Back to England with lots of work looming for me this week, which is good. Aside from some minor distractions (The Edinburgh Fringe, anyone?) I have had a long time off and I'm looking forward to getting back to some proper employment.
And if I hadn't already been feeling like it was time to get healthy again, then I would have done after tonight when I went to see "Supersize Me", the fantastic documentary film about an idiot who eats at Mcdonald's exclusively for every meal for 30 days. I highly recommended that you see it if you haven't already. Morgan spurlock is an extremely engaging and likeable man and unlike Michael Moorw you don't feel that he's gone into all this with much of an agenda (he almost certainly had one, but it doesn't feel like it). He just wants to find out what the effects of doing something this extreme would be - he clearly actually quite likes Mcdonald's food - and through that to investigate why Americans are getting so fat. The results make you think that Al Quaida are probably wasting their time trying to come up with ways to kill millions of Americans. They can just sit back and wait for the Americans to destroy themselves.
Of course his experiment is extreme, but the repercussions on his health are devastating in the short term (and would have been much worse if he'd carried on for any longer, one would have to presume). It made me question the way I blithely stuff my face with rubbish without considering the ramifications and made me desperate to get back to my exercise regime and cut out all the shit and the booze (well maybe not all of it).
There were some obvious parallels with my 50 dates experiment and I wished I'd thought to have doctors tracking my health throughout the period. Like Spurlock I was about as fit as I've ever been when I started (in fact, at any other time I think the excesses would have proved too much, but luckily my Marathon trained body was able to endure them for longer than wiould have otherwise have been the case). But "Supersize Me" has more satirical point than my personal odyssey of self indulgence and questions the way our governments are run. It's also something that we could all easily change if we wanted, as he himself points out. I'm not sure I will ever eat another fast food burger again after this film. Mcdonald's are obviously scared that other people will feel the same as they've been taking out ads to say where they think the film has got it wrong, whilst admitting that some of it is right.
The enjoyment of the film was slightly spoiled for me by the couple who came and sat right in front of me just as it all started and then proceeded to noisily talk, eat and then slurpily snog each other's faces off at regular intervals througout the film. What is it with me at the moment? Am I giving off some invisible ray that makes people want to heavy pet whenever they bask in it (but which ironically does not make any of these people want to come and heavy pet with me). In this case the couple did not have the advantage of being majorly attractive or fit. They were both in their forties and should have known better. I didn't so much object to them wanting to snog in a cinema - I've been known to take that opportunity when it has presented itself to me - but just that there were a lot of empty seats and so they didn't need to sit quite so close to other people and also they were doing all this in what must rank as one of the most unromantic films ever made. A man ate too much and was sick out the window of his car and they snogged. We saw the sick and they smooched again (and it was horrible slurpy smooching that made me feel more sick than the sick had done). We saw a fat man having an operation to clamp his stomach - they kissed. We saw his intestines and his fat and apparently this was the most wonderfully amorous image, because they were soon chewing off each other's faces. I don't think this was some kind of bizarre fetish. I think they were just so into each other that they couldn't keep their hands (or rather their mouths) off each other. But they must have known that before they came in. So why did they chose to comes and watch "Supersize me"?
Unless they'd seen the title and wrongly assumed it was about something else.
