Nourishment

Nourishment ©

By Michael Casey

We just watched the Great British Bakeoff on tv, a cookery programme if you don’t have it in Poland or Ukraine or Russia or wherever you are reading this, Timore L’Est  popped up the other night so I have very far flung readers. My own tastes are very wide, as is my pain. I had to stop to put on Movelat pain killer just then, buy shares in it, it really is fast acting, paracetamol is also part of my daily diet. I just hope that they are not contributing to the decline in my kidneys.

Ok, back to the story, Nourishment, the GBBO finished and I flicked channels and stumbled on a documentary about Benedictine Monks. Considering yesterday’s story, A Korean Christmas Carol, it might have been inevitable. So I’ve gone from food nourishment to spiritual nourishment, just by changing tv station.

So immediately I knew I had a story, so here it is. We all need nourishment, food and water and love and sex and something to nourish our spirits. We have comfort food and comfort sex. We are starving when we come home from work so we’ll grab a bag of chips or a kebab, or in my case for 20 plus years I’d throw in a processed food item into the oven. It’s healthy because I never fried anything, I only baked or grilled in the oven. Sadly the MSG in processed food was probably coating my arteries and may have killed me, but for my unplanned quadruple heart bypass. But I am not a dietician, I’m just a fat silver haired writer in shades from Birmingham England. I remind you of this as there is a clever Dublin guy and a Monk, who share my name. I am the good looking one, they are not me.

Family and food go together, just as English and Writers go together, otherwise its Writers who write in English which is not the same thing. The Great British Bakeoff is about cakes it is not about meat dishes, if you want meat dishes you need to watch another show. Andrew Graham Dixon one of my tv heroes does ART programmes, but when he is with his Italian mate together they do food and art programmes. You have to decide what you really want to learn about, otherwise you can dilute the subject matter, and ruin both. In my opinion AGD is fantastic at both, and his mate is a great cook.

I side-tracked myself there, perhaps you need to be a Don to understand my point. My point is that we need to feed our body and soul. We need food that is nice, otherwise we are in a jail, even a self -imposed jail. This Summer we abandoned our old supermarket as my daughter wanted quality food while she studied for her Exams. Well the quality food seems to have worked, she got 4Bs, 4As and 3A*. Which compared to other future Medics is average to good.

So now when my wife brought home some none nice food my daughters and me could not eat it. You are what you eat and you get used to what you eat, or can afford to eat. Luckily we don’t drink, nor smoke which is disgusting anyway, and we don’t gamble. Yes I know you will all start singing The Adam Ant Song, What do you do? And yes I do drink 12pints not a week but a year, on my Meds I should avoid alcohol. And yes I do buy the occasional lottery ticket, that’s for the Pedantic out there. Ok, so you can decide what is important and your food basket reflects this.

Polish people love their food and judging by the bit I’ve eaten the quality is so high compared to your average English supermarket. Egg yolks are bright yellow for example, just as Maltese food is so nice, not forgetting the food I’ve eaten in County Kerry Ireland. The closer the food is to the table the nicer it is. Family and food make such a difference.

Love and sex make a difference too. If you live all alone without even a cat to stroke then your mental wellbeing is not as great as a family environment. Mind you if you had a horrible childhood then being alone is absolute Heaven. But generally we all need somebody to talk to, to laugh with or to cry with. To make love to, badly or fantastically, quickly or slowly, all night long or a stolen 5 minutes before her cookery programme is on tv, or your football match is on. Or even if all you can manage is holding hands because you are 95, though for 70 years you did regularly break beds, but luckily you owned a furniture shop.

We all need nourishment, just as that plant on the shelf to my right needs watering too. It’s a Shamrock the Irish symbol. We may not be able to afford the best of food, and our sexual technique may have gone off the boil. But we all have our memory and imagination, so if we close our eyes we  can be anywhere in the world as we eat our food, nice or plain. But a bit of nice margarine or butter and this will lift any meal and turn it into a joy. The French invented sauces because they were eating rats at one stage of their History. So a bit of flavour lifts any meal, as a bit of variety. Just as it used to be Fish on Fridays.

Sex makes us happy, and we are not alone, literally, two become one, and three or more if you want to practice your maths skills, mainly multiplication. I don’t need to elaborate, you can all look at your lover and stop reading this and do something much more fun instead. But finish your bread and butter first, as you may need your strength or just the…