Rock and sausage roll - plus other eating disorders.

It happened while I was sitting at home, quietly sorting my stamp collection, polishing the family's impressive collection of Dixie Chicks CDs and counting my carbon warming credits, when, suddenly and unexpectedly, the phone rang.

Mind you, the phone always rings suddenly and unexpectedly. If we knew it was going to ring, we wouldn't need a ring, would we?
We'd just saunter over casually at exactly the right time, pick up, and say something like, 'Hi, I knew it was you.”
Anyway, it was a wrong number.
However, it made a great start to this column. They all have to start somewhere. And after the hectic Easter, you're lucky this one started at all.
The phone call got my research team here at RR thinking about the telephone and how it has changed our lives. We also wonder why, if the word telephone is shortened to phone, then the television is not called the vision? My wife says then the Taleban should be called The Ban and there'd be issues for Telly Savalas and the Telly Tubbies.
Then we pondered how the current generation would survive in the event of a catastrophe: such as all the world's cellphone towers simultaneously, synchronistically and all at the same time, falling over. I don't know what sort of mishap would cause that, but work with me here.
Without cellphones, a whole generation of young people would be forced to have real conversations, plan ahead, look for directions on a map before going anywhere, and, the Lord forbid, write notes on pieces of paper and remember stuff. In other words, behave like normal citizens.
Imagine the mayhem.
I've been speaking to a few Probus and Lions club meetings lately and a lot of the older generation are completely bewildered by this dependence on gadgetry. My generation, stuck somewhere in between, in a sort of digital No Man's Land, can see the benefits and the pitfalls and have what I hope is a sense of balance.
These little cellphones were designed to help our lives, not take them over!

This takes the cake
It's a long way to shop if you want a sausage roll.
That's according to the rock band AC/DC, at least I think that's what they said. Depending on how much AC/DC you've listened to – and how loud, determines how accurately you hear.
Which brings me to the matter of mis-spent youth. If only I'd mis-spent more of it. As one gets older and wiser (whatever that is) one realises that being young and silly was a much better option.
Some of that mis-spent youth involved the school canteen and the local shops.
A survey of school food this week show it's obviously not as far as AC/DC claims, since it seems junkfood is available in 84 per cent of New Zealand schools.
That includes hot dogs, pies and yes, sausage rolls and the number of schools selling them has increased by 14% in the last year.
MP Sue Kedgley says the survey shows School Food Guidelines need to be re-instated, as 64 percent of schools are selling donuts, cookies and cakes and nearly half are selling chips.
The scary part is that the MP claims the results are conservative and that sixty per cent of children buy food at school canteens.
'Most parents wouldn't feed their children a constant diet of sausage rolls, donuts and chips, so why do we allow our schools to sell this sort of food on a daily basis?”
Well actually, Sue, some parents themselves live on a constant diet of those, with a certain soft drink and alcohol thrown in.
There is some good news: 65% of schools offer bottled water and 70% sell fruit.
Here at RR we reckon that if the Government was serious about our nation's health, it would provide free school fruit, or at least subsidise it.
The old days of school milk was on the right track. Why not bring on the fruit and veg?
Not only would that improve student health but may help instil good eating habits for the rest of their lives.

Relish the thought
Why are there not more fruit trees in our public parks and gardens? Surely it would be good use of land to grow some healthy and productive crop trees instead of acres of high-maintenance, pretty things.
Even if ten per cent of the region's parks had edible crops, it would be a start. Imagine replacing some of the useless hedges with feijoas, intersperse the ornamental park plantings with tamarillo, avocado, pipfruit or whatever will grow. Surely they couldn't be any more labour intensive for our parks and reserves people to tend.
Food for thought, eh?

Parting thought
Newly-discovered writer's condition – Dysrexic: When the disordered letters in your words are too skinny.