Pilgrims’ Progress

by a ranting member of the lunatic fringe
Lindisfarne, England

According to newly-released statistics, New Zealand is almost leading the world in obesity statistics (apparently currently coming in third). I wonder if we would have noticed England’s obesity if we had flown here directly from home. But we didn’t and the problem here struck us strongly.
I’m not going to get scientific about it….just a little anecdotal…..in terms of the places *we* have been, we’d say Laos is the most non-obese nation. We did not see one overweight person in our month there. Not one. We expected Cambodia to be the same, but we saw an occasional chubby young person there – we were staying just up the road from a private school and quite a few of the children (obviously from wealthy families or they would not have been attending the school) were starting to show the signs of adopting a Western diet. Now I do not know for certain that they eat lots of Western food, but we did see them with bottles of Coke and chocolate bars. None of the people living on the rubbish dump, on the other hand, were overweight. None of the people we met in Thailand or Vietnam, who lived their traditional subsistence lives were fat. None of the rural Chinese were tubby. No-one in Mongolia was carrying extra kilos (and all they eat is mutton and full-cream dairy with loads of fat piled on – so maybe the NZ food nazis should sit up and take notice of the fact that low-fat diets are not the answer – our bodies need fat and while the beauracracy tries to prevent us from consuming it, they are not going to solve the obesity epidemic.)
It’s not even a Western issue (I don’t think)…..in Holland and Germany there were precious few tubbies – yes, there were a lot of men carrying beer pots on their skinny legs, but not general obesity. In those countries you have everyone riding bicycles everywhere – even old dottery grannies (no offence intended – I’m describing the ladies we saw on bikes – so dottery that when they got off their bikes, they sometimes nearly toppled over – but they were still out there cycling well into their nineties!) And there was next to no low-fat food. Just plenty of full cream milk and quark and yoghurt and butter.
Then you get to England and everything is low fat. And a good portion of the population is overweight. My theory stands up to the scrutiny of circumstantial evidence! If our health board is going to ban anything, let them ban sugar. Did you know that in the fourteenth century we used a teaspoon a year of this “luxury spice”. Now Britain’s annual consumption is 35kg per person. Hello! Could we make a link between that and obesity, diabetes and poor teeth, do you think? And how different is New Zealand? (Answer:not very)

Now, if you’ll give me just a moment, I’ll hop down off my soapbox (and to think I thought they had all been packed away in the attic for a year!)….

There, back on solid ground.

Are you still with me? How about something less controversial – a nice wee morning game of hide-n-seek in Warkworth Castle (before the rain came….again). Or if you prefer, the game where you have to run under the drawbridge (which doesn’t draw any more) and try to avoid the missiles being sent from above….that one was fun!

The day ended in pouring rain, we’re perched at the edge of the sea (in fact, according to the GPS we are IN the sea!) in a little carpark just off the causeway that goes across to Holy Island. The island is only accessible at certain times of the day, dependent on tides, as the causeway totally floods at high tide (a most impressive sight to see - and exciting to watch people to-ing and fro-ing trying to make up their minds whether to take the risk once the water has come up a bit! The pictures of almost submerged cars on the tide timetable signposts did nothing to deter some!) We zipped across this afternoon to visit Lindisfarne Castle and Priory, but as the rain took our arrival as its debut time, and we saw the number of motorhomes in the carpark, we came straight back and nabbed spots in aforementioned carpark for the night (no overnighting allowed on the island), not that we needed to hurry as none of the flash motorhomes came into our freebie spot!

Time on the road: need to check Jboy13’s record!
Distance covered: 68km

by a linguistics graduate
Bath, England

That Bath is a university town was particularly apparent today – hundreds of black-gowned graduates were out on display, marching the streets, proudly clutching their certificates. It seemed an appropriate place to check out second-hand bookshops and augment our meagre-but-much-larger-than-last-week supply.

Staying in a book-filled home, we have delighted in snuggling on the couch poring over, reading every word in more Beatrix Potter books than you would imagine possible in one sitting! When we left home, ER(then 2) had her favourite books, but Peter Rabbit was not among them. Yesterday, after I had read aloud a couple of bunny books, she asked to read the next. And she made a valiant effort! I love this early reading and have really missed it. I also love cuddling on the couch, children draped all over me, experiencing a written world; I’ve missed that too. But I wouldn’t swap what we have had for all the books in the world – when we opened one of the books yesterday, the children recognised foxgloves, just like the ones where we were staying a few nights ago, just like at the roadsides all this last week. They hadn’t met real life foxgloves before!

With regards to reading, something has been intriguing/bothering/puzzling me over the past few days. When we left home Lboy8 was seven years old and a struggling reader. He was sounding his way laboriously through regular words.
The other day we picked up an armful of books from a High Street charity shop in Looe. Lboy8 took a look at “My Naughty Little Sister” and promptly devoured it. Ever since, current experiences with his own naughty little sister have been compared to the literary exploits, the every-chapter-starts-exactly-the-same rhythm has been duly noted and pointed out to all-n-sundry, and the irony of the big sister still being a little kid did not escape him.
So how did that happen? Sure, this particular book is “only” written at an 8yo reading age, and so it is nothing remarkable that he can read it. But for almost nine months Lboy8 has had almost no reading material (unless you count his own poorly creatively-spelt journal). There have been hardly any social reading opportunities in English (street signs or food packaging, for example) and, as already mentioned, we have not been reading aloud.
I am of the opinion that, just like with breathing, eating and walking, given the opportunity at a maturationally-appropriate time, a child will pick up reading without a twelve-step programme or huge amounts of blood, sweat and tears.
To be honest, I did think Lboy8’s already limited reading skills would be compromised with such a break, but within the context of our whole family, this was a sacrifice worth making, an opportunity cost not too great. He’s got the rest of his life to learn to read, but we are unlikely to ever walk the Great Wall of China with Grandpa again. Even when we have had time to read (like when we were slowed down in Luang Prabang for three weeks), other things took precedence. At that particular time it was more important to us that the children learnt to overcome the language barrier and play with the children we were living with. Reading, we figured, could wait.
Except that it hasn’t. It’s happened anyway. Without any input from us apart from playing word games on long train journeys. How? I did think we at least needed to provide the opportunity, but we haven’t even done that. So now what do I do with my learning theories????

On the topic of word games…..here’s a goodie our couchsurfing host taught us tonight. You think of a word with two meanings (like glasses or cold or sun/son or flour/flower or tongue….) Everyone else has to try to guess your word by asking you questions. When you answer each question, you have to include your word, but instead of saying the word, you say COFFEEPOTS. We’ll be playing this one again!

So mused I, as we wandered around Bath today….

Time on the road: none
Distance covered: 0km

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