lifestyle – Page 16 – don't confuse the narrator

the weight of the world

I suspect I’m one of the few women of my age group who has never been on a diet; I was a skinny child and my mother used to tell me I wouldn’t put on weight until I got “a contented mind”.

I’m not sure that’s what happened, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore all the media hype about obesity and health: what used to be reserved for the pages of women’s magazines seems to have spilled over into the general press, and I’ve been aware for a while that my BMI is up at the top end of the acceptable range.

The latest article to catch my eye is on the BBC Health page, entitled “Where are you on the global fat scale?”.
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cat’ku

Looking for something summery to post for San Juan, I found this:

sunny verandah
a scattering
of kittens and kibble

The photo appears to have been taken on June 24th, two years ago. The blog post for that day is a proper Midsummer Night poem: noche de san juan.

the way through the fields

I was away for less than a fortnight, but the elderly neighbour has been ill and hasn’t been around with his donkey for a few weeks now.

It seems, then, that the path I take across the field to get onto the road to the village has been ‘repossessed’. (It used to stretch from where the photo was taken almost to the tree and then down to the right.)

I should probably write a poem about it, but I think Rudyard Kipling dealt with the same subject better than I ever will, even if he was writing about woods rather than fields:
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wiki-ed women

Referring to Google for help with an article, I find a new doodle. The mouse-over text tells me we’re celebrating “Día internacional de la mujer” – presumably I get that in Spanish as it’s my browser language.

A couple of clicks takes me to the Wikipedia page, also in Spanish:

Día internacional de la Mujer - wikipedia

I click to the English equivalent page and compare, and two things strike me:
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poetry, prose and politics

In a piece on the BBC website Magazine section, the historian David Cannadine talks about ties. The article starts:

The former governor of the state of New York, Mario Cuomo, once observed that in a modern democracy “you campaign in poetry but you govern in prose”.

which certainly caught my attention.

But Cannadine then makes a strange leap to connect this to the subject of ties:

Translated from speech to dress, […] suggests that you campaign wearing an open neck shirt, but govern wearing a tie.

To press the flesh and get yourself elected, it seems essential to dress down and appear casual, like ordinary voters, rather than be buttoned up or formal.

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