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reminder system
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September 2004
 Talkback is a regular
feature in laterlife.com run by journalist and author Helen Franks.
Welcome to talkback 54
Read Helen’s views and ideas, then add your own by
emailing her on helen@laterlife.com. Whatever
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Food, news and jet lag
We’ve just returned from a holiday in the US, and as well as jet lag are
suffering from being overfed and under-informed.
Food first: I’ve never seen so many overweight people in one place or
so many large clothes in the shops. The reason isn’t junk food, it’s simply
that portions are so enormous. Order a salad and you get a huge plate of
green stuff, usually saturated with dressing. Grab a filled roll from a
supermarket and note the weight of it. Could be a good half-pound of ham in
there.
A news programme on television exposed the shocking fact that a
chicken salad contained more calories than a big Mac: yes, it was the
blue-cheese dressing that did it.
Which brings me to news. If I felt overfed on the food front, I was
starved of news. CNN, the main television source, seemed to consist of
snatched news moments between the advertisements. When I say news, I mean
murder trials. Underneath these was a constant stream of subtitles, with a
summary of headlines covering world events. Couldn’t get my head round them,
not with the murder stuff going on at the same time.
Radio was hardly better. The public service news channels struggled
to bring a broader perspective, but what can you learn about a siege in Iraq
when the programme presenter used most of the time congratulating the
reporter in Baghdad on her witty greeting?
Where international news and comment should have been, lurked a black hole.
I listened to a popular radio programme fronted by Ross Limbaugh and
was appalled. He was running a speech by senator John Kerry, but there was
no way you could hear a word of it. What we got was a continuous ‘voiceover’
commentary by Limbaugh, slating the senator’s views in the most rude and
dismissive way.
No wonder our American friends listened to the BBC World Service.
And finally, the long-haul flights. It must be age, because I
couldn’t read, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bear the television films. My DVT
socks felt uncomfortable. And we seem to have permanent jet lag. (We did the
Argonne anti-jet lag diet – see August Healthwise - on our journey out, and
it seemed to help. But it was too much of a hassle to organise when coming
home.)
 Apart
from that, it was the holiday of a lifetime. Seeing good friends,
visiting a wild west mining town (complete with brothel museum), driving
through incredible mountain scenery, experiencing New Mexico and the Santa
Fe opera house, and a remote Native American reservation, and finally the
Grand Canyon (which was awesome in the most accurate rendering of that
word).
Glad we did it. Can cope with the food and the news. Just wish the
jet lag would go away.
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