Healthy living.

Contrary to their earlier suggestions, health people are now telling us that drinking three to five cups of coffee a day does not harm you and may in fact protect you from type 2 diabetes and one or two other diseases. Or at least that's what some of them are saying. This benefit does not apply to fizzy drinks containing caffeine as they usually contain enough caffeine to give you insomnia and palpitations, as well as probably rotting your teeth. Neither does it work if you drink what the report I read describes as "the creamy, sugary versions from coffee shops". No, just ordinary black or white coffee. So you should still feel bad about drinking caramel lattes in huge cups! 

This must be a day for reading about health because almost immediately after reading that I came across an item about how much healthier it is to go the loo squatting instead of just sitting. Actually I knew that already. The Romans used to squat apparently. According to what I read today, if you don't fancy perching on top of the toilet seat to squat, putting your feet on a little stool and leaning forward is almost as good. Amazing what you can read about in the papers! 

Bad for your health is something called BASE jumping or B.A.S.E. jumping. BASE jumping is an extreme sport. As far as I can tell, extreme sports are practised by people with no sense of what might happen to them, or possible just with no sense! B.A.S.E. is an acronym - Building, Antenna, Span and Earth (i.e. cliff) from which idiots jump. My attention was drawn to this by a headline about two well known BASE jumpers who died in Yosemite National Park in the USA over the weekend. Well known in the extreme sports world anyway. When they failed to return from their jump at the weekend, friends reported them missing and their bodies were found some time later in a gorge. Base jumping in Yosemite is illegal and those who attempt it risk being arrested and fined. Maybe the illegality of it just added spice to the activity. 

Presumably sending out planes and a search party to find them cost their friends a fair amount of money. But then, I suspect this extreme sport is probably a pastime of the rich, as ordinary working people don't have the resources to get to the venues and pay for the equipment. Once again I am obliged to ask why anybody wants to jump off a high building with a parachute or a set of "wings". Oh, I know all the arguments about how climbing places and getting yourself into and out of difficult situations is something that people do "because they can", "because the mountain is there" and such like but it doesn't mean I am convinced by them. 

I read about this after having watched a gutter man climb up ladders to clear out our blocked downspout. Our house is perhaps a little odd - although it's style is quite common around here - in that it has two stories at the front but three at the back. The ground slopes down at the side of the house so that you can go in through the front door, apparently at ground level, and then go downstairs into what should be a basement but which in fact opens onto the back garden: hence the difference in number of floors. Recently we have noticed that when it rains the water running down the sloping gutter at the back of the house fails to go down the downspout but kind of cascades down the wall, increasing the possibility of damp affecting the building. And so we arranged for a man to come along and poke about at the top of the down spout and clear away any collected gunk. This he duly did, with Phil supporting the bottom of the ladder and risking having the aforementioned gunk land on his head. The rain now runs nicely down the downspout. 

Now, this chap went up the ladder as part of his job, something he gets paid for. OK, nobody forces him to do this job but still, he is doing it to earn money, not paying out a sum of money to risk his life by climbing up into a high place. We spoke about the fear of heights thing and he said that he has on occasion found himself freezing - with nerves, not cold - at the top of a ladder in a high place. I suppose that every once in a while up at the top of a ladder or on the roof of a house a workman's imagination can suddenly kick in and he finds himself visualising the plummet down to earth. Our gutter man said that in such a situation he simply has to bite his lip, settle his nerves and get on with the job, because after all he will still have to get down that ladder when the job is finished. It's definitely not a job I would want to do though. 

I think I'll just stay in!