Saterday august 8 2009.

I got burnt on your behalf. So many tweets and facebook updates bemoaning another superb summer in the English capital I figured I owed it to you to take advantage of the one thing this city does have going for me: sunshine. Today was another blistering hot day spent at the beach, broadening my mind with a wide range of podcasts while feasting the eyes upon the tapestry of bodies so haphazardly strewn about. The sheer variety bewildering I wondered how many worried before coming here if they measured up to whatever magazine cover they surely came across in the months between booking and taking this holiday. Hopefully my thin frame has put them at ease.. the men atleast. I've given up on womankind ever learning to be happy with the skin they're in. Ofcourse, if we put a stop to advertising or start rating it as we do anything violent these days. The Americans rate trailers after all why not advertising: "This advertisement is rated 15+ PEGI may contain nuts and erroneous assumptions about what makes one look attractive that have been proven detrimental to the emotional well-being of girls as young as 8 years old. As with this blog- Parental Discretion advised."

Once upon a time the father of a friend of mine told me he was as skinny as me when he was my age. I found that hard to believe as he appeared as Hardy as I did Laurel. 'Not to worry' he said. 'When I hit my thirties I piled it on.. just you wait and see.' Since I quit smoking a few months ago I certainly have but nature can be cruel sometimes and instead of padding me out in a more general fashion or atleast the bits where the bones are sticking out it, ofcourse, centers around the waist. Great. Sit-ups. My least favourite activity in the gymn besides the bicycle, tread-mill, rowing machine, swiss ball, and weights. Its not easy being a lightweight I tell you. You have to grow pretty tough skin. The heavy-weights among us however have it so much tougher. Whereas before you and I were only bullied in school now the government is out to get you as well. Much like the countless friendly advice given to me over the years its not that they care its just that they've come to the conclusion they could save so much more money by preventing us from having to take a trip to the hospital. As if the amount they've been saving over the past few years hasn't resulted in waiting lists that have been doing just that already. The next thing you know they are going to be touting hospitals' own conclusion that they had nothing to do with up to 70% of the patients' they discharge recovery: apparently its the placebo effect. They say we've so come to believe in the miracle works of medical science the men in white coats might just be the latest incarnation of the wise old woman of the village boiling arcane ingredients in her cauldron or the man with the long white beard and the skull necklace jumping about to the beat of a pigskin drum. They might just institute make-belief sessions for everyone every sunday or if you're really fanatic about hygiene 5 times a day. Unfortunately, that would release the father of the diabetic 11 year old girl that died recently from manslaughter. After the praying he did to God to make her better it would seem, in my hypotethical government policy of the very near sighted future, she simply didn't believe fervently enough it would work. She believed in docters and docters would've given her an insulin shot. The 30% they are sure about then. By the way, don't you just hate it when you go to the docter, and I've been in more than one country, and they pull the old "well.. its either a bacteriological or a viral infection.." I mean, that pretty much covers everything except cancer, doesn't it? I've always wanted to turn around with my blood shot eyes and runny nose and ask them how long they have to go to school these days to become one but then I'm affraid such thoughts will obstruct the magical thinking that will make their prescription of "Lots of rest and lots of tv -I mean tea-" work. Back in the day they would advise you to wash your hands too but nowadays docters themselves can't be bothered to do that at your local hospital. So they fire the minumum wage cleaner who escaped a civil war in an unnamed african country and has been eeking out a living, illegally residing in the country where one day she too will get to sign up to a pension fund only to learn through her church they invest her savings in the military industrial complex which has been lobbying the government to green light arms deals to resource rich regions of the world around the equator so we have something to look forward to in the next century when the experts say we will run out of everything except rubbish therefore she is better off clasping her hands together and looking up to the sky where our heavenly father resides though it has been proven not to be a crystal sphere but a continuation -however tenuous- of the air we breathe into the vacuum of space. Which, a) makes you wonder what they thought was up there before the invention of glass, b)'the vacuum of space'.. when the vacuum was first discovered and they showed it off by making mice die, something scientist of all ages still get a kick out of to this very day (and in doing so discovering there's this gas we breathe) and bells ring without sound (and in doing so discovering sound requires a medium) the religious authorites of the time went through quite a lot of trouble silencing those who showed off this discovery, for as they put it "Nature abhors a vacuum" 't is funny then how He who created Nature end up living in it with his Angelic choirs singing so.. silently. But the real joke ofcourse is on the cleaner who mopped the floors with chemicals that make your eyes burn in hospitals where people are dying of bacteria that have evolved to eat flesh and now chooses not to pay for a pension which would get her that kind of healthcare and out of a moral obligation to her own people and a faith which has no need for an all encompassing theory which perfectly explains how all things great and small are connected to and diversified from a single source. Simply because its much cheaper to replace her than it is docters who refuse to clean their hands. All I'm trying to say is if you want people to lose weight, because us skinny people are a lot cheaper to treat, maybe you should release MRSA into the general populace.