How to deal with dark times | Tim Keller

It's not often I'd share a whole sermon on here, but what a humdinger this video is!

Worth getting yourself a cup of coffee and settling down with your knitting to listen. Wisdom and grace. I love it.

A Lenten program that may interest you

I wonder if you already know the output of Fr. Columba Jordan, a Franciscan friar of the Renewal. He's based at St Patricks friary in Limerick (Ireland). The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal website is here.

I follow him on YouTube at Called to More here, and I love his videos. There's also some of his teaching at Little by Little, here.

I read today in The Catholic Herald that Fr Columba will be hosting Crux: A Lenten Journey of Surrender which will be available on the Ascension app. I should make clear that it involves a purchase — not expensive, just a few pounds, but it isn't free.

You can read the article that tells you about it here.

I'd never heard of the Ascension app and don't know anything about it and I'm not wild about apps and tech generally — but I do like Fr Columba, and I like the idea of having a Lenten program to follow. If he's doing it, I think it'll be good.

So I thought you might like to investigate it for yourself. 

You can find out all about Crux (the Lenten program with Fr Columba) at the Ascension Press website. The page to go to is here.

Come back and say what you thought of it, if you decide to join in.

From my own point of view, if money is involved I probably won't do it. If that's true for you as well, but you do want a focus for your thoughts through Lent, there's a playlist here on my own YouTube channel of my Lenten book The Wilderness Within You. It goes through every day from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Also, my Hawk & Dove story The Hardest Thing To Do (Volume 4 of Series 1) is a Lent book, but I haven't made a YouTube playlist of it. I might do at some point.

Thoughts about money and family tradition

 A lot is said about money at the moment — with good reason. The economic prospects of England look fairly bleak, and such sectors as farming and the hospitality industry have been dealt very damaging blows by political decisions. The situation with housing is tough, the roads are coming to pieces, councils everywhere are struggling desperately. These are not affluent times.

In this context, envy and resentment are often apparent. I often hear it said that pensioners are unreasonably well off — that the triple lock on the pension is crippling to the economy, that paying the state pension is too great a burden for those in work, and that "statistics show" pensioners spend their money on booze and cigarettes, cruises and restaurants and generally having a good time. Young people cannot afford to buy a home and start a family, while the older generation live comfortably on their savings and state pension, and this is not sustainable.

It intrigues me that this is a common enough scenario to be universally accepted as accurate, because it's not my own experience of life.

In the family I was born into, people worked together. Married couples built up affluence through hard work, from very lowly beginnings, and they were self-employed so they could pass on the family business. My uncle inherited my grandfather's farm, but a bungalow was built for my grandmother on the edge of their land, and my unmarried aunt who had fragile health lived with my grandmother who was blind. So everyone benefited from everyone else. My other aunt married an accountant farmer, and their daughters married but their unmarried son lived and worked the farm together with them. My aunt lived to be very old, and stayed at home living with her son after she was widowed, to the end of her life. In budgeting, the needs of all of them were considered.

This is the way of thinking I knew growing up, and it also characterised the family I married into, in which context my children were born. My mother-in-law used her savings to pay for the deposit we needed to buy a house, and every Sunday as a matter of course we — my husband, me and our five children — went to church with his parents and then ate a massive roast lunch with them at their home. We never had to pay for childcare because they baby-sat for us, and when my mother-in-law did her grocery shopping she used to include a bag of groceries for us, too. Plus each time I had a baby, my husband's aunt would leave peeled vegetables on our doorstep for several days, to help make supper preparation easy.

In this family context the older generation, having earned and saved all their lives, would help their adult children buy their own homes, and help financially with big purchases like cars, and do as much as they could afford to ensure that bills were covered for the whole family. The older family members kept aside enough money to ensure they were not a burden on the younger ones — enough to pay their bills and cover any necessary care costs — but apart from that, whatever they had was channeled down into the next generation. In many cases adult family members continued to live together, so elder care happened naturally as the need arose.

I thought that was how everybody lived, but maybe not. There was no scenario of rich old people spending extravagantly while the younger generation couldn't even afford a home or to start a family. 

Each person took responsibility for themselves, but always with a view to helping each other and contributing to the whole. Each one valued the opinions of the others and would be proud to play their part and make the most of their abilities.

What I find disturbing about articles and podcasts on the topic of finance in modern life, is that they seem to carry the assumption of everything being only about the individual. The assumption that it will be normal for some family members to be comfortably wealthy while others have too little to eat. I read about people going to food banks or couch-surfing because they are homeless, or a parent with children managing in temporary accommodation in a hostel, and I wonder — where is their family? 

I feel something similar about all these tales of sexual abuse of girls on a grotesque scale currently dominating the new, both Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and the rape gangs in England: I wonder, where were the families of these girls? Was there no warning, protection, advice? Were they not helped to read between the lines of invitations and opportunities? Where was the wisdom of older sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers? How did people end up so vulnerable in such massive numbers? I know that in some cases fathers tried to intervene at a late stage, to get their girls back — but surely what would have protected them in the first place would have been collective wisdom and tradition within the family. I realise that there are many people in the world and most families have someone who makes unfortunate choices, but on such a large scale? Incidentally, the political establishment and mainstream media have for the most part turned their backs on the victims of rape gangs in the UK, and those who have tried to bring it to public attention have been smeared and persecuted. Rupert Lowe MP has now put in place a crowdfunded public enquiry to bring to light what has happened, with a view to prosecuting the perpetrators. If you would like to learn about the enquiry and financially assist it, go here.

In my family, the people know that the others will always have your back, that home will always be a sanctuary. There is no question of it being just about the individual, of calmly watching other people struggle. My children have varied income levels, but the ones with more will treat the ones with less to lovely outings, the ones who can drive will give lifts to the ones who can't. We mostly live near together, but the one of my children who lives at a distance will always say, if anything problematic occurs, "Do you need me to come home?"

When the pandemic lockdown happened, there was a deadline after which we could not travel and had to stay where we were. My daughter who lives away dithered about what to do. At the time she had a rented ground-floor room in someone's house. Not wanting to disturb them after bedtime, she made a last-minute decision, and used the window to go in and out to pack her car, leaving them a month's rent money and driving through the night to come home. My daughter who lives alone was the permitted member of our family bubble through lockdown, and we used to walk round to my married daughter for doorstep visits, chatting at the required distance. The rest of us all lived in one house anyway, and those of us with savings helped those whose incomes were affected; the pandemic lockdown was just ike a lovely holiday for us.

None of this requires anybody to have a big income. Everyone is okay because we all look out for each other. It's what most people used to do. But evidently in society as a whole this is no longer true. In our borough the main cost, almost half the budget, is temporary accommodation for homeless people, and the main driver of homelessness is family breakdown. 

This isn't surprising. If you have a family with three children living in a three-bedroomed house, with one boiler (furnace, US) one television, one internet provision and one car, with both parents one way or another supporting the household, and the parents split, what happens? Now each parent wants part of the custody of the children, so now they need two three-bedroomed houses, each with a boiler, a telly and internet access and a car, but now with only one income for each household. Of course it can't work. There's no wonder we have a housing crisis and people made homeless. 

It feels to me that I am watching the systematic dismantling of traditional family life — assisted by the aggressive promotion of pick-and-mix sexuality. 

The breakdown of the family unit will lead to the economic collapse of society, because the costs of trying to do life on your own are beyond the reach of most ordinary people. The more you split, the more you have to pay for.

A similar set of attitudes applies to expectations of citizenship. In my childhood, if it snowed all the men of a street would be outside with shovels, clearing the snow from the pavements (sidewalks US) to make them safe for pedestrians. People took a pride in their homes, growing vegetables in the back garden and flowers at the front, and they weeded the pavement in front of their home. Now, nobody clears the snow, they wait for the council to do it. Nobody weeds the pavement, the council comes round once a year and sprays with glyphosate (which happens to be a neurotoxin) so the weeds are still there but dead now.

The council workmen have to be paid, and their wages are raised from the public purse. The result is that less and less gets done but costs more and more, all because we have abandoned the habit of working together.

One final example. Net Zero — the political aspiration in the UK that by 2050 our carbon emissions will reach net zero. Ha! It cannot work. It will tank the economy, and all we'll have done is export our industrial activity, making in fact a net increase in dirty technology, while losing our manufacturing independence and economic resilience.

But that doesn't mean we have to give up and just "Frack, baby, frack!"

We could approach it differently. Let industry continue with use of fossil fuels, let development of renewable alternatives be assiduously pursued, but in the meantime let the citizenry work together to reduce pollution and reliance on dirty energy — informally, not by government mandate and regulation. Let all those of us who can afford solar panels put them on our houses, our churches, the buildings of our businesses. Let all of us conserve energy as much as we can, heating the person not the space at home, using modern technology that is less energy hungry — for instance, cooking in an air fryer not a big oven. Let those of us with gardens grow our own fruit and vegetables. Let us reduce waste and manufacturing by buying second-hand and sharing. We could travel fast in the direction of Net Zero and adequate housing provision and clean streets (with no fly-tipping, thank you), at the same time as taking pressure off the local and national government budget, if we simply prioritise working together for the good of the whole.

Sardine hungry

 There's a thing they say in the carnivore nutritional sphere, if people say they're hungry — "Yes; but are you sardine hungry?"

Always make me laugh, because how true!

In case it sounds merely baffling at first acquaintance, maybe some explanation is needed. 

In general carnivores aim to eat once or twice a day and mostly don't snack. They follow the principles of intermittent fasting to support health. Sometimes they fast for longer periods than 24 hours, perhaps 3 or 5 days.

When people transition to a carnivore way of eating, it takes the body a while to get used to the differences, especially changing from the frequent top-ups typical for people whose diets rely on carbs. 

So, though in general one of the great things about carnivore as a way of eating is that people don't feel hungry, ever, there are exceptions to that at first or on a prolonged fast. 

There's more than one kind of hungry, of course. There's the sort that can more or less be defined as "My teeth are bored", which is very different from the body running out of fuel and urgently needing help.

This is where that marvellous question comes into its own — "Yes; but are you sardine hungry?"

The other evening I'd been defrosting chicken, but when supper time came it was still half frozen, so I left it for the next day, but I still wanted some supper. There in the cupboard, for just such a time as this, was a tin of sardines in brine. 

I know sardines are good for us. I know they are full of Omega 3 oils that will transform our lives and banish inflammation. I know you can crunch up their spines (yuck) and that's a marvellous source of calcium which will chauffeur away the oxalates that fasten on to the calcium. And even so, somehow I can fancy almost anything else. 

But I ate them, along with some Jarlsberg cheese slices and a solitary gherkin. I hope they have done me good.

Making space and going slow — wisdom

Leaving margins of every kind in life is beneficial — some money in hand, some time in case things take longer than expected, some room for an extra guest to sit down and a child to spread a game out on the floor.

I love minimalism and simplicity for several reasons, and a big one is so I don't overtax my personal system. The less stuff I have to fall over, clean and curate, the less likely I am to get frustrated and lose my temper. The less there is in the diary, the less anxious I am about being late or when commitments overrun. The less cluttered my house is, the greater the possibility that I will, at some point, get round to cleaning something (although it most probably won't be today).

This has been a very wet winter, and a lot of people are facing issues of mould in their homes. Doubtless this is exacerbated by the misguided enthusiasm for UPVC replacement windows and insulating cavity walls and attics, but I'd better not get started on that. If you've made your home into a Tupperware box, well it will get condensation and the mould that goes with it, no?

Off our kitchen is a small pantry. The previous inhabitants of the house used to keep their fridge in it. Consequence? They couldn't get at it to monitor the reservoir at the foot of the fridge (at the back), so it grew a slime mould, overflowed, leaked consistently, and now the joists have rotted and need replacing. So we removed a cupboard in the over-fitted kitchen to create a space for our fridge. But because the kitchen is over-fitted, there's nowhere to put a bin (in fact two, for separating recycling from trash). So we put the two bins in the pantry. The over-fitted kitchen includes very high upper cupboards, for which we needed a little stepladder. There's nowhere to store it but the pantry. We take the compost scraps out to the garden compost heap every other day or so, which requires plastic clogs because the garden is wet because it's been raining all the time. My husband and I have different size feet. I don't mind wearing clogs that are too big, but he does, and my feet are bigger than his. So we have two pairs of clogs. There is nowhere to put them but the pantry. A family member returned a folding garden table I'd given her, as she was no longer using it. It's very useful, but only on an occasional basis. I couldn't think of anywhere to put it but the pantry. Did I mention, this pantry is very small?... As you can see, it was getting smaller by the day.

The window in that pantry doesn't open and has no trickle vent (a new one with a vent is on order), and the pantry is an enclosed pocket of cold, so it gets condensation. It has been steadily proliferating mould, which is a health hazard. Eventually, earlier this week, seeing the mould getting long and green and fluffy, no longer just making grey patterns on the walls, I concluded the time had come to tackle it.

Why hadn't I done it before? Well the walls and ceiling in it are plastered with that textured Artex that trashes cloths and sponges, and when I tried to do it with a brush it got bleach everywhere without getting rid of the mould. And also, the pantry had got so full I couldn't get into it any more.

So this time I rehomed the table (erected) into the hall, I relocated the bins, also into the hall. There was nothing in the hall and they are easy to move for cleaning in their new situation, so — good. Now I had only the stepladder and clogs to house in the pantry, and they're easy to move. Ha! Win!

I decided to sacrifice a washing-up sponge (bleach disintegrates them) and forget the brush. The pantry now being empty there was room to get into it, and the sponge was effective at wiping the lunar surface of the pantry free of mould, once sprayed liberally with bleach.

It made me realise that I need to leave myself more space, more margin, otherwise I'll never clean that pantry again. I need to not clog it up with stuff to store and bins.

My whole life is like that pantry.

I used to notice it when our kiddies were little — the difference between winter and summer. In summer, wearing shorts, T-shirts and sandals, we'd just hurtle out the door and go. In winter, I had to get them all lined up in the hall, make sure each one had a coat and a hat and a scarf and boots and her gloves, and the baby had her big muff thing to sit in (for the stroller). At that point, almost invariably, one of them would decide she needed to use the bathroom, and everyone had to wait under threat of death while I unravelled her weather-proofing then bundled her up again. I'm surprised we ever got anywhere at all.

A day or so ago I shared that video, which compared civic unrest in Minneapolis with those families whose child melts down uncontrollably in the supermarket and suggested that mothers would accommodate while fathers would 'bring discipline'. Hmm.

I think he was right about the need to restore order swiftly and firmly in Minneapolis, which is why I shared the video, but I had reservations about it. Because I think — refocusing away from the civic unrest and onto the domestic meltdown — you need to start before you get to the store if you're going to take kids there. A child needs both a job to do and something to look forward to. So each child needs a task — to look out for a particular brand for cereal, for example. And children like to choose not just watch, so each child needs the chance to pick a snack to add to the trolley. 

Only last week when I was in the supermarket, I saw a father with his little girl. He had her sitting crouched inside the trolley as many parents do. She wasn't fooling around, how could she be? She was cooped up in the trolley. But even so she managed to do or say something he thought was out of line, so he started reading the riot act at her — you know, "RIGHT, THAT'S IT! YOU'RE NOT HAVING ANYTHING NOW" etc etc, and snatched away a little toy she'd chosen, which he dumped on the bread shelf. She was distraught and started to cry bitterly. I noticed she was wearing school uniform, so she'd already had a whole day of self-restraint and tedious requirements before he started with his nonsense. As it happens, Mother re-appeared carrying a large toddler, swapped kiddos, gave the toy back to her daughter, and peace was restored. 

I didn't think it was the child's fault. I didn't think the mother made things worse. Although the little girl cried, I didn't think it was actually her meltdown.

But how to do better? Include the child more in making choices, or one parent stay home with the kiddies while the other takes a list to the store, or only buy a few things at one go, or send the dad into the café for a hot drink and a snack so he doesn't create havoc with his contagious meltdowns. Just get some more space and breathing room into the scenario. Whatever it takes — but prune out, don't add in.

Something I notice about chronic illness and growing old is that I need even more space. If I want to go to the store to buy some milk, gone are the days of just nipping upstairs to get my bag and off I go. Now I have to dismantle the TENS machine and put it on charge and pack away its sticky pads, and by the time I've done all that the cat will have woken up and decided if I've appeared it must be time to be fed. And my feet are fairly shot so I need to wear lace-up boots (in the winter, summer is OK for sandals) which are a struggle to put on. And this morning when I did that, the bootlace broke because it's old and frayed because I buy my shoes secondhand. Things seem less simple, less straightforward — I mean, it's even a bit of a mission getting out of the bath!

So in this season of my life, more than ever, I give myself space, and time; I create margins, look for ways to take off the pressure. Minimalism and simplicity were always good practice; they're my survival kit now.

The buddhist monks walking for peace

Did you hear about this? Probably you did, and are one of the two and a half million following it on Facebook, or the one and a half million following on Instagram. By now it's nearly concluded, but it has been a very beautiful peace testimony.

Twenty-four monks, and a dog called Aloka, connected to the Huong Dao Temple in Fort Worth in Texas have been walking 2,300 miles through the United States, passing through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the through the Carolinas and Virginia to finish up in Washington DC. They began in the last week of October, and they expect to arrive in Washington on February 10th.  

The purpose of the Walk for Peace is to promote the buddhist values of peace, compassion and non-violence.

What a lovely thing.

The video below is a song arising from the Walk for Peace and expressing its values.

Someone else with thoughts on Minneapolis

I think many of us find all the political stürm und drang going on a drain on the spirit, so having shared on this video I'll move on to thinking about other things for a while. I'm about to start sewing box pleats by hand into a black skirt with black thread in the English winter, so I'll probably be along to complain about that before long.

Please notice, these videos I've come across and am drawing to your attention don't all promote the same point of view. That's because I'm not picking sides in these issues, I'm just interested in listening to sane and thoughtful voices — I'm more interested in the approach than the objective. I think whatever your politics might be, whether you incline to the Left or the Right, whatever your thoughts on immigration, whether you are based in the US or the UK or elsewhere, it's still helpful for each of us to think through the approach we bring to civic and/or personal encounters, and try to get the balance right in establishing boundaries with a view to enhancing compassion. If we can hold in place an approach that is calm and promotes safety, that should offer the framework to air differences constructively and find a way forward that works for social justice and the common good.

Feel free to just pass this over if you are well weary of trying to tease apart the tangled threads of right and wrong in civic unrest. But I think what Nick Freitas has to say here is realistic and constructive.

I have one reservation about Nick's video — by this time I am getting tetchy about this constant denigration of women, this ever-recurring assertion that in any situation where things go wrong, the woman is the problem and she can either shut up and sit down or the man will leave. I am here to tell you that it can be one almighty big relief when he walks out of the house for the last time. 

In my own life, I have seen plenty of situations, up close and personal, where it is the man who has been the spoilt brat, and both the woman and the children have needed to be the adults who together repaired and rebuilt after he trashed everything. With that corrective, I do recommend what Nick Freitas has to say.

Resentment

 In writing the other day about women and men in society, and the attitudes I saw emerging toward women among young men on the political Right, it struck me that resentment is a serious social toxin.

There will, of course, always be inequality in the sense of difference. The determination to pursue gender fluidity to make all aspects of human opportunity available to all is likely to plough into the ground at some point, because reality will be too adverse for the project's sustainability. So I think we do have to get used to the idea that we can't all be, and have, everything.

I notice this more as I grow old, watching the magic life ingredient of potential gradually atrophy. There are things now that I can see I will never have, never achieve; I have run out of vigour and time, the chance has gone. 

On our way to church on Sunday we parked the car near a house I especially liked. I thought about the houses of other people who have written books — C.S.Lewis and Agatha Christie, for instance — and the houses they lived in. Rudyard Kipling! What a lovely home he had! Batemans, in Sussex. It's beautiful. I thought about what they achieved, and the acclaim that went with it, and the homes they were able to afford through their endeavours. 

But that house we walked by as we went to church will always be out of my reach. I know this as a matter of certainty, because however much money came my way, that's not how I'd spend it. There are other people who don't even have a home to call their own at all; I'd rather fix that than move up the property ladder.

So, though other writers have done better than I have, in ability and recognition and financial success, I don't resent their achievements as writers or the fruits of their labours. I've been doing my own thing, following my own path, shaping my own life which overflows with blessing and brings me great contentment. I've prioritised my own values in the choices I've made, and that makes me happy.

Sitting by the 'fire' in our living room the other night, I was reflecting with my husband Tony on how perfect everything has turned out. I never expected to live where we now do, it just came about through the unfolding of events, but as it happens I really love the street where we live, and in that street I like our house the best, and it has the exact layout I would choose for a couple of our age and requirements. On the sofa beside me, dozing on his heated blanket (!) was Clarence the cat. I had no plans to acquire a cat when we moved in here. But Clarence had no home and just turned up needing somewhere. Yet, as it happens, if I had deliberately gone looking for a cat, Clarence would have been exactly what I hoped for, what I was looking for. I even like his nose, which is long and aristocratic, not one of your snub-nosed pug-faced squashed-up ones. It seems to me that the great I Am, the Ancient of Days, has the exact measure of me, his lowly creation — my longings and even my preferences. Everything is just right.

But what about those young men, looking resentfully at women bosses, and denigrating the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and resenting the (admittedly spiralling out of control) preferential treatment now offered to people from overseas, arrived on our shores in rubber dinghies?

I think establishing and maintaining firm boundaries is essential for the health of either an individual or a country. I think position achieved by merit is a better way of proceeding than positive discrimination. I think there will always be inequalities and aspects of life that are hard/easy to access because of your gender or race or religion or colour or age or class or health or income or natural abilities or whatever it is. Some hurdles can be surmounted with effort, others are set too high. 

But, I tend towards the view (this is more of a suspicion than a certainty) that what undoes a person, what corrodes them, what ruins life, is not the adversity but the resentment. I'm not saying we should be indifferent towards serious persecution, like (for instance) the murder of Nigerian Christians by Boko Haram. I think society should always address violence to stop it. In the same way, I think exclusion of minorities is wrong; by which I mean things like not letting someone attend a school because of the colour of their skin. I think the legal framework of a society should defend equality, but I don't think we should try to micro-manage the delivery of equality. There will always be adversity because of cultural norms, though I wish this were not true. But in a reasonably democratic society where we're not talking about danger to life levels of adversity, I think resentment poisons more people than the adversity does.

I came across a little flurry of videos by Jordan Peterson a while ago, that he made with his wife Tammy about the principles they follow in their married life. They had quite a bit to say about resentment. It's something they have identified as being like (this is me saying this, not them) what the Bible calls 'a root of bitterness' — something that needs weeding out as a matter of priority. If they sense within themselves resentment arising, they talk it through and they examine it and they take responsibility for doing whatever it needed to remove it.

I think that's very wise. 

There's that bit in Max Ehrmann's Desiderata:

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

This is wisdom. 

Of course, as part of bringing in the Kingdom we should do our best to see that each and every one has the chance to pursue his or her dream, to flourish and excel. Of course we should take the trouble to see and address the adversities some people struggle with, be that a disability or a geographical disadvantage or something bad happening like a redundancy or a house fire or whatever. Our job is to help one another, to lift each other up, not just turn away and leave other people to cope on their own.

But in one's own life, it's worth staying vigilant about resentment. It has a tap root that makes it very difficult to eradicate once it's established. Resentment pretends to be about other people, to be their fault, caused by them; but it absolutely is not. Resentment in me is my own issue, my responsibility, and mine is the life it will ruin if I don't address it clearly and directly and get rid of it.

If you look up what the Bible and the church teach about resentment, the general consensus is that the antidote to resentment is forgiveness. I see why that's thought to be the case, but I don't think I agree. Forgiveness is needed when someone has hurt you, on purpose. I think resentment is more allied to envy, to wishing you had what someone else has, to thinking action is required because their advantage means your circumstances aren't as good as theirs, or your voice is ignored while theirs is heard.

I think the antidote to resentment might be gratitude, or contentment — something more in that ballpark than forgiveness. But I'm not sure. What do you think?

Recommending a YouTube channel

I'm just sharing this along because I think this YouTuber is wise, calm and very sane. He has made only a handful of videos, so it's very easy to catch up with his perspective and what he's proposing.

His personal background and history seem to me to particularly qualify him to comment on the present political landscape in America. I'm not 100% sure about this, because I find all the rage and chaos in my own country (England) bewildering enough — the poor blaming the rich, men blaming women (and vice versa), the Right blaming the Left (and vice versa), citizens blaming immigrants (and vice versa) — but I am very attracted to his approach of calm and intelligent thought, learning from past mistakes, supporting the human, and staying within the law.

Here's his video, watch his others if you have time, and let me know what you think.

Eating aeroplanes

 There's a person recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for eating an aeroplane — a Frenchman called Michel Lotito.

He is said to have consumed quite an array of hardware, starting small with hinges, metal chain, bolts and razors, and working up through medium-sized objects like a waterbed, some chandeliers and a coffin (with handles), to arguably more chewy items like shopping trolleys, a computer, a waterbed and a telly. But his pièce de résistance was without doubt the light aircraft he ate, a Cessna 150 which took him a while to consume.

The Guinness Book of Records people awarded him a brass plaque in recognition of his remarkable digestive achievements, and he ate that, too.

But I was thinking about him today because of mushrooms. 

Opinion on eating mushrooms is divided. Apparently, people who inform us about how to survive an apocalypse say there is no point eating mushrooms because you don't get much calorific value from them but they might kill you. They either are or aren't safe, but are never very nutritious. So it is said, and yet some varieties of mushroom (Lions Mane, Turkeytail etc) reputedly have marvellous healing benefits. They are in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket, but they aren't vegetables — they aren't animals either, but they're said to be more like animals than plants.

But why eating aeroplanes reminded me of eating mushrooms is because (are you the same?) when I eat mushrooms they pass through intact. I probably don't chew my food as assiduously as I should.

There's a very interesting man on YouTube called Lee Copus — his channel is called Kent Carnivore. Lee had ulcerative colitis, followed all the medical dietary advice for managing it, and ended up losing his colon altogether. He had been advised to eat lots of fibre and fruit and vegetables, but the anti-nutrients and plant toxins won the day, and Lee had to have a colectomy. As a result he has a bag attached to the stoma created on his abdomen to collect the digestive material that would normally pass on and out through the colon.

This means that Lee has an unusual opportunity to assess the extent to which food is digested and processed in the upper gut.

If he eats any fruit or vegetables, they pass out into the bag exactly as they went into his mouth — a bit chewed up of course, but clearly recognisable. But he found that all animal products he ate (meat, cheese, fish, eggs) never passed through as discrete objects; they were always digested and just came through as chyme. No lumps of meat or flakes of fish or pieces of egg, ever.

This is what put Lee on to first realising that fruit and vegetables were pretty much going through him like Michel Molito's aeroplane parts; he ate them, yes, and they went through him, but they came out as they went in, they were not in any real sense part of his food.

This is how I am with mushrooms. They are one of the things on the short but enjoyable list of food I can eat, so I have re-integrated them into what I have because I like the taste of them and they create variety; but they may well be entirely pointless beyond those motivating factors. Like eating aeroplanes.

Now, Lee believes he would still have his colon if he had latched on to this earlier and taken plants off the menu before he needed surgery. And surely most of us who attempted to eat a bicycle or a television would end up in the emergency room.

So I'm not sure now to what extent it's a spectrum — ranging from people who can only manage animal products, through those who can manage a few fruits and veg but not mushrooms, to those who can even eat the supermarket trolley itself — or if it's more that we should all really only eat animal products (what Dr Ken Berry describes as the proper human diet), just adding in broccoli and shiitake and chandeliers as an idiosyncratic quirk to satisfy a longing for variety.