Free personal nutrition report? I'm extremely unconvinced

So there's a company that's offering a free personal report to tell you what you should change about your nutrition. I thought I'd give it a go - what did I have to lose?

The way it works is that you fill in a questionnaire online, which they analyse and then they send you a link to your "personal" report which you can view online. I wasn't too surprised to see that their report ends up with recommendations for the purchase of health supplements from them - after all, why would they be offering a free report if they didn't hope to make a profit somehow? That's fair enough in my book.

But really disappointed me was the way the questionnaire was phrased. They ask you about certain types of food, and the question is: how often do you eat this? e.g. how often do you eat red meat/wholemeal bread/fruit/etc. And then on the basis of that rather limited information they produce what is supposed to be a personal report for you - how on earth do they reckon they can produce a personal report about my nutrition when they have no idea how much I eat of anything - all they know is how often I eat this stuff! Say you have two people filling in this questionnaire - John eats 100 grammes of red meat 5 times a week, whilst Jane eats 250 grammes of red meat twice a week. The answer to the question "how often do you eat red meat?" is going to be 5 times a week for John and twice a week for Jane, but they both eat the same amount per week.

Either I'm missing something, or this is one big con!

Who was it that thought up this expression - and why?

Once again I read in today's paper about a crime involving a "member of the public", and no matter how many times I've come across this expression I still can't get my head round it.

Am I missing something? It just seems like such a pointless, meaningless piece of euphemistic journalese. What does it actually mean when they say that someone is a "member of the public"? As far as I can see, all it means is that this is a person, one of us plebs, an ordinary human being. The public is us, not an exclusive club or political party or even book club or library, where you have to take out membership. I've been a member of the public for 46 years now, how long have you been a member? Can I cut up my membership card and stop being a member of the public? Are there any benefits to being a member?

I can see the point of euphemisms for expressions that may be considered obscene or offensive, but what's so bad about saying the guy who was stabbed on Oxford Street was, well, a guy who was stabbed on the street? an ordinary bloke? If what they're trying to say is that they think he wasn't a criminal, then they could say just that: the man stabbed on Oxford Street is believed not to have been a criminal. How about that? And anyway, I don't see that criminals aren't members of the public - they're just not very law-abiding ones, that's all. And there's another expression they could use if the intention is to say he wasn't a criminal: a law-abiding citizen.

Hey, I think I've got it. In other countries they could say he was an ordinary citizen, but the Brits aren't citizens, they're subjects, and nobody would understand the expression "ordinary subjects". I wonder - am I right? Is "member of the public" just a British expression?

Being fully present in the moment

One of my favourite Times columnists, Michael Gove, wrote yesterday expressing his longing for "pure immersion in the moment". He said he'd love to read our thoughts about the best way of being "fully present", but when I went onto the Times website I found that they give us a maximum of 300 characters to comment! Yes, you read right - 300 characters, not 300 words. How on earth can I squeeze all that I have to say about this subject into 300 characters without resorting to TxtSpk?

I'm not going to try and compete with his suggestion of surfing, as risk-taking just isn't the way I get my buzz, though I can see how a feeling of danger can bring about a total focus on what's going on for you at that moment, I'm sure that facing a huge wave and concentrating on survival would mean you don't suddenly find yourself thinking about the shopping list or the person you were supposed to be phoning or the report for the boss. But there are other ways of getting that pure focus. (Actually, I was surprised to find a man asking about this - my impression has been that men are much better than us at focusing on whatever they're doing and forgetting about everything else, whilst women tend to juggle lots more different activities and are not so good at shutting out the world and its distractions, which is probably the way we're programmed so that we could be good mothers. Babies wouldn't survive very well if their mothers were too good at focusing on what they're doing to the exclusion of everything else.)

But the question was about ways of being fully present in the moment, which is, as he says, quite rare these days as people tend to rush around so much - the developments of technology, instead of those optimistic fantasies of a life of leisure which I remember reading about in sci-fi when I was young, have brought us more pressure, higher expectations, and much less peace and quiet. To be able to focus on the moment these days you need to switch off a huge number of gadgets! One of the things that I find crucial to my sanity is the ability to switch things off. Even now as I write, I've got the email closed and have signed out of Messenger - useful as they are, these things are likely to distract me from my writing.

Yes, writing has to be near the top of my list - being creative is something you can fully immerse yourself in, so much so that I've been known at times to forget about supper because I was so immersed in a story. And I expect people who are creative in other ways - painting or sculpture or whatever - probably experience the same thing, total immersion in what you are creating.

Praying can sometimes do that for me - not always, because often I am very distracted, but now and again there are these special moments when I am totally and wonderfully aware of God's presence, and nothing else matters, there's just me and him and total bliss. Even better than making love - which of course is another opportunity for totally immersing yourself in the moment and forgetting about the boring and mundane elements of life.

And then there are those little moments that are on offer but so often we don't feel we have the time to really enjoy, like watching a rainbow or a butterfly, or pausing to cuddle a cat. Children are so much better at this - somehow we lose it as we grow up and allow ourselves to become more and more burdened with To Do lists. But the choice is still there - seeing the neighbour's cat in our back garden when I go out with the rubbish, I could tell myself I've got a zillion things to do, or I could stop for a minute and really enjoy stroking the cat. I find if I allow myself that moment of pure delight, I then have much more energy to tackle my To Do list afterwards.

Really encouraging! one man making a huge difference

This has got to be one of the most encouraging things I have ever read - someone who has found a way of giving a sense of hope and purpose to convicts in what would seem a totally hopeless situation.

And reading this I found myself thinking how easy it is for us to think that convicts in prison are worse than we are, whilst in reality the difference between them and us is that they've been caught and punished.