The end of the festive season, and odd ideas people live by!

Overnight the Three Kings will have delivered presents to all the good little Spaniards and the Befana, a kind of benevolent witch whose connection to Christmas, rather like that of pantomine, I have yet to understand, will have delivered presents to all the good little Italians. And that’s that. Christmas is officially over!

I ran round the village this morning early - well, not that early as it was gone nine o’clock - and the council workers were already busy in their hi-vis vests removing Christmas trees from their various stands outside shops. The village may have won the award for the best Christmas lights in all the Saddleworth villages but there’s no messing around. When it’s over, it’s over!

So after I had showered and breakfasted, I took all the decorations off the tree and put them in the storage box. In the process I discovered a little box with some of my favourite tree bauble which had been forgotten in the excitement of my three year old helper setting the tree up with me. Still, there ‘s always next year.

And now the lights and baubles and the Christmas crib figures have all been stowed away in the attic, the thirty-odd cards have gone into paper recycling, the tree has been put in a sheltered place in the garden, in the hope it will survive to be reused next year, and even the fallen pine needles have been vacuumed up. All that remains is a stray piece of Christmas cake and a few chocolates!

The magazine section of the Guardian is still full of New Year’s hints - how to get and stay healthy and fit and trim and happy. You know the kind of thing. Decca Aitkenhead was writing in praise of having been vegan for a year and on a regime which sees her getting up for a cold bath at 5.00 am every morning. She says the way to do that is to get in the bathtub and gradually fill it up with cold water, rather than filling it up and lowering yourself gingerly into the icy bath. This is the same principle as putting a frog in a pan of water and gradually bringing it to the boil! She ends her article like this:

 “Friends from LA came to supper recently. They’ve always been a fanatically health-conscious couple, and over the years have taken a very dim view of my eating habits, so I emailed them in advance to say that dinner on this visit would be vegan and gluten-free, and did they have any other dietary requirements? In all honesty, I wasn’t really asking so much as showing off. Gluten free and vegan surely covered all bases; what other dietary requirements could anyone conceivably have?

“Nowadays we only eat foods permitted according to our blood type,” they emailed back.

After I’d stopped laughing about the madness of such pseudoscientific narcissism, a terrible thought occurred. Is this what happens once you set off down this path? If I’m writing about eating according to my blood type next January, someone please order me a Big Mac.”

In case you, like me, don’t believe that such a thing exists as matching your diet to your blood group, here is a link to some information about it.

In case that is not crazy enough, I read this yesterday:-

“In a study by the Innovation Center of US Dairy, it was found that seven per cent of Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That works out at about 16.4m people.

This isn’t the first study to reach a worrying conclusion though - previous research has found that nearly one in five Americans do not know that hamburgers are made from beef.

“At the end of the day, it’s an exposure issue,” said Cecily Upton, co-founder of the nonprofit FoodCorps, which brings agricultural and nutrition education into elementary schools.  “Right now, we’re conditioned to think that if you need food, you go to the store. Nothing in our educational framework teaches kids where food comes from before that point.”

And apparently some people don’t feel any huge need to find out either. “We still get kids who are surprised that a French fry comes from a potato, or that a pickle is a cucumber,” Upton said. “

 There seems to be something amiss in their education system!