Altitude is good for you

80% of Olympians use altitude training. Athletes competing at altitude see an 8% improvement in performance from it. People who use it to train for normal atmospheric pressure get a 5% performance increase.

That's if I remembered the figures correctly. I was told that the best runners enter a yogic state of mind when competing to minimise the amount oxygen used by their brains. Richard at the Altitude Centre in... wait for it... Putney, tells me he has compelling evidence from Tibetan monks that they have more oxygen in their blood from using less in their brains. Apparently up to 40% of our oxygen can be lost in our brains if we get into a panic.

If I weren't so depleted right now I'd draw a witty conclusion from this.

_

Today I learned...

My key stats
*Heart-rate - 48 bpm (apparently v good)
*Blood oxygen level - 99 / 100 (above avg)
*And I have the lung capacity of a twenty-five year old

tom gay motorway

It is a little known fact that if you google 'tom gay motorway', the first listing is the wikipedia page of Tom Robinson, 1970s punk rocker. Well done, google. Tom was responsible for that penetrative track 2-4-6-8 Motorway, when Robinson drove his truck midway to the motorway station. It is lucky that I wasn't aware of this when I met him last night as I might have thought less of him; it's a very silly song.

I was at a fundraiser for the Patients Association in memory of the late Claire Rayner, agony aunt and broadcaster. Claire clearly had an extraordinary life; Jay Rayner, Stephen Fry, Jo Brand and Giles Brandreth all paid tribute to it. Highlights include her persuading Sandi Toksvig to give up wearing small pants for her 50th birthday and bringing sanitary towels into common parlance with a controversial TV advertisement for Vesprey Silhouette Plus in 1992.

Not to be outdone by Robinson, Toksvig shared with the audience her own painful account of a recent visit to a motorway service station. "The moment you enter them, you feel you start swimming in a fantastically shallow gene pool", she said. On this particular occasion, she was confronted at a cash point by a woman in a pack-a-mac. "Now there's an early warning sound if you ever need one. 'I like you Sandy', the woman said. 'You're very funny. But that's not why I like you. I like you because you're not a specific shape.'"

But I digress. Tom Robinson had some advice for me. "Keep a blog for 90 days. For the first 30 days it'll be fun. Then after 50 or 60 days you'll be wracking your brains for what to write. By 90, you'll have found your voice."

To clarify, we're talking about my personal voice, as opposed to journalistic or creative writing.

Now to return to an earlier point Tom Robinson is a successful presenter and music journalist, and he salvaged this career from that truck-truffing motorway song and another song about being proud to be gay; and I'm too young to understand the punk movement but from what I heard last night, Tom can't sing all that well. Basically, he's done well for himself; I'll take advice.

So here goes.

My personal highlight of the night was after awkwardly confusing Jo Brand and Ruby Wax (it's technically my mother's fault, but this excuse falls down for the same reason that you can't blame your mum for making a mistake if she's doing your homework for you), I wiped a lipstick mark from her (Jo Brand's) cheek by licking my finger and scrobbing her cheek with it; sometimes a girl just needs a helping hand.

Live v- sorry b-logging from the Julien MacDonald SS11 show

It strikes me that everyone's in this game for themselves.

Flat-chested girls with no eyebrows (boys?) Stompy walks the heels wouldn't survive for more than a week. Corpses in big polo necks. Fashion is not sexy. Thin Chinese women. Don't eat chinese clearly. One is wearing a dead badger. A boy in a dress. Blimey, fantastic skirt. Now this one really might be dead. Thankfully the music has roused her - she's alive. Big pouty mouths last seen on Homo Neanderthalensis. Music goes all punky suddenly they're all poking out their bellies. They look like pot-tummied toddlers. This one's good. I'd like to look like her. Really I would.

Just spotted orange man in row in front. Momentarily distracted by extent of fake-tan.

Who says blood-sports are dead? They're all wearing mammals. Highlight! A member of the audience in the front row crosses her legs and the paps all scream. OUTTATHEWAY! Highlight #2 a model trips on skirt. She looks as if she might go and kill herself.

Apocalyptic religious chanting takes over. I think of bones. Then I think of death.

"Wow". Audience reaction is unanimous. "What a collection", gushes the Daily Mirror to my left.

Dee from the Irish Indy to my right has left her seat and is leaning over an incongruous fashionista in a barber trying to get a shot of the designer. She is live-vlogging.

"WOW people are getting rowdy", tweets the Daily Mirror to my left, an agog look on her already gogglish face.

Some have stood up, this is true.

I want to go home.

Wrexham & Shropshire

As a committed rail user I am very sad to hear that the train operator Wrexham and Shropshire Railways will cease operations at the end of this month. In my opinion, they are the only decent train company in operation. Over the course of three years they have delivered an impeccable service that put the pleasure back into train travel with comfortable carriages, friendly well-informed staff, free internet and locally-sourced refreshments. On closure the business will be neither “insolvent nor being placed in administration and all outstanding financial commitments will be met.” Further to that, they are seeking employment opportunities for their staff and paying wages and full redundancy entitlements. This makes them quite possibly the most decent rail company ever operating at a time when we need it most.

The message they sent to passengers this morning said “it was concluded that the business, which operates with no public subsidy, would not provide a return on investment.” My first thought was to lobby for public subsidy. Our railways are highly politicized but surely this could present an opportunity to address the failing customer standards and hold up one company as a gold standard in rail travel? Then I read further. Wrexham and Shropshire Railways, the ‘local’ company that garnered its support from the rural communities around Wrexham, Shrewsbury, Birmingham and Banbury, is owned by Deutsche Bahn. Forecasts say it is unlikely to become profitable and thus it will be efficiently closed down. End of story.

But what if it had been a local company as we all assumed? Might there have been a fight to be won against Westminster – a fight for some subsidy that might encourage rail networks to offer a better service? As it is, it's a miserable example of yet another area of public service where we encourage mediocrity rather than meritocracy and I’ve decided to buy a car.

Kitchen cupboard cosmetics

This is a piece I wrote for my darling next door neighbour who owns a fantastic organic food company. It was in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago, and basically it's Zita's inspiring story of how she stopped using beauty products with chemicals in (which is nearly every mainstream product on the market) and went instead back to nature and, primarily, her kitchen cupboards, to use things like olive oil and avocado.

Look out for her Marigold powdered bouillon which is much better than stock cubes. Also the Vita Coco coconut water that is the only thing I know to actually make a difference to a hangover.

The original article is here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/beauty/article-1222043/How-I-treated-fertility-problem-cosmetics-created-kitchen-cupboard.html

Anyone for Breast Stroke?

So I reported on the International Naturist Federation's annual swimming gala a couple of weeks ago. Well, when I say reported, I actually mean I took part.

Before...

...After!

There were a lot of great people there, most of whom I hope will talk to me again. I had a fantastic, if extremely surreal, weekend with the British Naturists, and indeed with all the other naturists from around the world! Thanks to all of them.

A DISSENTING RECYCLIST IN A RENEWABLE WORLD

“I DON'T RECYCLE”, I announced to a group of fellow smokers gathered outside a bar in Soho discussing personal carbon targets. Immediately I regretted my admission. No one admitted the same. Searching their faces hungrily for an ally, I found my friend Tom. His face showed guilty resignation. I then looked to Hugh who shares a house with Tom and, registering his disapproval, asked why the discrepant practice if they both use the same bin. It turned out that Hugh separates enthusiastically, but never actually empties the recycling box, so once a week Tom empties its contents into the black wheelie bin. As for the other disapproving faces, I know it’s bad and negligent and obtuse of me not to recycle, but if I’m not mistaken, their disapproval was tainted with the same envy they would have experienced had I been having sex with a student or taking drugs on a Wednesday; secretly, they would rather like to share my dangerous disregard for renewables.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be keen on separating my waste and for that I blame Germany. I spent a whole year in Frankfurt timing my trips to the underground rubbish lair to coincide with everyone else in the building being at work. There were no less than five different bins. The Germans loved it, but then they were all set up to separate at the initial disposal stage. Their bins had subdivisions, colour-coding and extremely efficient operators. For me, it would have been a question of fingering through carbonara steeped newspapers and hairy mango stones to separate it all in the dung dungeon, a low-ceilinged room at the back of an underground garage with fluorescent strip lights that flickered on to illuminate the beastly bins of establishmentarianism. Occasionally, I’d miss-time it and someone would be in there, neatly putting small bags of pre-prepared waste in their rightful places. The regularity and ritualisation of it, the acceptance of being on such close terms with one’s rubbish, revolted me slightly. We English were not brought up to examine the sins in our bins any more than we were to inspect our own bodily waste. It takes a full strength of mind to curl your hand around a steaming dog turd on Hampstead heath, and if no one’s looking, well, sometimes you don’t notice it. The sin-bin is not a term coined without reason. We’d sooner hide the 13 empty bottles from a ‘civilised’ dinner party in our bin than we would ask to borrow some space in the neighbour’s green recycling box.

It’s the same part of my upbringing that makes it physically impossible for me to describe the texture of my faeces. On the rare occasions that a description of such bodily waste has been required of me by a doctor, it took five minutes of puerile flippancy to muster an honest description. And even then I used culinary equivalents like walnuts in vegetable stock. But as we get older, just as we get better at describing the shade of an erroneously yellow turd, so we must improve at recycling. It’s unavoidable, it’s not cool to be an abstainer, and while it is terribly un-British (some of my friends won’t even get their bikini lines waxed, such is their fixation with privacy in the waste removal department) it seems we’re all going to have to get better at it.

Next time I take out my green box, its lid perched awry on a roof of unread Sunday papers that shelter a carefully constructed tower of empty wine bottles, I will do so with pride. In a silk dressing gown, perhaps, with a flash of thigh and a private grin that says, “I recycle AND have fun.”