have air conditioning here as we feel it is not green. Instead we use mosquito netting without window glass. As I have said before, this means the noise from outside is louder and slight breezes flow across the rooms. Fans help augment the need for moving air. It is all a far cry from Bradford, Leeds and London where a mass mania seemed to have clutched the hearts of the population and the shoppers were out gathering their Christmas gifts as though no recession had ever existed. And this was during a week day. In Leeds I went into a coffee house in order to avoid further slaloming along the high street. It was called Caffe Latino. For some reason, probably as a result of my need for constant enquiries about the composition of food and drink, here in Ghana, I said I’d like cream. We don’t sell cream. Then I’d like full fat milk. We only sell skimmed milk. This is a specialist coffee shop! I don’t think that the company have the nation’s health in their mission statement. Does anyone complain? No. The British will take their coffee the way it comes, it appears. Meanwhile I will only drink coffee with cream, believing that my active life style more than compensates for cholesterol. Actually, I also believe that it is GOOD cholesterol....

Meanwhile, like the curious ex-pat that I suddenly am, I came across a rather wonderful performer (on television) who has come to the fore in the last two years and, therefore, since I left those island shores. Michael McIntire seems to me an exceptional talent and the HALF MILLION attendees at his national tour events obviously agree with me. He is that brand of comic who homes in on the absurdities of the every day. The ones that all of us are prone to and hardly think about until it is illuminated for us by a satirical mind. His thesis on the art of hovering made me cry, particularly as he mimed focusing on an alien object on the floor and accelerated the vacuum cleaner towards it rather than picking it up to protect the machine’s innards. His rendition of the cleaner’s gasp of pleasure at the change of noise as the nail is sucked inside was blissfully funny. On the plane back I found another recording of his oeuvre. I suspect he could go through the events of any day, impromptu, and find bizarre behaviour in the population at every turn.

Like all my fellow (!) Ghanaians, I did some shopping for my children and grand children while I was in London. I must admit feeling a bit let down by Hamley’s on Regent Street. I haven’t been since my sons were kiddos but it was all a bit brash, pop musicky and technological. The innocent mysteries appear to have disappeared with terms of endearment such as wizard, super and champion. Did I just write that? Have I become a boring old fart? Probably, though it doesn’t feel that way. I am certainly not a Roger Scruton (he who recently did a programme about how the UK had become ugly in its aesthetics). There is beauty everywhere, if you could only open your eyes. But that is my Zen bent of mind and It didn’t appear to be in operation when I was in Hamleys.

Labels: Ghana. Accra. Shopping.

¶ 4:09 PM 0 comments