[ageing] life change now

Mousie writes of the people who look after the elderly, including some [and Mousie uses far stronger language than I], who are not fit to do so.

As always, whilst we feel angry about this treatment, we also cast a glance at our own old age and shudder. There, but for the Grace … Having now lost parents and step-parent and having lost touch with any other remnants of what could be called family, you could say death or the street will remain at a distance only until the mind and body start to go.

Who knows when that will be?

Juliet runs a post on living to a hundred and I wonder why that's of interest to her. To me, I can't imagine anything worse than living that long, given that western aches and niggles set in about 50 to 60 and the deterioration of the mind follows on after that. I don't want to carry that baggage over another 40 years.

She mentions that the longest living people in the world are the Uighurs of China and she has two fascinating links you can follow. Whilst she zeroes in on their diet:

Uighur food is characterized by meat - mutton, beef, camel, chicken, goose; vegetables - carrots, tomatoes, onions, peppers, eggplants, celeries etc.; dairy foods; and various fruits ...

some other factors like "weather, environment, and people's life habits and physical quality" are also noted but there are things here which haven't been spelt out fully. One article quotes "experts" saying it is related to diet. The classic western mistake over and over again and the reason the tone in the rest of the post is a little angry.

In other words, westerners are encouraged to think that if they go over to this diet, after trying the mediterranean diet, then all will be well and they'll live longer. This conveniently glosses over the other quite real reasons they live long:

1. the physical makeup of a people long used to austerity for countless generations in a survival of the fittest scenario. This is not the average obese North American or increasingly obese Brit;

2. the mental toughness - working in the fields till 80 or 90 is more an indicator of this than of long life;

3. simplicity - no hi-tech, sedentary, door-to-door-car, hush power, all-mod-cons lifestyle but life made uncomplicated and much closer to the earth than the dislocated western societies;

4. spiritual harmony combining their Maker [whom bloggers in particular continue to insist does not exist], four or more generations of extended family and a village atmosphere of community which leads to well-being;

5. exercise - yes, exercise. Look at those hills in the picture and the answer is there - they have to walk and work;

6. nature itself - instead of little boxes bounded by concrete roads, car and industrial fumes;

7. then diet - simple, unprocessed and in season.

But to think for one second that just doing the diet bit is going to slow the march to debilitation is self-delusion. All of it has to go together in a harmonious whole. Then it doesn't matter if they eat more bread, more fried food, more of the vilified dairy products - it's all swamped by the other aspects of the lifestyle. If you want this, you can't pick some aspects and pass on others, say N4 and N5. No, all of them have to be working together in a harmonious whole.

Contrast this with today's west - increasingly godless people, enslaved to material gain, living in exceedingly unhealthy cities, more and more people lacking common decency and courtesy [you can see it immediately in the way they talk or blog], eating a fatty, salty, sugary diet and deluding themselves that a ham and salad sandwich is healthy, having lost touch with nature in a day to day context [as distinct from the Sunday ramble], living either alone or with the same sex, lacking the perseverance to make relationships work, lacking the mental toughness to survive and hankering for a faster, more convenient and more comfortable lifestyle.

Plus drinking.

Nothing wrong with drinking in its place but it must be in its place - in its context. The land in that photo is Shangri-la whilst, for me, living in a polluted city on a low salary is hell on earth. So where am I on that continuum? Possibly halfway along but there's still a long way to go before longevity becomes a desirable goal.

You'll possibly be angry with me for writing these things. Sorry.