Spectator Life

Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.  Nobody here seems to be waiting 84 hours in an emergency room, as one NHS patient recently did in Scotland There wasn’t much they could do about the annoying bone in her foot, that was shown to be broken after a wait-free visit to the on-site radiology suite. But the diagnosis was rapid. The advice on what to do and not to do is proving effective. As encounters with the medical milieu go, I’d give it five stars.

It shames me to admit this, but I haven’t been near a public swimming pool for many a year. Hotel pools, yes; the sea – occasionally, in parts of the world with predictable warmth. But I have resisted the new wave of ‘wild’ swimming and was never a regular – to be honest even an irregular – at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. Nor have I frequented health clubs or spas, though I did go to enquire about one that had opened nearby; then came the pandemic.    As a one-time regular pool user, I am taking another look. This is because I have just completed my four-session NHS allocation of hydrotherapy (for a broken ankle).

A team of nurses was trying to ascertain whether my wife was pregnant. It didn’t seem very likely. She’ll be 57 in a couple of months, went through the menopause over a decade ago and has been on HRT for several years. And she hasn’t had IVF. Insofar as one can be certain about such matters, I believe I have been her only sexual partner for two decades – and I’ve had a vasectomy. Furthermore, were she to be pregnant and go on to give birth she would leap straight into the global top 100 oldest mothers of all time list. So, no, it didn’t seem likely.   A team of three assembled to put screens around her so that she could urinate on her trolley.

Do you take it? If not, the chances are you’ll know someone who does. In an age of insomnia, melatonin has become a must-have sleep aid; as ubiquitous as yoga or herbal tea. In America, it is available over the counter and, according to The National Sleep Foundation charity, 27 per cent of adults take it. The use of melatonin has more than quintupled between 1999 and 2018. In the UK, where it is prescription only, melatonin use rose by nearly 900 per cent between 2008 and 2019, and many more of us – exact numbers are unknown – buy it unlicenced online. ‘People say it’s safe because it’s natural. Well, Vitamin A is natural.

Tis the season to eat salads and wear skimpy clothes. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe, egged on by adverts featuring bikini-clad models, barely-there fashion in shops, television series such as Love Island that equate sunshine with slender figures and the perennial expectation that we should by now be ‘beach body ready’. We’re undoubtedly more sociable in summer. A study last year found that we’re twice as likely to make excuses to avoid a social event in the winter Yet quite aside from the idiocy of only being ‘allowed’ to enjoy the warm weather when we’re deemed aesthetically agreeable enough by unidentified authorities, summer isn’t ever when we are at our slimmest, is it?

When I tell friends, ‘You never hear people talking about the upside of Alzheimer’s’, they look at me like I’ve said something about Hitler being nice to animals. In general, a mention of dementia will ruin any conversation. People freeze up at the thought. It’s true that having a relative with dementia is hard and the bad far outweighs the good, but that is no reason to ignore the positives completely. In fact, the tiny benefits can help you deal with all the downsides.  I’ve had a lot of time to look for the positives. Growing up, my grandparents had Alzheimer’s so I was aware of the condition, but I hadn’t thought that it could happen to my parents.

In an interesting piece for Air Mail, Linda Wells writes of ‘The secret lives of tanorexics’, asking: ‘What drives these bronze obsessives – and why won’t they ever learn?’ She questions her sun-baked friends about why they are so intent on doing a thing which they are warned will ruin their complexions and make it more likely that they get cancer – and doesn’t get a satisfactory answer from any of them. Reading it, I realised that I too am a tanorexic. It kind of creeps up on you over the years, like any other bad habit: one minute you’re having a harmless half-hour in a sun-trap pub garden in Hove and the next your hair’s falling out in Crete, as happened to me when I failed to wear a sun hat in July some years back.

Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then taking the plunge and thinking the morning after – ‘Gosh, that was nothing to be scared of – I might even do it again!’ I’ve been quite the reprobate myself during my long, louche life, and I’ve certainly lied and adulterated, so of course I can’t condemn anything that I’ve done too, as that would make me a filthy hypocrite. What I can’t forgive in a politician is sanctimoniousness – and he had none.

Over dinner with a friend last week, halfway through a bottle of Merlot, I noticed her eyes starting to glaze over as I spoke. Normally, I’d be offended – but it’s something I’ve experienced a lot lately, and I’ve only got myself to blame.  I was in the middle of telling her a story about my latest running route, which is a slightly different version of a run I’ve been doing for years – down the country lanes near my house, but rather than cutting through the footpath in front of the fields, now I take a sharp left and go round the farm, doubling back behind the houses and adding at least six miles… sorry, were you starting to nod off?  It’s official: I have become a marathon bore.

The final trimester of pregnancy is a strange time. You’ll be told to rest, as if you can somehow bank sleep. The reality is likely to be a dash to buy everything you need, as well as don’t need (a hi-tech ‘nappy bag’ for instance). Once the baby arrives, even trying to get out of the house becomes a mission. With that in mind, here are some helpful ways to focus mind and body during the final few weeks, if you’d rather not spend too much time obsessing over the correct shade for the nursery.  Complete your baby courses The National Childbirth Trust runs the most well-known antenatal courses, but many others are available too. Bump and Baby Club is supposedly a little more relaxed in its attitude towards childbirth.

‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us all, but women in the most dehumanising terms, into mere bodies; bodies that can be chopped, changed, rearranged increasingly even to accommodate the outward trappings of the opposite sex. This manifests itself most completely of course in porn, as it always has, where the cold-eyed camera sees everything of the body and nothing of the person inhabiting it.

In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry has revealed he ‘enhanced his calm’ during the birth of his son Archie in 2019 by taking ‘several slow, penetrating hits’ of the canister of laughing gas in his wife Meghan’s hospital room. He described how when a nurse returned and tried to give Meghan a dose for pain relief, there was none left: ‘I could see the thought slowly dawning. Gracious, the husband’s had it all. “Sorry,” I said meekly.’ He is far from alone in enjoying the high that comes from laughing gas. Also known as nitrous oxide, it has become the second most popular drug (behind cannabis) among 16- to 24-year-olds, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. An astonishing 3.

A few months ago I wrote a piece for The Spectator about the surge in popularity of Elf Bars and the potential health risks of these colourful e-cigarettes. But disposable vapes are now posing a different kind of problem – for the planet.  These single-use devices, which last for around 600 puffs, head straight to landfill after users suck out their smoke. The vapes which don’t make it to the dump can be found lining the gutters of our cities, having been cast aside. In Britain an estimated 4.3 million people use vapes today, up from around 800,000 a decade ago, according to YouGov data.

I struggled to pull myself out of bed in the morning. I slept for hours at lunch breaks and was having a hard time focusing. I was working six days a week as an editor at one of the world’s largest newspapers. I needed to concentrate. It was my first year there on a fixed-term contract. I didn’t have the security of knowing I would be hired afterwards; I had limited scope to make mistakes. Articles that required extensive fact-checking, style correction and careful proofreading felt like an insurmountable obstacle. What was wrong with me? I booked a doctor’s appointment to check my vitamin levels. I’m anaemic, so thought that could have been the cause.

I thought I knew how to breathe properly. My years of studying dance at various institutions have all involved tuition on breathing and its relationship with movement and posture. So I was sceptical when I joined my step-sister Octavia’s online breathwork classes – what more was there to learn? My first class was in lockdown, at a time when many of us felt in a continual state of anxiety. We were guided through various techniques that manipulated the rate and depth of our breathing. It was dynamic and intense, much harder than I imagined. But nothing much happened at first. I started to think that maybe this wasn’t for me.

Have you seen the colourful sticks with blue lights hanging out the mouths’ of most teens and many adults? Elf Bars are the colourful and sweet disposable vapes causing a wave of dependence across all age groups.    While the government is looking to rid the nation of tobacco smokers, electronically delivered nicotine is becoming a new frontier.   People who have not smoked before are getting addicted to Elf Bars. And ex-smokers are turning back to cigarettes to wean themselves off the potent pens.  Costing between £4 and £12 depending where you buy them — they are cheap. Watermelon, Grape, Cola and Cotton Candy are a few of the 28 flavours on offer, and each user knows the flavours they love and the flavours they hate.

We all know about the perils of sugar. 90 per cent of us suffer from glucose (blood sugar) spikes every day. You may have even contended with the symptoms without recognising the cause: fatigue, cravings, mood swings, poor energy, bad sleep, acne and, crucially, weight gain. But what if you could mitigate the effects of glucose without forgoing sugar and carbohydrates completely? Starchy and sugary foods turn to glucose as we digest them. The resulting glucose then enters our blood stream. If too much glucose arrives too quickly in the bloodstream it causes a glucose spike. These spikes bring with them consequences: inflammation, premature ageing and fat storage. Many diets suggest cutting out sugar and carbohydrates completely.

Knots in the stomach? An overwhelming sense of despair? Nervous, restless and tense? That'll be the anxiety talking and for good reason. What with the financial crash, austerity, Brexit partisanship, climate change catastrophising, social media derangement, pandemic pandemonium and now the possibility of a third world war, I'd be concerned if we weren’t all feeling a tad anxious. Indeed NHS leaders are now urging ministers to tackle what they are calling a 'second pandemic' of depression, anxiety, psychosis and eating disorders, brought about by recent events. Indeed, one study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that diagnoses of anxiety had tripled in young adults since 2008. It's right that we take mental illness seriously.

For decades we have been told that it’s all our fault; that the reason many of us don’t manage to lose weight is a lack of willpower. But there’s a bigger cause behind our failure to shift the pounds and it’s certainly not due to floundering commitment. It’s down to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. In fact, there are several well-researched biological pathways that protect our body from weight loss and ensure our weight rebounds each and every time we attempt to slim down. Research shows that in order to lose weight and make it stick, you must eat well and exercise for a month – then have a month off.

Many of us have reached the conclusion of late that the world has gone mad, so it will come as no surprise to learn that it's now possible to sign-up for a run with an entry fee that's proudly claimed to be 'the second highest in the world'. To those who have long regarded running as a) something that you would pay not to do or b) an activity that's appealing because it's one of the few things left in life that's free, entering the four-day 'Highland Kings Ultra' might seem like an odd way to blow £15,499. But, according to organiser Primal Adventures, 'a significant number' of the 40 slots for the April 2022 event are already filled.

I plead guilty as charged m’lud. For the last four decades I have been telling patients who have been losing the battle with waistline spread that it’s their body's metabolism causing all the problems. This was conventionally believed to start to steadily slow year on year from the mid-30s onwards, meaning it became trickier to shift those stubborn pounds as time went by. It was also assumed that hormonal changes such as occur in pregnancy or the menopause further impacted on how quickly we burnt off calories, all adding to the struggle to keep weight off. Well, it now seems that, along with the rest of my medical colleagues, I was probably doing those patients a disservice.