Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain." - when I visited Castle Howard in 1986, then under the management of the Howard family not English Heritage or the National Trust, I was appalled at the state of the fabric.

"In the final part of this book we will examine in detail HOW you can lower your weight set-point by altering: 1 Your environment and pscyhological health 2. Your food and eating habits 3. Your activity and lifestyle" - cf The Sunday Times ABC diet, 1984. (Activity, Behaviour, Comsumption)

"Slowly, over the years, our eating behaviour changed inexorably until it was not at unusual at all to see people enjoying a snack - something that would have been seen as odd prior to the 1970s" - I find it hard to believe elevenses and teatime were invented in the 1970s.

"We need just one teaspoon of sugar [in our five litres of blood] to reach our optimal blood level of 80mg/dl" - I would to see this done for salt.

"And I considered how much I disliked Big Englanders, whom I saw as redfaced, staring, loud-voiced fellows wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world, and being surprised and pained and saying "Bad show!" if some blighters refused to fag for them." - Brexiteers appalled that Europeans now refuse to import their fish and financial services?

"Yet Jarrow and Hebburn looked much worse to me than some of the French towns I saw at the end of the war, towns that had been occupied by the enemy for four years" - English industrialists worse despoilers than the cursed Hun.

"...most of whose ancestors never saw a county of Great Britain. We all know this England..." - he refuses to recognise the difference.

"May [Norwich] become once more...a city in which foreigners exiled by intolerance may seek refuge and turn their sons into study and cheerful East Anglians" - he's writing about French Protestants: what he would make of Syrian Muslims?

"An even better example [of public spirit of Norwich's citizens] is found in the city's purchase of land all around the edge of town, which is now enclosed in a green ring about two miles wide" - origin of the green belt concept?

"I was shown several varieties of fish here that were quite useless for the home market because the English, even the poorest, won't touch them. They were re-shipped to the Continent.." - no longer an option.

"In spite of so many prophecies to the contrary, we are now less urban than our fathers and grandfathers were; the country gentleman tradition is livelier today than it was twenty-five years ago; and I understand there are far more people hunting now than there were before the war." - the cause of England's de-industrialization?

"These Hull trawlers do not fish the North Sea but sail up to the Arctic and may be away for three weeks." - the collapse of the British fishing industry can hardly be blamed on European competition in British coastal waters.

"It did not seem an English landscape at all. You could easily imagine that a piece had been lifted out of a dreary central region of some vast territory like Russia or America, then dropped on this corner of our island" - i) English landscape has a certain scale. One I guess that it shares with other European countries. ii) Great Britain is an island, but neither the Welsh nor the Scots get a mention.

"During the five years ending in 1931 more than 5,000 people were killed in the coal-mining industry, and more than 800,000 were injured." - Anger provokes statistics, which are otherwise rare in this book.

"If there had been several working collieries in London itself, modern English history would have been quite different" - I wonder if the presence or absence of coal isn't at the heart of the North/South divide.

"The change in the type and amount of fats consumed in the western diet has resulted in an increase in the omega-6 to the omega-3 ratio from a natural level of four...to the current level up to fifty" - from figure 9.7 only canola approximates a ratio of 4, maybe butter and palm oil but in much lower quantities.

"So an upsurge in the cell wall of omega six...will increase the amount of inflammation...inflammation inceases THF-alpha...THF alpha blocks the action the leptin. Leptin resistance causes obesity." - I was wondering when we were going to get back to Leptin.

"The association of British sailors with limes spawned the nickname 'limeys'..." - I have always assumed it was a reference to the colour of mineral lime.

"The oil in the remaining germ of the rice would rapidly become rancid and attract mould and insect infestation. It was therefore of no use for trading, and of no use to supply large numbers of people in remote locations, such as armies on the move. Polished could be stored...shipped and traded." - glad to discover that the Chinese Empire and not just the British contributed to global famine and malnutrition.

"What great work, I asked myself, I asked myself, owes it's existence to those vast profits, those mounting dividends? What sciences and arts had they nourished? What new graces had they added to English life in return for what they had taken away from here?" - was it obvious in 1933 that industrialization had actually raised living standards for the poor, or did that come with the welfare state?

"...there had been enormous fortunes spent in wages and material in profits and dividends. But still I wondered, as I stood there, shivering a little, whether it had all been worth while." - anti-industrializationism again.

"[Gateshead] has fewer public buildings of any importance than any town of its size in the country. If there is any town of like size on the continent of Europe that can show a similar lack of civic dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation, I should like to know its name and quality" - more Europhilia: did WWI make the British more pro-European and WWII less so. Allies vs. Liberators?

"The problem with omega-3, though, as far as the food industry is concerned, is that it causes food to go off and become rancid (this is actually a sign that it IS food and not a manufactured food replacement)" - if it doesn't go off, it's not food: an interesting definition.

"Only women and children stop at the greengrocers section and only men go to the butcher's section' - I read recently that anthropologists now have evidence against this assumption.

"We can find this out by studying what current hunter-gatherer which remain isolated from modern influences: [Tanzania, Namibia, Congo, Amazonia, Greenland]" - No temperate grasslands where grains might occur naturally.

"The lowest metabolic rate of a group of ten people [same sex, age and size] would be 1,075 kcal per day whereas the highest would be 1,790kcal per day." - as he says this would make a nonsense of my app"s calculations...but I am losing weight as by app would suggest. I have an average metabolic rate?

"Leptin is released by fat cells" - I've learnt something new

"There is no escape. We may be under fifty different national flags, but we are compelled to serve now under only one economic flag." - the reality Brexiteers are still ignoring, eighty years later.

"Actually, the comparative decline began years ago" - Industrialism was never part of the English character, there was never any interest in restoring it once it had burnt itself out.

"That is Blackpool. It is a complete and essential product of industrial democracy" - Not sure it is. The English economy is now service based, but mass English tourism now is still the same, it just happens on the Mediterranean rather than on the English coasts. I guess more to do with ancestral raiding of Saxon and Dane. Having said that, the last time I was in Blackpool many women were wearing niqabs.