Ties That Bind

For the best part of half a century I wore a tie every day. At junior school it was admittedly elasticated with a pre-tied knot, but then at senior school it was a rather natty blue, gold and white affair that actually needed to be tied. Moving from the elasticated tie to the one that had to be tied was something of a rite of passage. This being the seventies, when ties were worn very, very wide and the school tie was somewhat narrow this led to many boys (and girls for that matter as they also had to wear the tie), constructing a knot the size of their fist, with the actual hanging part of the fabric about two inches long. This was however the widest part of the tie so it was vaguely fashionable, even if this style was frowned upon by the school establishment.

When I started work ties were obligatory in offices but workers in all sorts of occupations, including many blue collar jobs, habitually wore them. Many men wore them even when they were not working. My own father regularly wore a tie even after he retired when he wore a proper shirt. In fact his wardrobe consisted only of proper shirts; he was never a t-shirt or polo shirt wearer, thus he wore a tie most of the time when he went out.

Over recent years office wear has become less formal. It started (in my old offices at least) with dress down on special occasions, then informal wear (t-shirts and jeans) became a regular Friday occurrence, normally with a small donation to charity attached. Then it was decided that ties need not be worn even with a suit from Monday to Thursday, until ultimately dress down became the norm five days a week. I was not an adherent of wearing a work shirt and suit without a tie however. To me wearing a suit without a tie looks strange. If the top shirt button is not done up it looks scruffy; if it is done up it looks odd. The only way a shirt without a tie with a suit looks good is when the shirt is collarless, a look favoured by some Middle Eastern politicians. So while many people around me at work went tieless, I persisted when wearing a suit; somehow it felt more natural to me. Apart from anything else, after over forty years of tie wearing I actually felt more comfortable wearing one. There is a school of thought that suggests that more formal work wear is actually associated with greater professionalism and productivity and I’d subscribe to that to some degree. Even though my office went fully dress down, there were some buildings that did not so visiting them for meetings meant that we had to adopt their dress code; certainly in customer facing roles formal attire was still compulsory. It’s about image I guess and our culture still associates formal wear with efficiency and professionalism.

Recent research by online fashion retailer Very.co.uk has found that one in ten workers cite dress down Friday as the most stressful day of the week and 15 per cent become so stressed by what to wear they even call in sick. Somewhat extreme and exactly the opposite effect that their employers were aiming for, so perhaps it’s understandable that some organisations have actually bucked the dress down trend and reverted to the requirement for staff to wear formal dress, including ties for men.

Pushing the dress down boundaries are Virgin Atlantic. According to their website, “Virgin Atlantic sprung a surprise on Canadian breakfast television this week, as they presented CTV Breakfast anchor Aamer Haleem with a ‘Say Bye To The Tie’ t-shirt – following his cutting encounter with Richard Branson last year. Last May the Virgin Group Founder was a guest on the show when he decided Haleem would probably be slightly more comfortable without his tie, before taking matters into his own hands and producing a pair of scissors from his top pocket.”

The article goes on to say “if you’re a tie wearer then look out. You never know when Richard Branson will next be on the spot to cut your attire down to size.” Now I’ve never met Sir Richard, and frankly I don’t think that I’m likely to, but in the event that I did, and that I was wearing a tie and he took a pair of scissors to it, I would not be best pleased. Sure, if I worked for Virgin and was asked not to wear a tie I wouldn’t but otherwise I will wear one if I choose to; in some circumstances it would probably be disrespectful not to. I am sure that there are many clubs and restaurants that still insist on men wearing ties and why not? As to comfort, I can’t see why a tie should be uncomfortable unless the wearer feels that their neck is being constricted, in which case it is the tightness of their shirt collar that is the problem, not the tie.

Some people view the tie as superfluous, unnecessary, an outdated garment that may inconveniently immerse itself into a cup of tea or fly over the wearer’s shoulder on a windy day. To those people I’d point out that most useful of additions to a tie wearer’s wardrobe, the tie tack, of which I have several and which prevent such inconvenient dunkings and flyaway moments. I rather miss wearing a tie now that I don’t work and don’t have to; I’m sure that the next time an opportunity to wear one presents itself I will quite enjoy doing so.

If it’s true that the tie is a non-essential item of clothing then one day it may go the way of the cravat and the tie dye shirt, but men’s suits tend to be dull and drab without a tie. A tie gives the wearer the opportunity to add a touch of individuality and colour to their dress. It’s not too strong to say that a suit is incomplete without a tie.  The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, opined that men should always wear a tie on formal occasions. He was asked why. "Because it looks better," he said and I concur.

The Fat of the Land

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges this week encouraged us all to drink more beer. Well not in so many words they didn’t but an unintended consequence of their proposal to introduce taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20% could be just that.  The Academy is a "united front" of the medical profession from surgeons to GPs and psychiatrists to paediatricians. They are currently recommending:

• 1.       A ban on advertising foods high in saturated fat, sugar and salt before 9pm
• 2.       Further taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20%
• 3.       A reduction in fast food outlets near schools and leisure centres
• 4.       A £100m budget for interventions such as weight-loss surgery
• 5.       No junk food or vending machines in hospitals, where all food must meet the same              nutritional standards as in schools
• 6.       Food labels to include calorie information for children

As they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and these recommendations may just be one step on that road.

A ban on advertising foods high in saturated fat, sugar and salt before 9pm

Hands up all of you who actually watch TV advertising? Thought so. The advent of video recording, through Sky Plus, Freeview and TiVo means that if your household is even vaguely similar to mine, it’s rare that you actually watch an advert. Recorded the programme? Let’s skip through the commercials. Watching live? Let’s go put the kettle on or pop off to the loo. There is much debate as to whether the ban on tobacco advertising on TV and in cinemas had as much impact on consumption as did negative advertising. Indeed there is a widely held belief that tobacco advertising is related more to brand loyalty than overall consumption and a similar argument holds true for these food groups. Adverting doesn’t necessarily drive people to eat junk/convenience food that they would not have if it had not been advertised but rather it means that they eat at McDonalds rather than Burger King, or Pizza Hut rather than Dominos.

The sinister aspect of convenience food advertising are the promotions tied in with films books or TV programmes that connect the latest fad with the food. The notorious clout that pester power has when exerted by a child is enough to bend the will of the strongest parent, so on the whole you have to say that such a ban may at least make for a more peaceful life among the nation’s parents. Will it reduce the consumption of foods that are high in saturated fat, sugar and salt? The cynic in me says not to any appreciable degree.

Further taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20%

Look at point two. No, look at it and examine the possible (unintended) consequences. Your local JD Wetherspoon pub is currently selling Carlsberg lager or John Smith’s bitter at £2.09 a pint. They also sell a fourteen ounce glass of Pepsi Cola for £1.70, which works out at £2.42 per pint, or after the proposed twenty percent increase, a swingeing £2.90 per pint.

Now I grant that the academy’s target group are the teens and pre-teens who don’t drink alcohol (well not officially at least) but an unintended consequence of their proposal, should it actually come to pass, could be encouraging increased alcohol consumption in adults, driven by price.

A reduction in fast food outlets near schools and leisure centres

A cursory examination of the secondary schools in my local area reveals that none are within easy walking distance of a fast food outlet. Now my area may not be typical, but if there happens to be a fast food outlet on your local school’s doorstep, what precisely is envisaged here, closing said outlet? Restricting their opening hours? Common law in this country, as outlined in the case of Mitchell v Reynolds (1711) is that,

"It is the privilege of a trader in a free country, in all matters not contrary to law, to regulate his own mode of carrying it on according to his own discretion and choice. If the law has regulated or restrained his mode of doing this, the law must be obeyed. But no power short of the general law ought to restrain his free discretion."

I await with eager anticipation, the first time that the law steps in to either close an existing McDonalds store, or oppose planning permission for a new one, on the basis that it is too close to a school. My experience, gleaned over years of commuting, is that school children get the bus from school into town, buy and devour their fast food and then get another bus home. For the hungry child in possession of an Oyster card, distance is no object.

A £100m budget for interventions such as weight-loss surgery.

The NHS website states that “Weight loss surgery, also called bariatric surgery, is used as a last resort to treat people who are dangerously obese (carrying an abnormally excessive amount of body fat).This type of surgery is only available on the NHS to treat people with potentially life-threatening obesity when other treatments, such as lifestyle changes, haven't worked.”

The telling phrase in the above is that this sort of surgery should be available only when other treatments, such as lifestyle changes, haven't worked. This proposal opens the floodgates for the lazy and weak willed to demand surgery because they have zero will power and less common sense, diverting resources from those truly in need, and I include people who are obese in the category of those in need, assuming that non-surgical methods of weight loss have proved ineffective.

No junk food or vending machines in hospitals, where all food must meet the same nutritional standards as in schools.

No argument from me on that one, although as the recent horsemeat scandal has shown, I wouldn’t hold schools up as a beacon of nutritional enlightenment, but that is another story.

Food labels to include calorie information for children.

Now most of the pre-packed food I buy in the supermarket already contains calorific information, fat content, sugar content etc, etc, so I’m not sure how effective this is expected to be, especially when you consider that printing “Smoking Kills” on cigarette packets probably hasn’t scared everyone in the UK into giving up, albeit that consumption declined by almost 50% between 1990 and 2009. Also you can print all the health, calorie, fat and sugar content information on a fast food wrapper that you want and the average teenage isn’t going to read it far less take any notice of it. Besides, remember how you were as a teenager, that feeling of immortality, that belief that it would never happen to you? I doubt very much whether there is a teenager in land who takes one iota of notice of health warnings, nor ever will.

On the day that The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ recommendations came out, I happened to be listening to a radio phone in and one listener spotted a major flaw in all of this, namely the absence of the “R” word, R being for Responsibility. You can legislate all that you want, place any number of restrictions and print any number of health warnings and the effect will be a big fat zero unless people, that’s you, me and the man on the Clapham omnibus, take responsibility, responsibility for our own actions and those of our children until they are old enough to do it for themselves. So it is and thus it ever was.

"You have reached your destination."

I like to think that I have a fairly decent sense of direction, and I know that having been somewhere once, I can usually find it again without recourse to a map or sat-nav, but I do admit that when it comes to map reading my wife is probably better than me. Indeed there have been occasions when Val has wrestled a map away from me in frustration and forbidden me to use it again! My problem is with the fine detail; I’m ok with the big picture and even after a cursory glance at a map can happily navigate to a town I’ve never been to. The problem comes when trying to find somewhere specific within that town. I always find that the last mile or two is the most difficult of the journey and it is then that I have, on occasion found myself hopelessly lost. Only by leaving home ridiculously early to go just about anywhere, which I do to compensate for the potential to become lost, has enabled me to arrive on time (or still actually early) when this happens.

In the days before sat-navs, this was much more of a problem and even more so before the internet when the only real alternative to a map was the Automobile Association. Pop along to one of their branches (which I’m not sure they have anymore) and as a member, they would provide you with a route planner in hard copy, not over the counter of course, they had to post it to you. About a week later a large envelope would arrive with a ream of music score paper containing driving instructions. This became old hat once the internet came along as the AA put a Route Planner on their website. Then along came Google and the route planner in Google Maps became invaluable. The only problem I find with that is when driving alone I still manage to get lost as I try and drive and read the route planner simultaneously. Inevitably, after a few wrong turns, I would have to stop and scrutinise the map and directions. Being a man, asking someone for directions is of course out of the question, except in extremis.

Now when it comes to technology I wouldn’t say that I’m an early adopter. Partly this is due to my belief that initial versions of some technology products will be “buggy “and that a better, cheaper version will come along in a few months but I also fear buying something gimmicky that will end up a white elephant. So it was that it was a number of years after they first came out that I bought a sat-nav. Most of the time it sits unregarded in the glove box in the car, but it comes out from time to time and on the whole I wouldn’t be without it, although it’s not without its frustrations. My principle frustration is that no matter how firmly I affix it to the windscreen, there is usually some point during the journey when it becomes unattached and falls to the dashboard with a resounding clunk. Unfortunately the dashboard is somewhat curved and all attempts to site it there have met with failure. Unless I can stop to reattach it, which I obviously can’t when driving on a motorway or narrow country lane, the thing then either rolls around, threatening to drop into the foot well, or has to be relocated to the passenger seat.

I like the voice though, it reminds me of Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation) and I love the way it pronounces “roundabout.” However (and to my wife’s amusement) I do find myself arguing with it occasionally. “Turn left,” says Deanna (inevitably that is how I think of the sat-nav), “It’s not a left turn,” I argue,” it’s a bend in the road.” Sometimes I’m sure she gets annoyed when, particularly in the early stages of a journey, when I know exactly where I am, where I’m going and that the route that Deanna has in mind isn’t the best one given the time of day and traffic conditions, I ignore her advice and she has to recalculate the route. Overall Deanna has got me where I want to go and usually pretty close to the predicted arrival time, but I do think that she took revenge on my occasional disobedience one time when I foolishly connected the device to my computer to download updates from the manufacturer. I’d done this before without a problem, however on this particular occasion this activity wiped all of the information from it. I uninstalled and re-installed the software, I reset the sat-nav to its factory settings but to no avail; it was useless and it had to go back to the shop for a replacement to be issued.

As helpful as they are, I have one major note of caution to inject about sat-navs and it is this. We’ve all seen the reports in the newspapers, sometimes humorous but sometimes tragic, about motorists following the advice of their sat-nav slavishly and ending up trapped in some narrow lane inappropriate for vehicles (this normally happens to long distance lorry drivers from the continent), or in one spectacular case, on the railway tracks when the driver took the instruction to turn right at the level crossing too literally. Mindlessly following the sat-nav’s directions when the evidence of our own eyes is that this is wrong can be foolish and downright dangerous. The trust that we place in technology can be our undoing in these circumstances. I have found that following Deanna’s instructions has to be tempered with realising that I am in charge of the vehicle and in the event of an accident I can scarcely blame her, now can I?

Assuming that weather doesn’t intervene and cause the game to be postponed, Deanna will be directing me to Maldon on Saturday when Romford visit Heybridge Swifts in the Ryman League. I’ve been there before so  for the first 95% of the journey she’ll be little more than a passenger, but I will be relying on her to stop me going round in circles in the last mile or so, so long as she doesn’t sulk when I ignore her route from my house to the A12 that is!

Little Bags of Mystery

When it was recently revealed that supermarket beefburgers had been found to contain horsemeat and that halal meat products were found to contain traces of pork, I wondered how my late father would have reacted to the news.

My Dad had opinions on most things and was more than happy to share them with anyone who would listen, whether they wanted to or not. Even before his eyesight failed (he suffered macular degeneration from his mid-sixties) my Dad would listen avidly to the radio, which was normally tuned to Radio 4 or LBC; news, current affairs and phone in programmes were his particular favourites and he usually had some view or other, sometimes quite extreme, about the topics that were broadcast. This quite often led to him discussing these points of view with me. I think it best to refer to these discussions as healthy debates with a frank and fair exchange of views. I must confess that on occasion, even when I agreed with him, I would take the opposite point of view for entertainment if nothing else.

All things medical fascinated my Dad, especially the links between health, diet and nutrition and food in general. One of the programmes that he listened to regularly on LBC featured Michael van Straten, an osteopath, naturopath, acupuncturist and nutritional consultant and advocate of healthy eating. While not quite following a macrobiotic diet, my Dad was keen to eat healthily; he eschewed red meat to a large extent, preferring white meat or fish. He was most definitely not a proponent of fast food or convenience food or of any highly processed food. On these subjects he normally had a strong view, for instances on most breakfast cereals: “You’d be better off eating the packet,” and on sausages which he described as “Bags of mystery.” I can rarely if ever recall him eating a sausage and I certainly can’t recall him eating a hamburger. So I’m sure he would have felt that the recent revelations of horsemeat in certain supermarket beefburgers and to a lesser extent the news of cross contamination with pork in halal meats vindicated his avoidance of convenience foods.

Sausages were dubbed “little bags of mystery” by the Victorians, who were sceptical of what they contained and suspected the presence of rather a lot of horsemeat. Today’s convenience foods would have given the Victorians plenty of scope for criticism. Adulterating food with unexpected ingredients is nothing new and history has many examples of foods being padded with patently harmful substances. Nowadays some of the substances added to foods may be defined as harmful; it depends on how prepared you are to ingest a wide range of chemicals that probably do little damage in small doses but are likely to cause long term damage if consumed on a regular basis. The most worrying element of this story is that there may be a significant risk that the horsemeat that has entered the human food chain was either tainted by harmful drugs administered to the animal while it was alive or in the method of its slaughter.

In 2005, the 5 biggest horse meat-consuming countries were China, Mexico, Russia, Italy, and Kazakhstan but generally there is a taboo about the eating of horse and it is more the taboo than anything else that exercises us in this instance; that and the deception. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong in eating horse and assuming that it is prepared properly nothing unhealthy either. A key factor in our outrage, apart from any health issues that I’ve alluded to above, is the deception. If people were accepting of eating horse and it was advertised and sold as such then those of us who preferred not to might accept that; what we can’t accept is one thing sold as another. Of course the whole affair begs the wider question around mass food production. Under what conditions are any of our staple food animals kept? How are they treated and slaughtered? How clean and hygienic are the factories where the carcasses are prepared before arriving in our supermarkets? On the whole most of us probably adopt an “out of sight, out of mind” approach when buying meat in the supermarket, until of course some TV documentary exposes conditions in some meat packing plant. More seriously, how much cross contamination is there with ingredients that we don’t want to eat for religious or cultural reasons. In some cases, and I’m thinking of suffers from allergies and food intolerances here, cross contamination can have serious health implications.

Since nut allergies are pretty common and can be fatal, we’re all familiar with warnings about products that may contain nuts or have been produced in a factory where nuts are processed, but there are plenty of other instances where foods contain unexpected extras. Many years ago I suffered an allergy to chicken; it brought me out in hives which was inconvenient and uncomfortable but no more than that. Now chicken should be reasonably easy to avoid if you don’t want to eat it, but I sometimes had reactions after eating other things, whereupon a quick read of the ingredients would reveal “Other meats” (undefined but quick obviously chicken).

Convenience food consumption in the UK is big business and while a reasonable person will be aware that the ingredients in ready meals, burgers and sausages will not comprise the highest quality meat, we all have a reasonable expectation that it will at least have come from the right animal. A major reason for low quality or (as we now find) fraudulent meat in convenience foods is financial. As a nation we have become accustomed to relatively low food prices. Research undertaken by the housing charity Shelter reveals that if food prices had risen at the same rate as house prices in the period since 1971, we would now be paying £8.47 for a bunch of six bananas, £10.45 for four pints of milk and £53.18 for a leg of lamb. I’m not entirely convinced that comparing hose prices and food prices is especially valid and Shelter’s point was aimed more at the lack of affordable housing than the relative cheapness of food, but in reality food price increases in the same proportion as those in other markets would cause public outcry so naturally food producers need to contain costs while still making profits.

Each new day seems to bring further examples of horsemeat contamination of beef products, although as Findus admit that up to 100% of the meet in their lasagne was horse, the word contamination is scarcely strong enough. We’ve ended up in this situation for two reasons. One is greed and the pursuit of profit on the part of all of the parties in the production and distribution of these products which results in the cheapest cuts of meat being sourced. As profit margins are trimmed to the bone[1] it becomes inevitable that the raw material will be of the cheapest, lowest quality possible. Secondly there has to be some responsibility on the part of the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Lamentably they only appear to have become involved in this affair after the event when really they should have been acting as guardians of food quality and preventing horsemeat entering the food chain, not wringing their hands and only acting now, a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. [2] I may be wrong but I suspect the FSA to be one of those organisations where bureaucrats outnumber the inspectors and testers. This appears to be borne out by the fact that it was tests carried out by the Ministry of Justice rather than the FSA that identified the pork in halal products, a story which incidentally appears to have been lost in the avalanche of news about horsemeat.

The whole episode raise questions of how much do we know about what we eat? When it comes to convenience food the answer has to be very little. We have to take on trust that what the manufacturer says is in the product actually is in the product and at the moment it’s clear that in a great many cases they aren’t worthy of our trust.

Furthermore the news we have been hearing evokes the “mad cow disease”  (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) scare of the 1980’s and ‘90’s when beef products of all types were being cleared from supermarket shelves; certainly I recall that my Dad reduced what little beef he consumed at the time to virtually nothing. But the BSE epidemic did not translate itself into the widespread incidence of nvCJD (new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) in humans as had been feared and beef consumption recovered. Over time our society’s reliance on and love of convenience foods will mean that this scandal will be a mere footnote in history like all of the others, past and future.

I say past and future because if history tells us anything it is that this will be repeated in some way or another. There will be plenty of people smugly declaring that they never eat burgers, or microwaveable lasagne, but they may rest assured that lurking somewhere in their fridge, freezer or larder is another food scandal time bomb waiting to explode. Next time it might be chicken or farmed fish or pork or lamb, but whatever it is, rest assured there will be a next time.

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[1] It has been difficult to write this piece without using lots of food related references; eventually one slipped through.

[2] Sorry, that was difficult to resist.