Fad Diets

Have you ever stopped to try and count how many fad diets there are out there? There are far too many to count. The blood group diet, the atkins diet, the gi diet, slim fast, weight watchers, rosemary connely diet. There are even companies that will pre prepare food and deliver it to you, for a hefty price. But how many of these diets really work, and work with lasting effects? The truth, very few. If things worked, then there would be far few of these diets around. The truth is, the key to losing weight is a numbers game. Calories in, calories out, and people on these fad diets are just too lazy to crunch the numbers, do a bit of exercise and lose the weight they want to lose. I’ve done it with counting calories and exercise. It takes at most an hour a day. I get to have my treats as long as the numbers add up, and I’m losing weight. No ridiculous detox, no extortionate prices, just simple counting. When are we going to stop these companies from taking our money and our control away. You and only you have control over the weight that you lose and gain! It’s about time that we all take responsibility for our own bodies and choices and stopped relying on random companies who, lets face it, are generally only interested in earning money.

Take Responsibility

It’s a word we hear often. Responsibility. Not one we use that often though. People are quite happy to shirk responsibility if it gets them an easy ride. There aren’t many who will actually stand up and be counted. Imagine if we had national service nowadays. How many people would actually volunteer. It  seems that in this day and age, people have decided that it is better to take the easy option. and in doing so are making the world a worse place. It is time that we all stood up and took responsibility for things in this life, before this world becomes one full of lazy cowards who are unable to even remember what the word responsibility means!

In the style of…

I was set a writing task last week, to write a piece in the style of a famous writer. It was not something I’d ever thought of doing, and have no where near finished it, but found it surprising, how difficult it was, firstly, to decide on a style, and secondly, to actually focus on writing in that style.

I circled through several different options, ranging from Sylvia Plath, to Sue Mayfield, to John Marsden, to Emily Bronte, before finally deciding on Jane Austen. I chose her style, because it is a completely different style to my normal style of writing. It is a classical style, which shows major preoccupation with decorum, etiquette, and behaving in a proper way. Austen uses these conventions, and then presents challenges to them, generally through the voice of her main character. Austen is very socially conscious, and her characters, although central, are almost secondary to the plot. She is not a hysterical writer, and does not focus on the innermost workings of her character’s minds. The idea of experimenting with this style appealed to me for just this reason. I always focus on the internal worlds of my characters, and tend to neglect the external. It will be interesting for me to develop this story, and see if I can change my style or not. Watch this space…

Bank Cock Up

Sometimes I wonder with banks, whether one hand knows what the other is doing. Earlier this week, my mother bought something on ebay. When she tried to pay for it, through paypal, she found that she couldn’t. She tried with my dad’s account, then mine and my best friend’s. All were refused. Turned out that they had taken it upon themselves to decide that it was fraudulent, and block all four cards! It wasn’t until over twenty four hours later, when my card was refused as I was paying for petrol, that I found out they’d blocked it.

Now, I understand safeguards, but to block someone’s card for making an ebay purchase, and then not tell them about it, I think is ridiculous and irresponsible. It was only after forty minutes on the phone that I was able to resolve this. It made me ask whether this would happen every time I made an online purchase for a larger sum of money. It made me question my banking choice. How dare someone decide that a purchase of mine was fraudulent, without even informing me.

While I appreciate vigilance, this purchase was not for a huge sum of money, and was to be shipped to the same address as the account. Surely it wasn’t likely to be that much of a fraud risk when considering this.

A First Review

I thought I’d try and change up this blog a little and scatter some reviews of books, tv, movies, music etc throughout the entries. Starting Now!

 

Last week, I had the displeasure of watching a two part BBC drama called ‘Dive’, directed by Dominic Savage. Described as a contemporary love story about two teens growing up in modern day Britain, this show starts out with a girl, Lindsay going to train at the pool, with a view to joining the 2012 olympic team. On returning home, she discovers that her parent’s marriage is over, and not only has her dad moved out, but her mother has moved her new boyfriend in on the same day! Thus starts a sequence of events whereby Lindsay goes off the rails, ends up partying and having sex with one of the popular boys, Robert. Conveniently, another girl in the popular crowd does not like this and slashes Lindsay with a blade, thus leading Lindsay to the emergency room where she is suddenly changed from a closed down, sullen teen who barely says two words, to a more talkative person who tells the nurse that she has been bleeding and that she thinks she might be pregnant. Cut to the olympic team selection meet, where Lindsay finds out that she has made the team. Robert, in the meantime has said that he doesn’t do relationships, but makes a sudden turnaround when he finds out that she is pregnant. A tentative friendship and sexual relationship develops, with Robert then attending the first scan with Lindsay. The second part of the drama follows Robert as he tries to decide whether to be there for Lindsay or not. This scenario is complicated by Robert’s brother who appears to be clinically depresses, having returned from Iraq.

The storyline is patchy, with very little continuity, with the writer having tried to pack far too much into the two hours allocated the show. The ‘brother returning from Iraq’ storyline is a show all of it’s own, and serves little than to take time away from the main storyline.

The characters are poorly developed, with Lindsay’s character saying very few words. In fact, it is to Aisling Loftus’ credit that she was able to say so much while not actually speaking at all. Both characters seem to have moments of being one thing and then seem to immediately switch to something entirely different, which leads me to believe that the writer was writing a plot, and the characters were just a coincidence of trying to achieve the plot objective.

The only saving grace this drama has is the acting skill of the two main characters, which endear them to the audience. Without this I fear many people would have just tuned out.

British Tv

British Tv at the moment is a dead loss. We have become like all  other consumer markets in this country. There are no longer any more really good, regular British dramas. We instead buy American shows to put on Tv.. Now, I’m not opposed to American shows, they’re great, but Britain has always had a strong showing of dramas on TV, and since the credit crunch, our TV has become a mass of documentaries and reality shows, and while I like these (mostly), I don’t think that British TV should be limited to this just because they think it’s cheap tv. We should push for more dramas on our screens. There are so many brilliant actors and writers out there just waiting for a chance. Perhaps we should start taking some risks, and put something other than the usual things on TV.

People

Some people really frustrate me. Why would you deliberately try and worry someone who is supposed to be your friend. Why would you ignore someone one day because you have something better to do and then be all over them the next day. The truth is, people use each other. People are horrible sometimes. Some people are so obsessed with looking good and sucking up to other people in authority that they just don’t care who they hurt. They think only of themselves and if they see someone else doing well, they get bitchy. It’s childish. If people just grew up and acted like human beings and were kind and compassionate to others, the world would be a far better place!