Reasons To Be Thankful - 26/01/2014

Source: MJASmith

It's all too easy to find things to complain about in your life - endless automated menu systems on company phone lines, getting cut up at a roundabout, not getting enough sleep, you know the drill.

It occurred to me recently that the people who have the most positive impact on your life also tend to be the most optimistic, the ones who seem resolutely upbeat and untrammeled by any small inconvenience. So, in an effort to approach things more positively, I decided to look back on the last week and, if I could find five things to feel truly thankful for, I figured I'd be on the right track. When I put my mind to it, it wasn't that hard.

Migraleve and Nurofen

On Wednesday morning I woke up with a dull headache. By the time I'd got to work and fired up my PC it was evident to me that it had become a migraine, in all its nauseating glory. I don't suffer with migraines very often but a couple of years ago I woke up on a Saturday morning with one whilst on a weekend away with M. and the girls in London and I wound up buying some Migraleve from Boots in Canary Wharf which cleared it away really quickly. (Pleased though I was with that, I was shocked at the note on the packet advising that, because of its codeine content, more than three days of use could cause addiction).

Since that day I've always carried that packet of Migraleve in my work bag (as a preemptive measure against a potential migraine, not because I'm now addicted to painkillers). It worked on Wednesday, or well enough to get me through a meeting with my boss and the various conference calls I sat through that day. The well-it-would-be-a-shame-to-leave-a-trickle-in-the-bottle glass of wine that M. poured for me that evening may have been a mistake, or maybe it just took longer to get over the migraine, but I woke up on Thursday with another headache, but a couple of Nurofen took care of that.

I didn't plan to open this post by being thankful for over-the-counter drugs, but nevertheless they really helped this week.

Brownies

My eldest daughter started Brownies last year, and each Thursday after dutifully completing her homework at school she goes off to our local community centre for a couple of hours. She loves it, and just completed the work for her first badge - the Booklovers badge, appropriately enough, given that at seven she has a reading age well beyond that and goes through novels like they're going out of fashion.

I pick her up from Brownies every week. It's only a two minute drive from the community centre to our house, but it's actually the only two minutes I get to spend alone with her each week. It's always a highlight, especially as she comes out of the hall positively bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm (for context, she's normally very calm and reserved). It's become one of my most cherished moments of the week, even if it means that she doesn't settle down to bed for ages because she's so excited about the fun stuff she's been up to with the group. This week she emerged carrying a shoebox which she'd decorated with a rudimentary decoupage from magazines, wrapping paper, old calendars and so on. I don't think I've ever seen her get as excited about anything else in her life, giving me some small ray of hope that she might always enjoy the simpler things in life.

Beigel Bake, Brick Lane

Every Friday lunchtime, two colleagues of mine and I leave the modern environs of the City and head for the infinitely more interesting Brick Lane, the sole reason for this excursion being to buy bagels from one of the two shops in the stretch of Brick Lane just north of where the old Truman Brewery used to be.

More often than not, I'm just picking up bagels for the following day's lunch, though quite when I got into this habit I don't know. It would be all too easy to pick up a packet of bagels from the supermarket close to home, but those bagels are poor synthetic cousins to the small, chewy rolls that you can only really get from a proper Jewish outlet. Plus at 25p per bagel, I can't think of many other lunches that come cheaper than that.

My colleagues and I started going to the first bagel shop you come to as you walk up Brick Lane from the old brewery. At some point we switched allegiance to Beigel Bake a couple of doors up, where the service is better and the staff friendlier. On our recent excursion I bought a slice of baked cheesecake, which, in all its firm, crumbly glory, was just about the best cheesecake I've ever had. A snip at just 70p. Most Fridays my friend Dan follows up his salt beef bagel with a coffee from Brick Lane Coffee next door, a funky place with a predilection for Lego, Star Wars and risqué posters and mugs with deceptive slogans that you'd never give to your parents if they popped in for a cuppa.

(In the picture above you can see my friend Anthony emerging from the shop; I like to think the smile on his face shows how much we enjoy visiting this place.)

Saturday Mornings

Time was, back when the girls were younger, when I would spend Saturday mornings in a terrible mood. For a while we attributed this to a pair of Mr. Grumpy socks that always seemed to be the next pair at the top of my sock drawer whenever Saturday came around; we now realise that this was a mere coincidence. None of us believe in magic, character-changing socks these days.

The truth was that I just didn't know what I was doing, or had no confidence in my abilities as a father, or both. M. would head off to the gym early Saturday morning, something which I never begrudged her doing after a week of looking after the kids while I went to work, but the mood that prevailed before she left the house may well have been construed as such.

Nowadays things are better. M. still goes to the gym all morning but I'm much more relaxed. This is probably because the girls have grown up a bit and my duties extend to simply putting out bowls for the cereal that they pour themselves or cleaning their teeth before we leave the house. I'm probably no more confident than I was when they were younger (I still can't tie their hair up in ponytails, for example), but things have definitely become easier. I'm still prone to bouts of grumpiness but I'm much more self-aware these days: it's true that you get out what you put in, and you can guarantee that if I'm in a mood then all I'm going to get back is two very grumpy little girls, and grumpy girls are indeed a force to be reckoned with.

My eldest daughter goes to a drama class for most of Saturday morning, leaving me to spend three hours with my youngest daughter. Those three hours have become among the most cherished of the week, something I couldn't have imagined earlier in her life. Our eldest is a daddy's girl through and through but it's fair to say that my relationship with our youngest was always a bit more strained, and I've never had as close a relationship as M. enjoys with her. Perhaps through me being more relaxed, or her growing up a bit more, Saturday mornings have given us a chance to enjoy each other's company and bond a lot more. It's only taken almost six years.

Most Saturday mornings we'll find ourselves running errands, either to a supermarket in Milton Keynes or taking a walk to our local high street shops in Woburn Sands to visit the tiny library we are fortunate enough to have in this small town of ours. We talk about whatever takes our fancy, play I spy, look out for cats, interesting buildings or just make small talk about school, work or sundry other things according to our moods. Just lately I've made a commitment to her that once we've done our chores we'll spend some time doing some sort of craft activity. A couple of weekends ago it was decorating a paper lantern she got for Christmas, while this weekend it was decorating a shoebox just like her sister had done enthusiastically at Brownies earlier in the week.

I've never been a big fan of getting messy, and for a long time we've been happy to outsource that sort of activity to their school teachers but I guess I've reached a point where I think it's fun, and certainly worth it for the happiness it brings my youngest little girl.

For the record, I still have the Mr. Grumpy socks, but they appear to have lost whatever potency they may once have had.

Breaking Bad

I am passionately averse to anything that's hyped. I don't know when this started, but over the years it's just developed into a sort of mantra; I don't mind 'cult' films or books, but such things often attain that cult status because they were roundly ignored when they were first made and achieve plaudits by slowly working their way into people's hearts. Hyped things don't do that; they have an impudent swagger, get five star ratings as soon as some reviewer has watched the opening credits, and get critics sufficiently hot under the collar to deploy billboard-worthy words with a fervent enthusiasm that all seems a bit daft. (I realise that in saying this I'm being somewhat ironic, given that my music reviews are published each month by Clash and I will confess to having deliberately worked up at least one sentence in a review with the sole purpose of seeing it quoted in an advert).

So it was with Breaking Bad: everyone I knew was gushing about it, and so I wanted to avoid it with similar enthusiasm. And then a colleague let me borrow the boxset of the first three series and, despite some initial reticence M. and I were both hooked (aided, in M.'s case by Aaron Paul, the latest in a lengthening line of men she confesses to having a crush on). Sufficiently hooked, I would say, to have found ourselves approaching the end of the third series with an addict's sense of desperation: we'd watched two or three episodes per night for going on three weeks and with series four not in our possession, we had a need for another fix but no real way of knowing where the next hit was going to come from.

I found myself at a kids party with my youngest daughter this past weekend where I spent a comfortable hour extolling the virtues of the show to another dad, who, in wearing a very cool Heisenberg t-shirt, had marked himself out rather prominently as something of a fan.

'Series four is the best,' he mused, perhaps sensing my desperation to get my hands on those episodes. I briefly wondered if he would exchange those episodes for one of my kidneys.

Perhaps I've been wrong about hype all along. I was wrong about The Wire and Girls and many other things. But then I think back to the hours wasted watching Kill Bill, some Oscar-winning ensemble cast film that might have gathered all sorts of risible adjectives or Comedy Central garbage like The Millers or Mike And Molly and reckon I'm not quite ready to slavishly follow the herd just yet.

Alcohol

Source: BBC

I decided to give up drinking alcohol for a month. I'd seen the posters for Octsober, a month-long initiative to make people aware of alcohol abuse, similar to this month's Movember, during which time men grow their facial hair to raise awareness of testicular cancer; I'd seen the poster, but didn't feel terribly compelled to participate in a month-long spell of enforced alcohol abstinence. I'm not good at feeling like I'm being told to do something by a marketing campaign.

Be assured, I'm not a alcoholic, nor do I consider myself to have any sort of drinking problem, and in fact, in contrast to others I know, I barely drink at all. I never drink on a school night, I hardly ever drink if I'm at a work dinner or on the rare occasion I go out for after-work drinks, I can only think of a handful of occasions where I've shared a whole bottle of wine with my wife during the course of an evening, and my principal alcohol consumption is confined to a couple of cocktails on a Friday and Saturday night and a glass of wine with lunch on a Sunday. In this sense, I'm not that different to my younger self; I didn't drink that much as a student and I can probably count the number of times I've been properly wasted on two hands. In fact, I wrote a post for my first blog (The First Days Of My Thirties) a few years ago that covered my mild misdemeanours with alcohol, and I have no other notable additions to make to that list. When I had a compulsory medical in my first few weeks of starting at university in 1995, in response to the question 'Has anyone commented on the amount you drink?' I put 'Yes, people say I don't drink enough.' The doctor didn't see the funny side of this. So, in summary, I don't think I have a problem, but then again, I imagine that most people with an alcohol problem don't think they do either.

The opportunity to abstain for a month came with the confluence of the bottles of vodka, gin and Bacardi in our house all running dry at more or less the same time. These are the bases I use for most of the cocktails I make so it meant spending anything up to £70 on three bottles of booze in one go. Money being tight anyway these days and with Christmas coming up, the idea of that expenditure was hard to justify, in the same way as I'd find it hard to justify buying music or an expensive hobby right now.

So for the entire month of November not a drop of alcohol passed my lips. I'd like to say that I felt better for it, but for some reason the only real benefit seems to have been financial. The month of abstention seemed to coincide with a period of unsettled sleep for our youngest daughter, and so I still woke up on Saturday and Sunday mornings during November with a jaded feeling, just as if I'd had a few drinks the night before. I'm sure my body appreciated the detox on some level, but I suspect you need to drink a lot more than I do to feel a major benefit.

But maybe there was one major benefit of the month off: I didn't miss alcohol at all. I didn't drive home from the train station after work on a Friday looking forward to a gin and tonic, or idly look through my cocktail books on a Saturday afternoon looking for interesting recipes to make, and in spite of having a pretty stressful period at work, I don't remember once thinking to myself that I needed a drink after an especially gruelling day in the office.

Still, that was November. It's now practically December, the time for Christmas traditions; mulled wine, the first alcohol I will have consumed in a month is being prepared, its boozy, fruity, spicy fragrance filling my kitchen. The Christmas drinks cupboard is being restocked and festive cocktail recipes are being pulled out of the Saturday papers.

Cheers.

Coffee

I have given up coffee.

I've had intentions of doing this before, and have managed a week at best. In total I have drunk coffee routinely since I was thirteen, or twenty full years out of my thirty-three. That's a lot of stimulant.

Except that my consumption was never excessive, and in comparison to other people was positively non-existent. I'd go so far as to say it was lightweight, wimpy. I can probably think of no more than three times where I've drunk more than three cups of coffee in a day; latterly, since I started commuting into the office from my home in Milton Keynes, a decent cup of coffee was required just to get the day at work started. Just one, mind. This is contrast to people I met recently in Geneva, who would drink five or six espressos in a morning just to be able to face the day. For me it was a milky americano at about 7.30, occasionally followed by another toward the end of the morning if the day was proving especially draining.

Coffee has on occasion done some strange things to me if I stepped outside of that one, maybe two cups a day range. I recall drinking two huge lattes in a café in Colchester that was trying to capture the whole Central Perk-esque, relaxed and convivial vibe of Friends. That was at about 10.30 in the morning. Despite not having anything else caffeinated for the rest of the day, thanks to that injection, I was still awake at 3.00 the next morning. And that's the thing that was most surprising about the event that led to my withdrawal from coffee; usually, coffee would have an effect on my head, not my body. I'd come away from a strong coffee feeling light-headed and not really 'with it'.

I read an article in Esquire last year detailing the negative side of coffee drinking but despite being worried to death by what it had to say, and despite a concerted effort to start drinking coffee every other day, I failed miserably. But still I never stepped outside that one or two cups a day range.

And then, a month ago, I went round to my parents' house and had a cup of Joe; nothing too hardcore, just from a jar. And then I went home and found Mrs S making one, so I thought I'd have another, again just from a jar. I wouldn't normally have two cups so close together, but I didn't think it mattered. Remember that two cups in a day, even if they're close together, isn't in any way excessive.

So it was a surprise to me that from the moment I finished that second cup, at about 11.30 that Sunday morning, through to when I went to bed, twelve hours later, I'd endured half a calendar day's-worth of heart palpitations so relentless and intense that I thought I was either having a heart attack or about to witness my own heart break free from the confines of my chest and bounce about all over the floor of my house like some sort of psycho Space Hopper. I was petrified, and couldn't see that coffee alone had prompted this feeling.

I don't know how I was able to sleep, but I did. However, when I woke up for work at 5.00 the next day those racing palpitations were still there, so I decided to call the doctors and get an emergency appointment. By the time I got there, my heart felt almost normal again – typical – and I was just left with an equally-worrying tightness in my chest.

I told the doctor about the coffees of the day before, at which she nodded sagely, doing that semi-sympathetic, semi-patronising smile medics are so adept at, and as she explained that caffeine had likely provided the trigger, I felt stupid and sheepish. And just as I was about to slope away apologising for wasting her time, she asked me if I'd been feeling stressed recently.

The answer was that I had. A week or two before that Sunday I'd experienced some of the most frantic, busy and stretching days at work I've ever endured. She said that the coffee may well have been the trigger for the palpitations, but that the stress had provided the conditions for my body to react differently than it would normally have. The trigger for the trigger if you like.

I was genuinely surprised. Up to that point I thought I'd managed stress in my life reasonably well. The impact of that Sunday was to make me rethink my approach to complexity and uncertainty generally, and I've (mostly) been more calm and balanced since then; more like how I've been told I appear on the surface perhaps, less internalising problems. In addition, I decided to give up coffee. Completely. Cold turkey.

A month later I haven't been tempted once to order an americano at all; not once. The physical effects I experienced that Sunday prompted such a fear of what something seemingly so innocuous could do to you that I just needed to cut it out completely.

So there you are; that's why I'm no longer drinking coffee.