The strangeness of things.

Despite predictions by a bunch of religious fatalists, who said that the world would end on Wednesday, here we still are. This was a continuation of the blood moon predictions from a few weeks ago. When the world didn't end at that point they did a recalculation and said that God had been calculating which of the churchgoers deserved to get into heaven but needed a bit more time to sort out those of us who no longer set foot in his places of worship. The mind boggles! Truly! 

So here we still are and, according to the World Health Organisation, getting fatter by the day. By 2025 they estimate that there will be one billion obese adults, not just overweight but actually diagnosed as obese. Some experts even think there have been metabolic changes. They have done comparisons between people having a certain calorific intake and a certain rate of exercise and worked out that in the 1960s and 1970s those people lost more weight than they do now. 

Personally I feel that it may because we babyboomers are not just the fortunate generation (free university education, maintenance grants, jobs aplenty when we graduated, etc, etc) but in fact we are a special little super-race who just do things more efficiently! 

I have been reading about a strange phenomenon in Argentina. Young people there are not getting married. Well, fewer of them do so now than ever before and a group of friends decided, when they realised that it had been a long time since they had been to a good wedding party, to stage a "falsa boda". This false wedding, at which friends got all dressed up, oohed and aahed at the pretend bride and then had a good knees up to celebrate, was so successful that they have now started to do it professionally. And so they stage weddings with a twist. A third party will turn up, an ex, a spurned lover, someone who knows a secret, and events take a dramatic turn. People pay around £30 to attend these events, probably a lot cheaper than paying for stag and hen parties, wedding gifts and the like. And an added spin-off is that it provides a wonderful venue for hardworking single people to meet possible future spouses! Fact is stranger than fiction! 

Clive James, Australian poet, writer, "personality", has been apologising for not being dead. Last year he wrote a poem, Japanese Maple, stating that his leukaemia would have finished him off by the time the maple turned red for the autumn. New medication has kept him alive to see another autumn. Another who has avoided the end of the world! 

Out running this morning, I stopped to chat to Jack and his little dog Rosie. A huge lorry stopped and the driver asked us the way to a local small industry. We were happy to oblige and as the lorry went on its way we talked about sat navs. Jack said he might need to get one after, despite a quite lengthy resistance. Yesterday he set off to Christie's Hospital for a check up (he is another who has cheated the end of the world) and got lost. One way systems, changes to buildings over the last year and who knows what else got him confused and he ended up in the middle of nowhere. And missed his appointment to boot. For the return journey he opted to do M60 and M62, coming off up the road from here at Denshaw. In retrospect this was a mistake as he took the long way round the M60 and finally got home at around 4 in the afternoon, having left home at 10 in the morning. Goodness knows how many miles and how much petrol he consumed! 

Life is more complicated than fiction!