Dietary stuff and babysitting.

I’ve just read about another eating disorder. We’ve had anorexia and bulimia around forever it seems. Now comes ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder). Sufferers become sensitive to the taste, texture, smell and appearance of certain types of food.

 There’s a young man in Bristol who has refused to eat anything but sausages, chips and crisps for around a decade. As a result he is now blind and deaf. Apparent.y such a restricted diet affects the optic nerve and other bits of brain function. It’s not junk food per se that causes the problem, although it’s pretty bad, but eating nothing but causes manor trouble. You need to take vitamin and other supplements to make the diet somewhere near balanced.

 And I think of the students I taught who survived on a diet of “chip balms” in Salford, “chip balms” being a bread bun stuffed to the gulls with chips - carbohydrate sandwiches. Most of them did go home to a fairly normal meal in the evening though. And I think of my own granddaughter who refuses to eat any fruit or vegetables. Just handling them gives her the jumjams. And, yes, she has a range of health problems but her diet is helped by vitamin supplements. She seems to have survived reasonably well to 16 and has a decent clutch of GCSE grades to her credit.

 Today my smallest granddaughter, three years old yesterday, has spent the day with me. Settling down to watch Frozen for the umpteenth time in her case - she knows all the songs - she informed me that my television is very small. It’s a perfectly good size. It’s just that in her house they have a HUGE screen, obscenely so in my opinion. But it seems to be the modern things to have in your living room the sort of screen pubs use to show football matches.

 So I have spent part of the day playing with My Little Pony toys. I now know the names of a whole range of small plastic toys, whose names I never learnt when my own daughter played with them. But then she only had one or two. The range was not so great then. Neither was there a TV series with intricate stories. However, the smallest granddaughter plays imaginatively with her little friends. She understands all sorts of stuff about their comolex personalities. So I am not complaining.

 We set out for a walk, only to have the rain start to fall on us. This led to some protest as I had to manhandle her into a waterproof suit which she objected to on the grounds that it is “too lumpy”.

 So it goes.