How to get your five a day

I haven’t remained this young-looking, handsome and vibrant by being nutritionally complacent you know.

Oh no – I’ve had to work at this, and it’s an art to get it right. Here’s how you do it.

After in-depth research, and lengthy discussions with my brilliant nearly-nine-year-old assistant Rebecca, I’ve discovered that the secret of youth is making sure you get that all-important ‘five a day’, as recommended by Doctors, Nutritionists, your Mum, and that smug lady at the pub who looks a bit anaemic.

Now I’ve always taken what they say with a pinch of salt (which is probably a bad idea in itself), so we’ve interpreted their findings in a way which ensures I still get my dosage of life-enhancing fruit and veg, but without all the depressing fruitiness and veginess that tends to go hand in hand with so-called ‘healthy’ lifestyles.

For instance – cabbage? You’re having a laugh, surely. And Brussel Sprouts? All the evil of a cabbage, compacted into a smaller area, not to mention the fact that they look like bogies. No, on the Grumpy Diet (TM), you can avoid all that unpleasantness by working out what your everyday foodstuffs contain, to find out if you’re getting your correct helpings. It’s surprisingly simple, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to achieve too.

For example: Chocolate. Contrary to what you may have read, this compact explosion of wonderment contains milk, which comes from cows, who eat grass, which is 1 of your five a day. Cocoa beans count as a 2nd one, the sugar in it comes from sugar cane, so that’s three out of the way already – and you haven’t even had breakfast yet!

Beer is made with hops, so that counts as one as well. See how easy this is? A delicious cappuccino is another marvel in a cup, containing milk (see above) and coffee beans. That’s two! If you go for the chocolatey dusting on top, and sprinkle some sugar on it, you’re up to 4!

And how about doughnuts? They’re made with a wheat-type thing (I think) so there’s one, sugar is two, and the jam in the middle is three – maybe more if it’s mixed fruit. So as you can see, what others might deride as repugnant snacking is actually a feast of goodness, bulging at the seams with vitamins, minerals, and some other stuff that I saw in a copy of Readers Digest in the Doctor’s waiting room when I went for that health check up after the sugar overdose incident.

Rebecca and I may just have saved your life. You don’t know how lucky you’ve been – we got to you just in time. Now nip off and have a packet of Fruit Pastilles. That should set you up for the rest of the week. No need to thank us.

Have a nutritious weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 9th November 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here The paper retitled this one as "Five-a-day is so easy when you know how". Fair play - that's a better title, isn't it?

Even though I came in at under their required word count this week, 46 words vanished somewhere along the line. They're all here now, though, bless 'em.

And it's a big HELLO! to the good people of Redditch! The @Redditchnews twitter account has started retweeting my links to columns and on their facebook page too. I can only assume Redditch is fairly cheery, and they need some depressing git complaining about things to calm them all down a tad.

(The Mike Oldfield odyssey continues - today its "The Complete", which clearly isn't, or it would be much bigger than 2 CD's.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog