Generally speaking, my experience of trains involves daily commutes on our increasingly dilapidated underground system or else impossibly crammed Friday afternoon virgin train carriages heading northwards, so it’s easy to forget they’re actually my preferred form of transportation. When it works it’s relaxed, comfortable, even dignified, and allows time and opportunity to lose one self in the scenery. It helps that I usually take long trips for good reasons. Last month, trains took me to Bristol to see an old friend, and this month they took me to Exeter to see an entirely different old friend.
Travelling west always feels peculiar. I lived for a long time in the M3/M4 corridor of course, so there’s plenty of personal memories and genera life detritus associated with that particular, most Ballardian of landscapes, however over the years a number of my oldest friends have, through chance rather than choice, drifted westwards and the act of visiting them - reconnecting with good times past - has lent the journey a slightly unreal, almost mystical feeling of going back in time, a feeling the landscape of rolling hills, fairy mounds and standing stones only serves to accentuate. Like I say, peculiar.
Anyway, my point is long train rides through the country, weekends with good company, sunshine and the seaside rock.
Also on the train, I read Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, a short eating manifesto preceeded by 200-odd pages of argument as to why you should adopt it. It offers much food (haha) for thought. At times Pollan seems to be adopting a mildly anti-science, preachy new-agey tone of which I’m instinctively sceptical, however his argument is more broadly anti-bad science, in particular science he believes is biased or outright compromised by food manufacturers. His main target is ‘nutritionism’ - the reductionist view that the value of food is entirely derived from the sum of its nutritional components, and the only value of eating is to promote bodily health. Pollan provides many examples of just how tenuous that argument is, and exposes the health claims of many food manufacturers as at best a quasi-science ill-supported by real research. The manifesto itself is delightfully simple and revolves around advice like: eat with company; avoid anything with more than five ingredients on the label; cook; and the book’s core message, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. Pollan makes a convincing argument and offers workable solutions. I’m already finding myself trying to follow some of his advice, checking food labels, going all-organic, and generally worrying myself about becoming too middle-class. As someone who’s general diet has gone completely to pot over the last few months though, this feels like a very positive step in the right direction. Cheers, Michael.
I’ve been following Harper’s Island on iPlayer. It’s advertised as a mystery thriller, the novelty being a character gets killed off every episode, with even the cast none the wiser as to what order they were going to be offed in until the day of shooting where their number gets called. Nice idea, except it really isn’t all that suspenseful waiting to see which muppet gets to die, and the killings themselves feel a bit tagged on to the end of every episode. It’s essentially a slasher film dragged out to thirteen-odd episodes, but I have a weakness for slashers, and whist the characters are every bit as inept and uncurious as their big screen counterparts, I’m finding it oddly compelling viewing.
