Modern ‘wisdoms’ that are anything but

Yup, pasta is OK. It’s not actually fattening as previously thought, according to a Canadian study published in the

BMJ. Some of us knew this revelation would surface sooner or later; we sensed that whoever said Everything in Moderation might have had a point. We had a hunch that micromanaging 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. 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 and one outside the cupboard), we still have moths. The traps are certainly catching moths, that we can see. But 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 was to upgrade our burglar alarm. It is amazing, 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 alarm would merely get on your nerves. We know this but we paid through the nose to get the box on the wall that, it has already been proved (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) that costs £27.99 for 30 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 send it in one big lump to China. Are the men at the recycling plant committed environmentalists, or simply 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? 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 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 Protect & Prevent (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 schmanzy, 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. We could burn it in an ashtray but we prefer to do it this way.

‘We turned pasta eating into an act of reckless debauchery’