Pasta avoidance, anti-ageing creams and all the other pointless First World faffing we should ditch
Yup, pasta is okay. According to a major new study, it’s not actually fattening as previously thought. Some of us knew this revelation would surface sooner or later. We sensed that whoever said ‘everything in moderation’, which for a long while was taken to be a good rule for life, might have had a point.
We had a hunch that micro-managing your diet like a jockey, treating party eats and pudding as if they were Novichok, was utterly pointless First World faffing. We knew this in our guts and yet we went along with it, all the same. We turned pasta eating into an act of reckless debauchery and self-harm.
Knowing this makes you wonder how many other modern received wisdoms we are living our lives by, while deep down knowing them to be a total and utter waste of time.
Here are a few that spring to mind...
Moth traps
Everyone goes on and on about them but four years of moth traps (hundreds of them, two in each cupboard, one outside the cupboard), we still have moth. The traps are certainly catching moths, that we can see. But so what? There are holes in our jumpers, different holes in different jumpers, year after year.
Burglar alarms
Last month our neighbour had their back door kicked in. During the day. In, out. Cleaned out in three minutes flat and that was that. Our response to this was to upgrade our burglar alarm. It is amazing, our new burglar alarm — you can turn it on and off from a foreign country. But if you wanted to get into our house, you could just break a kitchen window, do your burgling and the burglar alarm would merely get on your nerves. We know this but we paid through the nose to get the box on the wall that we already know (because our neighbour has the identical alarm) deters no robber, even at three in the afternoon.
Vitamins and food supplements
There’s always a new must-have one — this month’s is curcumin (something to do with turmeric, possibly antioxidant) — and costing €27.99 for roughly 27 pills. It’s hard to tell if they’re doing anything but it seems pretty unlikely, especially as we always forget to take them. We’re really buying them the way we buy Booker shortlisted books, for the security of knowing we have them in the house.
Recycling
We all know this is a penance for destroying the planet, don’t we? A mild inconvenience requiring separating things into six different bins and washing out cartons etc, after which they take it round the corner and send it in one big lump to China. Are the men at the recycling plant committed environmentalists or laughing their heads off at all the losers separating their ale cans from their Dolmio jars? It’s not really doing as much as we pretend, is it?
Switching to vinyl
Are you doing this? Turning off Spotify, getting into vinyl. Have you dusted off your old albums and ordered loads more. Have you got the turntable and the super woofer and whatnot, and the upgraded version of all of them. Are you, of an evening, unsleeving your copy of Miles Davis’ Kind Of
Blue and listening to the fat sound (there is nothing like it), or are you flicking on your Spotify playlist every single time?
Putting our faith in anti-ageing creams
To be fair, there is Boots’ No 7 Protect and Perfect (which really does work. My husband was told to put it on a scar by a
doctor). But we dodge that one because it’s sort of boring looking and go for the fancy schmancy 10 times more expensive one, modelled by the woman who has been airbrushed to a pebble finish. We like to spend money on silly cream, that’s it. We could burn it in an ashtray but we prefer to do it this way.