Badgerstoke on Diets

There always seem to be a new diet fad that is being introduced and so I thought it would be good to give you the Badgerstoke wisdom on this topic.

My wife, Mrs Badgerstoke, is an expert on diets as she has been continuously on one for the last twenty years. It has not been the same diet for the whole time as she likes to try anything new that comes along. In this she cooperates with Madge, the lady in the cake shop where she shops on most days.

Mrs Badgerstoke was a large woman when we first met (she was a Miss Prendergast then of course) but she became much larger over the first years of our marriage. It started when she was pregnant with our first child Gloria and she got cravings for sherry trifle and coal (which was inconvenient because we had gas central heating). The first of these is fattening I’m led to believe although the second is not. She did try to get her figure back after Gloria was born but Brian, our second child, came along shortly afterwards and the cravings started again, this time for bacon rolls and ice-cream. Strangely she still has these same cravings twenty years later.

Since Brian was born Mrs Badgerstoke has tried many different diets to get back into her original shape but without much success. She is four pounds lighter than she was twenty years ago but it is difficult to know which diet to ascribe this to as there have been so many over that period.  So I have decided to describe just a couple of the diets she has tried and you can make your own mind up.

CalorieCounter: This is a diet where each food item is given a points value (1 for a slice of cucumber, 2 for a crème cake, etc.) and then you add up the points and make sure you don’t exceed a certain number each day. Once you have paid your money they will tell you the secret value of each piece of food and allow you to partake in the other part of the treatment, which is being publically weighted and humiliated each week.

Mrs Badgerstoke and her friend Madge from the cake shop did try this for a while but they didn’t lose any weight. The main problem seemed to be how to judge the points value of food. For example is a large piece of Dundee Cake worth more or less than three chocolate éclairs?  My wife did attribute some of her overall weight to the clothes she was wearing (she normally wears some fairly substantial underwear) and she did manage to lose a few pounds one week by leaving some of this off but when she came home from the weighing she said that she felt “all wobbly”.

So I’m afraid that she didn’t continue with this diet for very long.

Detox Diet: The theory here is that normal foods contain toxins which stay in the body and cause problems. One look at the contents label on a food packet in the past would have confirmed the truth of this with names like Monosodium Glutamate and Trinitrotoluene. Now manufacturers use E-numbers so you can’t see what the foods really contain which is very sneaky I think.

Mrs B (I sometimes call my wife this instead of using her full name just to add a little variety to our conversation) did decide to try a Detox diet (I can’t remember which one) and so she sent away a large amount of money and in return received a box containing tins of liquid that she was supposed to drink instead of eating meals.

The second part of the programme was something called colonic irrigation. The theory here is that food can get stuck in the final part of your digestive system and start to rot there and this can be removed by shooting warm washing up liquid up your bottom through a rubber tube. So every couple of weeks Mrs Badgerstoke would catch the number 17 bus to a clinic where this process would take place. She seemed to be quite taken with the young man called Kevin who was in charge of inserting the tube.

The trouble with this diet was that the liquid that my wife was supposed to drink tasted horrible and she soon gave up. Not wishing to waist the liquid we did try adding it to the dog’s food but he promptly threw up on the dining room carpet.  And so we tried it with a stray cat that often frequented our garden and we never saw it again.

Although my wife gave up the meal replacements she did decide to continue with the colonic irrigation. However the cost of this was a little steep and so after a few more visits to the clinic I suggested that I could undertake the process at home as I had a rubber tube and a funnel in the shed. However my wife assured me that as I didn’t have the years of training that Kevin had that she thought there was a real possibility that I might have an accident during the insertion.

So for financial reasons we also gave up on this diet.

There have been many other diets (F-Plan, Pineapple, Radish, etc.) but none have proved successful for my wife although they seem to work a treat for the celebrities that is publicising them.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If your wife asks you if she need to go on a diet then honesty is not always the best policy.

Badgerstoke on Astrology

I know that Astrology is dismissed by some members of the scientific community, and these are people who are supposed to keep an open mind on all things. My personal view is that it should be considered just as valid as its twin science of Astronomy. There are too many events where Astrological predictions have proved correct for it to be easily dismissed. I will give a couple of examples below that I hope will convince you of my point.

My first example is the case of our neighbour Miss Dingle who lives at number 12. She once read her horoscope in the local paper and it said that “she would have a lucky gain” and sure enough three months later she won ten pounds on the national lottery. That can’t be a coincident surely.

My second example is in my own family. My son Brian is away at University taking a degree in Modern Art with Media Studies. Brian is a Libra. He was born just after midnight in the early hours of 24^th September which makes him a Libra by a matter of a few minutes but I’m sure that would have been enough time to stamp the Libra character traits on him. It is a sobering thought that if Mrs Badgerstoke had pushed just a little harder then he might have been a Virgo and a completely different person.

Anyway I have looked up the characteristics of Libra and found them to be: Social, Artistic, Vacillating, Intellectual and Communicative. It goes without saying that he is both Artistic and Intellectual being on an artistically bias course at university. I also know him to be Social and Communicative as he is normally to be found in the student’s bar most of the time, drinking and talking with his friends on a range of subjects. I had to look up Vacillating in the dictionary and found it to mean indecisive and hesitating. Like most young men of his age Brian knows absolutely everything about everything and will quickly give the definitive opinion on any subject at the drop of a hat (a real chip off the old block) and so I’m afraid that aspect of the standard Libra character doesn’t match, but four out of five isn’t bad.

So as you can see from my examples there is a lot to be said for Astrology and scientists dismiss it at their peril.

Mrs Badgerstoke does read her horoscope in the local paper each week and, as she is a God fearing woman, I thought I’d check with the vicar what the church’s view on Astrology was. Unfortunately he told me that they rank it alongside the other dark arts like witchcraft, yoga and veganism. But as Mrs Badgerstoke does enjoy reading her horoscope I decided that she would be willing to risk eternal damnation to continue doing so and therefore I didn’t tell her of the vicar’s opinion.

Also people shouldn’t assume that the heavenly bodies do not exert an influence on our lives. I did read in a learned journal (I think it was the Boy’s Book of Basic Science that I had for my tenth birthday but didn’t read at the time) that two bodies will exert an effect on each other proportional to their mass. Well I’m given to understand that the planet Jupiter has a very large mass and Mrs Badgerstoke is not a small woman and so it stands to reason that they must have an effect on each other. I can confirm that Mrs Badgerstoke certainly has an effect on me.

I am happy with good clean British Astrology with its signs based on random collections of stars but there are other systems as well which don’t seem to have the same proven validity. Take Chinese Astrology for example which has each year represented by a different animal such as the Rat, Baboon or Scaly Anteater. If you follow this then everyone born in the same year would have the same characteristics. So you might have a whole year where everyone was an Artist and nobody was a sportsman. This would play havoc with the school system and so I don’t think it can be true.

So I hope I’ve said enough to convince you of the validity of the science of British Astrology.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: Always take note of your Horoscope as sometimes it will be correct.

Badgerstoke on The Sexual Revolution

For this post I will cover a topic that seems to be constantly on the mind of many young people. I refer of course to sex.

There wasn’t much sex before the 1960s. There must have been some as women tended to have children and sex is part of that process. However in the 1960s we had the “sexual revolution” which is where the youth went mad with desire brought about by an over-rich diet and taking LSD (which is a type of drug I’ve been informed) and started doing sex all over the place and sometimes with virtual strangers.

At this time I was a teenager working for Mr Jenkins in his corner shop and delivering groceries on a shop bicycle. And I think that the “sexual revolution” must have been something that was exaggerated by the more sensation sections of the press as I never saw anything of it. I have discussed this with my wife, Mrs Badgerstoke, and she confirms my opinion although she did say that she’d had her bottom pinched once in 1968 whilst travelling on the number 39 bus. In those days of course she wasn’t Mrs Badgerstoke but rather Miss Prendergast but even then her bottom was of a size that the perpetrator of the crime would have had no problem in finding somewhere to grab hold of. My wife tells me that the bus was crowded with standing room only and although she tried her best, she never did find out who did it. She told me she even put an advertisement in the local newspaper offering a moderate reward next to a picture of herself (the one taken whilst wearing a bathing costume on the beach at Clacton) but nobody came forward.

Things seemed to setting down in the 1970s when the novelty of excessive and impromptu sex had worn off a bit but certain sections of the press tried to keep the thing going, probably to boost their circulation. The worst offenders were the women’s glossy magazines which encouraged women to assume that having multiple orgasms was their right. I discussed this point with Mrs Badgerstoke who assured me that having an organism tended to interrupt her train of thought and that she couldn’t imagine having a second one inside three months of the first and I’m not sure that, with that length of time between them, could be considered to be “multiple”.

We had an unfortunate incident in the close recently which illustrates the dangers that too much exposure to sex can bring. Another of our neighbours, Miss Dingle at number 12, read the book Fifty Shades of Grey. She said she thought it was a book on decorating for people with less colourful tastes. She seemed to have been deeply affected by the book and the vicar, Rev Snodgrass, has needed to give her extensive one-to-one counselling. You have to admire the devotion of the clergy as several times I have looked out of our bedroom window and seen him leaving Miss Dingle’s house in the early hours of the morning with a haggard expression on his face.

I will leave the topic of sex for now and come back to it in a later post as I understand some people can get a little over stimulated by the subject although neither myself nor Mrs Badgerstoke have ever suffered in that way.

However before I go, I had promised you some sage advice and so I will end each of my posts with a piece of wisdom under the name “Badgerstoke’s Tip” and here is the first one:

Badgerstoke’s Tip: It is best to have sex with the lights off, particularly if your chosen partner is not very attractive.

My name is George Badgerstoke and I’m starting this blog to pass on my extensive knowledge and experience to the younger generation.

I retired last year after forty highly successful years in the retail trade and since that time have made it my mission to help the younger generation who seem to have lost their way a little over the last couple of decades. Since my retirement I have on several occasions been in a position to impart my advice to a member of the younger generation and several of them have made suggestions as to what I could do with it. So I have created this blog for the benefit of the youth of the United Kingdom.

For my first post I will not impart any pearls of wisdom but rather I will introduce myself so that you understand where my future sage advice is coming from.

I live in a nice modern semi-detached house with my wife Mrs. Badgerstoke. My wife does have a first name but she doesn’t much care for it so everyone just used Missus. Even, two or three times a year, when we share our most intimate moments she still prefers me to call her Mrs. Badgerstoke.

We have two children, Brian and Gloria. Brian is away at University taking a degree in Modern Art with Media Studies. I’m not sure what career this will lead to be he assures me that there is a highly paid job awaiting him at the end and who am I to argue with someone who is clever enough to go to university.

My daughter Gloria is a highly skilled hairdresser and lives with her husband Dean a few streets away from us. Dean is on a Government scheme call “Job Seekers Allowance” which is for people who don’t want to work but like to practice their interview technique in case they change their mind in the future.

As I have already told you, I have recently retired and so a few words about my career are called for here. I started my career as an errand boy for a small shop delivering items on a shop bicycle and over the next forty years I rose to become the manager of a medium sized supermarket. My highly successful career has brought me into contact with many members of the public and allowed me to dispense my advice freely but since I have retired I have only come into contact with people who have already been advised by me on many occasions and they have encouraged me to go away and tell someone else and so this has been the main reason that I’ve decided to start this blog.

Well that is a brief introduction to me and my family. My next post will, I assure you, contain advice that you can take to the bank.