Yesterday morning, we awoke to a day when winds and storms had swept through the country and we hoped that the storms had well passed over the Midlands before we were due to go down into the town. We did pay a by now traditional visit to ‘The Lemon Tree’ cafe and enjoyed a bacon butty but our friend who joined us last week, we passed on a level crossing whilst she was dashing off in the opposite direction, but we shall see her tomorrow in any case. As the cafe is quite near the AgeUk furniture and charity store, we could not resist a quick whizz around and liberated a couple of really fine looking little cushions in a kind of silvery bluey-grey colour and decorated with a good frill. I am not sure whether this colour is described as best described as ‘Eau de Nile’ and I have a seen a description of it as a lightish caste of green, blue and grey. Anyway, I like the subtlety of the colour and I use them in pairs when I can. As I am buying them, the assistant who works in the store exclaimed what beautiful cushions they were and what good value they were when sold in their store (with both of which judgements I agree) I also espied a throw in just the kind of shade I was looking for so this too became a purchase making it a productive morning for us. I popped by another recently opened charity shop and they had a collection of soft toys from which I selected a couple of small cuddly bears to add to Meg’s collection. The naming of bears always calls for a bit of imagination but the larger one we are going to call ‘Franky’ as there is an attached label saying the bear is a ‘Franklin T Bear’ made for American Airlines and presumably given away to their youngest passengers. The second bear we are going to call ‘Pru’ as there is a fair possibility that the bear is a cousin of Paddington Bear who, as we all know by now, hails from ‘darkest Peru’ and ‘Peru’ is quickly corrupted to ‘Pru’. We then returned home in time for the carers to give Meg a check over and then got on with cooking the Friday lunch of a bought haddock pie.
Quite by accident, I came across on my iPhone a clip of Michelle Obama’s conference speech to the Democrats convention in Chicago. If you were of a cynical frame of mind, you could say that the speech was all ‘motherhood and apple pie’ but I was very impressed by its content, delivery and emotional appeal. In truth, the speech was as much about herself as it was about Kerala Harris but a principal theme was the impact of both their (black) mothers in giving them an enduring set of values. This was an interesting way to underline the collectivism inherent in the Democratic message rather than the rampant individualism which pervades the speeches of Donald Trump. Michelle Obama does not regard herself as a politician but there is an irony in the fact that she easily made the best and most compelling speech in a political convention, even outshining the oratorical gifts of her husband. The speech is quite easily findable on the web so I will treat myself to a more extended listening of it – it contained some interesting lines that would well have merited an airing on UK terrestrial TV but instead the media has been obsessed for hours and hours with the seven rich folk who have lost their lives after the overwhelming of their luxury yacht near Sicily.
I suspect that I am not alone in keeping a watchful eye on my weight these days and if I have put on a couple of pounds, then I attempt to take some remedial action in the next few days to remedy the situation. Although it is a somewhat discredited measure these days, it is still common in any medical monitoring to measure one’s BMI or Body Mass Index. This is calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by your height measured in metres squared. The resultant figure should fall within the range of 20-25 but the crudeness of this measure is often the subject of comment. If we were to take a Turkish weight lifter who has a very small stature but is a mass of quite heavy muscle then an extremely healthy Olympic athlete, for example, could have BMI in excess of 30. Conversely, when I used to get some of the students that I used to teach to calculate their BMIs as a computing/statistical exercise, then some of the very slight Asian female students who were absolutely healthy could have a BMI of 18. Now why I am mentioning this is because the other day when I went for a routine medical monitoring, the nursing assistant measured my height as well as my weight and since the last time I attempted to measure my height about a year, I seem to have lost about 2″.Incidentally, measuring your own height can be quite difficult as you are a different height standing up compared with lying down. When you are standing up, each of the 33 vertebrae in your spine will compress a minute amount but there could be a difference of 0.5″ or so. Now in the biological and social sciences, data often takes the shape of an ‘S’ shaped curve i.e. a straight line in the middle but which ‘flattens’ a little at the bottom end and the top end. Students of statistics will know that you should not make projections for any distance which is much below or above the trend line you may have plotted. But I am going to break this principle just to show the absurd conclusions to which it is possible to arrive. I have calculated that if I continue to lose height at the rate of 2 inches per year, then when I am aged 90+, I will basically be 1 metre in height which is approximately the size of a hobbitt. According to Tolkien’s descriptions, the average height of a Hobbit ranges from 2 to 4 feet tall (60-120 cm), with most hobbits standing around 3 to 3.5 feet tall (90-107 cm). So at just over 1 metre (100 cm) in height, I will certainly be in the ‘hobbit’ height range and I am not sure that this a future to which I am particularly looking forward. Consulting the web, I see that men, on average, lose 1.2 inches between ages 30 and 70, and a total of two inches by 80. So by subtraction, most men lose 0.8″ during their 70’s and it is a biological fact that height loss accelerates as you age.
© Mike Hart [2024]