It started on Boxing Day when I was breakfasting with my Longest-Serving Friend. The brandy bottle was still on the table from, oh, I don't know, Christmas Day? I had made up a bowl of granola, yoghurt, banana.
"Have some seeds with that," my LSF encouraged. "Tim would be pleased."
When my LSF mentions Tim in this context, Tim is Tim Spector of the Zoe project. This is a project intent on researching our gut microbiomes in order for us to live in better harmony with ourselves. We are on first-name terms with him. And when I say we, I mean my LSF and I - I've no idea what Tim thinks about this.
Key to Tim's research is the finding that eating a variety (30 different types each week) of vegetables (including nuts, spices, etc.) is a Good Thing and creates a healthy and diverse culture in our guts.
So, I added the seeds, then my LSF asked, "Brandy?" or maybe she exclaimed, "Brandy!" and I said, "Yes please," and poured a dash on top of my breakfast pile.
It was rather lovely, so the next day, I repeated the experience, then got on the train back to Shrewsbury to resume normal porridge with berries service.
Today, after my run with the Shufflers, I decided that to honour myself, I'd skip porridge and have a breakfast of crisps and red pepper hummus in the bath. This is all part of my 'embodiment' programme, or my 'doing what I damn well please' programme.
At some subconscious level, I think I was trying to recreate the wonderful Boxing Day libated breakfast experience, because about halfway through eating the bag of crisps (dipping them one by one into the hummus) I knocked the pack (perched on the bath side) and it upended into the water.
I was faced with a dilemma. Crisps floated on the almost-clean-but-not-quite-let's-face-it bathwater. To eat or not to eat? It wasn't really the question - it was, I saw straightaway, an opportunity to find out more about my preferences.
I can now say that, on balance, I prefer dry crisps, but also that I prefer eating wet crisps to letting them go to waste.
Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing. It's the road less travelled by me to self-acceptance. I didn't berate myself for the crisp dropping, or for my choice to eat them in the bath, as I might've done once. No. I simply got to know myself, and my crisp preferences, a little better.
I don't know if Tim would be pleased. I suspect he would. A crisp is vegetable, after all, not animal or mineral - as are chickpeas and red peppers. I suspect he'd just remind me to eat 27 further vegetables this week, and to clean the bath later.
