This weekend it was 9:30am and I was hungry but couldn't decide what I wanted. There in the pantry glowing like the beacons of Gondor was the oatmeal container.
It. Was. Glorious.
The oatmeal, not the container.
The beacons . . . of Gondor . . .
The beacons . . . of freakin'
GONDOR!? 
Well, sorry to go against the grain, Colonel, but try eating it everyday for six months straight!
Here's more on the "oatmeal' saga:
I avoid doctors. (Sorry, doctors, I know you study hard and all that to pay for your golfing fees and Jaguars and so on, never mind the Hippocratic Oath) but I just don't like people prodding and poking at me. I haven't been into a hospital as a patient all my life.
Maybe it's 'black magic' (white magic, pink, brown, whatever,) but I just put it down to plenty of exercise, lots of fresh air, and a very diverse diet.
Obviously, I must have some sort of decent genetic structure, too - I am a 'mixed' breed, a hybrid, with as many as six different 'races' pumping through my veins and I guess that baffles the heck out of germs - racial incest never weakened me.
I have never broken a single bone in my body, either.
So hospitals for me were generally places I'd visit for all sorts of reasons that had nothing to do with my own health, except to take shots on occasion - that I will admit to.
And, I
do admire surgeons, paramedics and doctors-without-borders with great admiration.
But, yon everyday GP who sits there writing out pill orders is someone I can do without, generally. So far.
Well, recently I had to take my son over to our family doctor for shots he needed for school (six months ago) and after the usual kidding round with the doctor who makes the usual joke that I would only need him after I'd fallen down dead, I decided to humour him and decided to take a blood test and a stress test.
Stress test went off perfectly - even though I felt like I had been abducted by aliens, strapped to a table, and was been smeared with jelly, and plastered with sensors and made to (quite ignominiously) run, stripped, on a bloody treadmill.
Blood test came back and the doctor seemed quite surprised and pleased with it, sugar okay, all other lights green and so on but he kept hemming and hawing about my cholesterol.
Several points too high, he's saying gleefully, reaching for his pad (to prescribe huge doses of anti-cholesterol medicine, I supposed).
Oh! no. None of that financing the pharma giants for their experiments into side-effects.
So he then gets tough with me: No pork, no lamb, no eggs, no butter, only non-fat milk, no beef - for chrissakes, why didn't he just jab a needleful of arsenic into my neck and be done with it?
Three months went by and I was faithful to this whole regime - plus I tailored my diet to beat the cholesterol -the daily oatmeal was part of the war. No daily full-English bacon and eggs and none of the stuff he forbade, but I had plenty of fish, lots more greens, all sorts of food that had HDL in them, and so on. I go back for a retest. The cholesterol had dropped a point and a half.
I swear - he looked disappointed.
Now a further 3 months have gone by and I'm due for another retest - and if it has dropped another point and a half - well, guess what?
Even the beacons of Gondor ain't going to sway me away from a dish of bacon and eggs.
Well . . . some thoroughbred swine, that is, no ordinary pigs.
