Two things
There are a couple of news stories I want to make brief comment on this morning. One is the thing about Doctors urging a tough obesity drive. Callers to 5Live last night kept blaming the government and schools and anyone else for the fatness of the nation. But, just as there can surely be no smokers in this country who don't know it's bad for them, people do know that cream cakes and pies, in excess, cause obesity, which causes all kinds of other things.
We know this, but we still keep eating cream cakes and pies. And chips and pizza and Chinese food. And kebabs and biscuits and curry. We don't need government initiatives to point this out to us, we need a bit of self-discipline.
(Incidentally, I was on holiday recently with my family, and we shared a house near the beach with my wife's brother and his girlfriend and baby. Laurent is French and lives in a part of France where you don't see many Brits abroad - he only knows me, really. And as we'd sit in corner cafes drinking coffee, he'd spot the English, not by means of the socks with the sandals [not an exclusively British habit], but by their body shape, their size, their volume.
To our European neighbours, we are well known to be fat. That, and our shockingly bad clothing [football shirts, football shorts etc.] marks us.)
The second story in today's news is the idea being floated of banning door-to-door salesmen from certain areas.
I'm as against cold calling as anyone. I ignore the doorbell, or I close the door on them, I hang up the phone on them, or walk away from the phone, leaving them talking to themselves for a few minutes. But one of the problems with our society, it seems to me, is that we don't have enough people walking around on the streets going about their business. Hardly anyone has milk delivered any more; there's no such thing as second post; there are fewer households with stay-at-home mums or dads; even newspaper deliveries are on the wane; and dog owners keep anti-social hours so that nobody witnesses them shitting up the pavements.
We need more, not fewer, people on the streets. So what if it's a door-to-door salesman? Just say no and close the door. At least there'll be someone out there, and it'll look like a human society and not a ghost town inhabited by hooded thugs.
We know this, but we still keep eating cream cakes and pies. And chips and pizza and Chinese food. And kebabs and biscuits and curry. We don't need government initiatives to point this out to us, we need a bit of self-discipline.
(Incidentally, I was on holiday recently with my family, and we shared a house near the beach with my wife's brother and his girlfriend and baby. Laurent is French and lives in a part of France where you don't see many Brits abroad - he only knows me, really. And as we'd sit in corner cafes drinking coffee, he'd spot the English, not by means of the socks with the sandals [not an exclusively British habit], but by their body shape, their size, their volume.
To our European neighbours, we are well known to be fat. That, and our shockingly bad clothing [football shirts, football shorts etc.] marks us.)
The second story in today's news is the idea being floated of banning door-to-door salesmen from certain areas.
I'm as against cold calling as anyone. I ignore the doorbell, or I close the door on them, I hang up the phone on them, or walk away from the phone, leaving them talking to themselves for a few minutes. But one of the problems with our society, it seems to me, is that we don't have enough people walking around on the streets going about their business. Hardly anyone has milk delivered any more; there's no such thing as second post; there are fewer households with stay-at-home mums or dads; even newspaper deliveries are on the wane; and dog owners keep anti-social hours so that nobody witnesses them shitting up the pavements.
We need more, not fewer, people on the streets. So what if it's a door-to-door salesman? Just say no and close the door. At least there'll be someone out there, and it'll look like a human society and not a ghost town inhabited by hooded thugs.
posted by Anonymous at
Thursday, June 23, 2005
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