Whether you’re a natural hoarder or not we all tend to keep our own little collection of memories somewhere safe; a shoebox maybe, a special box that carries memories of its own, or in between the leaves of books. These little oddments will either act as a reminder of the good times of laughs, drunken giggles, and the odd morning-after spent splayed on the sofa under a duvet and a Sunday’s-best film on, or of the bad- times once (but no longer) very close to your heart, relationships long since burnt out or friendships no longer intact. We hold onto the latter of the two as tight as possible no matter how much it hurts just in case – one day – that friendship is rekindled.

We’ve all been there, watching the stacks of boxes and bags grow with each passing day, or having a fight with those items that just don’t want to sit inside the wardrobe (why won’t they just stay there?!) but at some point in our lives, preferably when we have a little time to mooch rather than just sort and throw, we need to tackle these boxes. Yes, there’ll be memories in there. Some will hurt – from the people no longer with us, to friendships burnt out long ago, and letters, ticket stubs, and memory books given to you lovingly by your other half at the time – but some will be good. Photographs you thought you’d long lost, various items of clothing from your university days (I’m thinking a very short red skirt and a yellow vest top with ‘lifeguard’ printed on it) or clubs that you were once a part of (trampolining club anyone?), flight tickets to various adventures, cruise cards, museum entry tickets, all bring back wonderful memories.

I think there comes a time in every one of our lives where we just need to let go of the past and move on. From the photographs and memories that you shared with your ex, grasping onto them for months won’t mean you’ll get back together, nor will they have any impact on their life. Holding onto these memories hinder the healing process, they literally stop you moving forward because your head is filled with the many “what if”s and “what if things were different?” – It’s the cold, hard, truth, and although you may not want to hear “get over it” once more (face it, you know you’ve been telling yourself that for months), sometimes it’s exactly what you need to do.

Since coming to the realisation that I’m not going to be in this house forever, I’ve started taking a very stringent approach to tackling my hoarding. I came across old cinema tickets, Valentine’s Day cards, old notes, and an endless supply of broken promises of which I had great satisfaction in placing them in their own special place – the bin. I’m a firm believer that we should “live with no excuses and love with no regrets” but I also believe that some things just need to end and their chapter closed and so forth – that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen however. I’ve heard girls say how they can’t believe their boyfriend loved someone before them, but it happens. That’s life. This is life. You can’t change the past nor should you pretend it didn’t happen. We’re all shaped by our experiences after all… I don’t need to look over the bucket list I once made with a boyfriend, or the memories from days out stuck in a book. Nor do I need the birthday or Christmas cards from people no longer in my life… The [good] memories will always have that special place in my heart; I don’t need to remind myself of any of the bad ones.

In the end these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you love?
How deeply did you learn to let go?
-The Buddha

Looking back at my life and these past few months of 2013 I have learnt a lot; a lot about myself, my relationships with people, and my presence in this world. I simply hold onto too many things, too many memories. Letters have been scribbled to people once close to me, possessions have been returned, and normality has progressively been returned. With my hand on my heart I know that I’m ready to move forward instead of looking back. I know I gave my all; I gave as much love as I could and yes, I made some mistakes but without mistakes we cannot learn, and if we cannot learn how can we progress…? Life is for living! Life is for throwing off the bowlines and sailing away from the harbour (thank you Mark Twain) and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

On Wednesday, June 5, I’ll be giving my talk, “For-Profit Patriots: Blockade Running on the Texas Coast” at the Woodlands Civil War Round Table in Conroe, north of Houston. My talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Windsor Hill Club House, 1 East Windsor Hills Circle. Visitors are welcome, although everyone attending must be 18 or older due to the rules of the community. As before, there will be particular emphasis on two vessels wrecked here in 1865, Will o’ the Wisp and Denbigh. The official blurb:

“Patriotism, avarice and daring”? Did I write that? Gack, what turgid over-selling!

Anyway, it should be fun and informative. Hope to see you there!

___________

I went to sleep hearing what we would never be again. And I woke up listening to the way we were. It was driving me crazy.

The silence isn’t much better though. I feel one beating heart instead of two. I hear the self doubting thoughts so loudly now without the steady snoring hum drowning them out. And I hated that snore for years…

Sometimes the things you hate most are the things you long for with the most desperation.

It is your turn this time
To give a lovely melody
To these simple words of rhyme
To be to me a symphony
As lemon is to lime
A pairing so sublime
Perhaps it’s just
That it is your turn this time

Is it true that you cannot let it go
That to grasp the past
Is the way to make it flow?
To speak of secrets
Only you and I may know
That makes each moment slow
Perhaps it’s just
That you cannot let it go

This is your month I see
A month so long ago
When all this came to be
As songs you sing with bitter melody
Of how this led to me
And how we’re never free
Perhaps it’s just
That this is your month I see

(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved

how much it

hurts to breath

knowing that you

ain’t my life

anymore..

You don’t know

how badly the

tears fall when

someone calls your

name..

BUT for you

its just another

memory that din’t

last a day..

How could you be so ridiculous…

As most know all to well, life doesn’t always go according to plan. This clip was sent to me yesterday and I had to share it! While I know we all keep busy schedules, I encourage you to take the twenty minutes to hear Zach Sobiech’s inspirational story!

His memory and legacy are a constant reminder to live life to the fullest, always try to do the next right thing and find the good in every situation.

Take a moment today to get inspired!

special thanks to my brother for forwarding along this video yesterday and childrenscancer.org for the photo!

Do you want to stay mentally sharp, alert and live life to the fullest? If you are starting to forget things or feel that your mental functions are slowing down, the plant remedy gingko biloba may be a great solution for you.

Modern science has found that this ancient plant has a wide range of benefits including increasing blood flow to the brain and preventing the brain from aging. Gingko helps boost the brain’s energy. It also improves the production of neurotransmitters, chemicals that help transmit nerve signals and protects the brain from damage due to its rich supply of antioxidant bioflavonoids.

I recommend taking 60-80 mg three times a day and side effects are uncommon. Love, Dr. Susan

Throughout this book, Sutin explores the halls of his memory like a museum.  Instead of statues we find postcards.  The ancient history of humanity is stored in those artifacts that survive through the ages.  Sutin’s personal history is projected onto a collection of second-hand postcard images.  He uses these images as a vessel to pass along his memories, as he best considers truth.  For a writer, if an anonymous picture can trigger a memory or feeling, then perhaps it can also, or should, help ameliorate the abstract exchange from author to reader.  Like statues, pictures and photographs can serve as conduits of historical memory, amplified by the context of an associated text.

From a broader perspective, he is speaking to nature of memory itself.  As much as any of us know, it is from memory.  Memories are everything.  To connect to a memory, is to connect to who and what you know.  And Sutin is using these postcards “to enter into whatever [he was] writing”.  They are his conduit to better communicating his memories.  After all, memories are only as “reliable as we are”.

A writer faces many challenges in the attempt to communicate.  For with every step of the process, there is some translation.  From experience to memory, memory to thought, thought to expression.  Like the mask of a muse, that final step of expression is perhaps the most apart from ourselves.  To find some manner of precisification towards clearer meaning is a gift.  And if the muses have seen fit to bless a writer with a more fitting mask, isn’t it in that writer’s best interest to wear it?

I’m not sure if I should go looking for a mask to wear, some picture or music or video … or statue, to associate with this particular blog post.  Upon consultation with my memory, I think I’ll abstain this time.  It seems to me appropriate to let the work of Sutin stand taller than anything I might have to say.  If omitting any accompanying media is the best way I can think of to do that, then I think I should … not include any media.  In that way this text-image I’ve been contemplating should be abstracted from my response just a bit more, placing some distance, so as to better approximate my personal understanding of the relationship between artist and muse.

Quotes from A Postcard Memoir: p.3, 34-35

What does this face say to you? Naivety. Candour. Wistful intelligence. Vulnerability.  A time long past?

It is clearly an ‘old photo’, a studio shot. I also happen to know that it was made for wide circulation, part of the subject’s own personal war effort during the early 1940s when she tirelessly wrote cheering letters to numerous servicemen fighting overseas. This is my aunt, Evelyn Mary Ashford, my father’s little sister, thirteen years his junior. In a few weeks time it will be her ninetieth birthday, and although many who know her will mark this day with cards and kind words, it is unlikely that she will fully understand; these days her mind quite inhabits another zone.

Her corporal self, however, lives in a nursing home in rural Wales where she is well cared for. Hers is a strong old body. She has survived a Luftwaffe bombing, diabetes, breast cancer, strokes, repeated acts of medical negligence and, most recently, recovered from a broken hip.

Like many women of her generation, her spirit has also borne years of thwarted ambition, the denial of the higher education that her village school essays prove she deserved. As a country girl she has believed herself socially inferior. As a childless woman she has felt a misfit. As a daughter she has  sacrificed her own longings to ‘be someone’ , first to leave school at fourteen years old to care for an invalid mother, later to take in a domineering old father whose presence further blighted the first fifteen years of her marriage. And while the physical wounds of the 1942 bomb blast were exquitisitely repaired – her face was miraculously re-constructed over four years by Professor T P Kilner, a pioneer in Plastic Surgery for disfigured service personnel – the psychological effects of her experience were never addressed.

In the end, you could hardly see the scars as the later photographs below clearly show. But for years afterwards Evelyn reported the emergence of glass shards from all parts of her body. Also there were the years of  disfigurement between admissions  for plastic surgery to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and later to Stoke Mandeville (then a military hospital) where she received her final round of surgery alongside service amputees and burns victims. It was while she was here that she read letters to a young Canadian from the Royal Canadian Engineers. A landmine explosion had blown off his right leg and arm and left him partially blind. She and other patients were also shocked to see the arrival of the first victims released from the Belsen concentration camp. This is how she describes the scene in some lecture notes:

“All along the wall of the Main Hall there were stretchers lined up. Each one carried a skeletal form covered in a grey army blanket which barely disguised the fact that there was very little flesh on brittle bones. Gaunt, hollow eyes turned to look at us. ‘How are they every going to put those poor souls right again,’ someone said.”

***

I of course have only known the older Evelyn, so I cannot say what it would have been like for her to suffer multiple facial injuries – to effectively ‘lose face’ in all senses. She was nineteen when it first happened, in love, the shining light of her village, and she also earned a living in a very public place as an assistant in Whites, a big Guildford department store.

The effects, though must have been devastating. But then how do you begin to come to terms with your own injuries when you know that others were suffering far worse, or were dead, or that your particular wounds were considered a civilian casualty, and not the product of heroic self-sacrifice in action? Self pity, then, was not only NOT ALLOWED. It was seen as positively unpatriotic. These were the years  of the ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘grinning and bearing it’, both hard to pull off with glass-torn flesh. There are, though, some later passing references to unresolved issues. After the bomb blast Evelyn suffered from blistering rages which only her husband, Geoffrey Gibbings, was later to help her to overcome.

Married life c.1953

***

It was December 16th 1942 when the German pilot of the Dornier 217 strafed and then dropped three bombs beside the 1.34 pm Guildford to Cranleigh train. It must have been half-day closing because Evelyn’s account, written a month afterwards, says it was a Wednesday and she was going home from work. The train on this line comprised only two carriages, and she and two other White’s girls, Marjorie and Avis, were the only ones in their compartment.

Evelyn remembered the greyness of the day, the black silhouettes of trees across the farm fields, a swirling misty rain as they approached Bramley. She also said she felt an unaccountable depression. Avis was reading a book, The Sun is My Undoing, and Marjorie was leafing through Evelyn’s copy of the London Illustrated News. Suddenly, as she and Marjorie were chatting, there was a terrific clatter along the train roof – like a shower of hail. Next she says it was

“as if someone had given me a crack on the head with a giant hammer and I was going down and down, then round and round into eternity.”

When she came to, she found herself hanging out of the corridor window with the remains of the door hung around her shoulders. Through the glassless window she first thing she saw was the three Canadian soldiers who had got on the train with her at Guildford. They were beside the track. One was badly cut and his clothes were in shreds. He held his companion  as they sobbed together like children. The third soldier was dead, lying against their knees with a handkerchief over his face. In her muddled state, and before she passed out, Evelyn remembered thinking that they must have been in an accident, and that one of the soldiers was dead. Poor things, she thought.

When she surfaced again it was to find that her own clothes in shreds and that the valise she had put on the seat beside her was pierced through by a shaft of wood. Marjorie had disappeared completely, and Avis lay under the debris, apparently unscathed but dead, with the usual quiet smile on her face. Later, it transpired that Marjorie had been blown out of the carriage. She had lost an eye.

In a 1944 letter to one of her many war-time pen-pals, a young American trainee pilot, Evelyn describes what happened next:

“at last I ended up in hospital with no face or clothes to speak of…I opened my one good eye and saw a handsome face smiling down at me. This boy, as he looked to me, was in shirt sleeves and I, thinking he was a student, and being very light-headed…reached up and patted his face saying, “Hello, Sunshine” with the result that he had a lovely blood-stained cheek. He turned out to be the hospital’s leading surgeon and ever afterwards was known as Sunshine Allen.”

Seventy years on, there is no way of knowing if Evelyn remembers any of this. Over the past few years she has grown increasingly confused, and after several strokes has been unable to speak very well – a declining state generally described as ‘having dementia’. I know it is said that unresolved anger is a feature of dementia, and there may be a big element of this in Evelyn’s mental retreat – years of repressed frustration perhaps. But wherever her mind is now, I feel it is there, somewhere, tracking in a parallel universe. It is our loss that we can no longer communicate with her in this new world.

As the keeper of her notebooks and letters, the fragments of her life, I now find myself the custodian of her memories. This of course is flawed in many ways. A long family feud meant that I did not really get to know Evelyn until later years. We wrote to one another while I was in Africa, and I knew she always led a hectically busy life within whichever community she and my uncle had made their home. I never had the chance, or even thought to ask her about her life; how it had really been. I knew her only in the present where she was an expert horticulturalist, seamstress, good cook, great reader, great letter writer, dedicated Women’s Institute judge and committee member, animal lover, church goer, former small-time sheep farmer and generous friend to anyone need. I also knew that my mother had been deeply jealous of her.

Evelyn’s archive is not extensive. It includes some of her village school essays from 1936-7, notes for lectures given to her gardening club and the W.I, and a fraction of her lifetime’s correspondence with friends around the world. There are also two day-books of newspaper cuttings and her commentaries upon current affairs dating from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Finally there is a notebook of creative writing pieces.

My aunt wanted to be a writer; was so thrilled when my own work began to be published. All her life she strove to cultivate herself, and on all fronts. There appeared to be no subject that did not interest her. Coming from a background with a Victorian father who thought it more important that his daughter be apprenticed to a draper’s than to go on to high school, and then marrying a stalwartly middle class man who thought wives should stay at home, she later sought her educational opportunities within the seemingly unchallenging sphere of the Women’s Institute’s Denman College. Here she attended all manner of courses whenever the chance arose, then passed on her knowledge wherever she could. At seventy nine, and much to her husband’s bemused irritation, she went to word processing classes so she could write up her lecture notes in a more orderly fashion. Clearing her home, I found her notes on the letters I had written from Africa. Naturally she had turned them into one of her talks.

But perhaps in the end it is best to let the photographs of Evelyn tell their own story. Here, then, are some of the many faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford, glimpses of a life well lived. She truly is an inspiration to all who have had the pleasure to know her.

Evelyn around a year old. She was born at Redhurst Cottages, Cranleigh, Surrey in 1923. Her mother Alice, was a Streatham girl and former cashier for Sainsbury’s. Her father Charles Ashford was Head Gardener at Redhurst Manor.  (Below) Aged three, in the walled garden at Redhurst. Her life-long interest in horticulture began in this garden, listening to her father’s instructions to his men.

The Ashford Family, my father Alex at the rear c. 1930

At Pitch Hill, aged around fourteen (1937). This was her last year at school. In an English exercise of that year she wrote: “These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.” She also wanted to have lots of REAL friends and play Madame Defarge in a stage version of Tale of Two Cities. The people she most wanted to meet included Jean Batten, famous New Zealand aviator, H.G. Wells and Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1941 the 2nd Royal Gloucester Hussars were billeted in Cranleigh where Evelyn’s family lived. This is how Evelyn met her future husband Geoffrey Gibbings. He is taking the photograph of this, the ‘Hoy Gang’ picnic on Pitch Hill. Later that year the 2nd RGH was posted to Libya to fight in the North African Campaign. Evelyn did not see Geoff again until the end of the war.

Evelyn as an ARP (air raid protection) volunteer (left). Looking after mother (right). On the roof of White’s department store with her fellow assistants (bottom).

War’s end and engagement to Geoffrey Scott Gibbings. He twice escaped capture by the Germans while fighting in the desert. (Below) At the New Year’s Eve Southampton Motor Club dance c.1955. After the war, Geoff worked in the motor trade for the rest of his working life. Somehow this last photo tells you everything you need to know about Evelyn. May her dance go on in some part of her mind.

		Evelyn Mary Ashford, born 1923 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

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And many thanks to Su Leslie for her inspiring Shaking the Tree blog on her family history.

©2013 Tish Farrell

measuring the width of harm

in ratchet clicks so solemn ,

childhood had finished

you saw to  that

overtook my heart with years

as firm shrouding

growing up was a facility

in the forest where only some

belonged,

and i did not want to go there

it was a sentence

a finish

even ultimatum

to those near expiry date

flesh baggage creased and folded

eyes as dim bulbs,

i was the one on the bicycle

wishing to go past

shouting at the top of my voice

yet something broke the wheels

and i was left at the path

sat crosslegged wondering,

one woman with a cart lopsided

and one eyed horse offered me a lift

and i refused despite

silky touch of mane

as horse nuzzled my hand,

i was broken not forgotten

resisting time as an armed guerilla,

i would fight

and there would be casualties

Ginkgo Biloba Leaves with black background (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear Dr Mom,

Here is another herb for your first aid kit – brainfood.

Ginkgo trees, are one of the oldest species of trees cultivated in China and are believed to be 150 to 200 million years old. The ginkgo trees grow in average soil and even in full sun. The tree can grow 100 – 120 feet. Ginkgo trees are very resistant to pollution and infection and hardly suffer any disease. Insects rarely attack these plants. Due to these reasons these trees are most tolerant even in urban conditions and are grown as shade trees.

Ginkgo or ginkgo biloba extracts is made from various parts of these trees. Chinease has used ginkgo biloba for the centuries for treating various ailments. Now it is most researched herb and is used by most of the countries as herbal medicine.

Working of Ginkgo Biloba:

Ginkgo leaves contains two groups of active components known as flavonoid glycosides and ginkgolides. These active ingredients helps in increasing blood flow to the brain and improving overall network of blood vessels, and consequently increases the inflow of oxygen and essential nutrients to brain and other important organs of the body and simultaneously helps controlling in allergic inflammation and asthma.

Benefits of Ginkgo Biloba:

The research on this herbal medicine continues for the last three decades and some of the benefits as evidenced by clinical studies have been summarized below.

• It has a positive effect on vascular system and it allows the system to act more efficiently by allowing more blood flow and consequently more oxygen to the vital organs of the body including brain.
• Brain, being the highest oxygen consumer (20%) of the total oxygen requirement of the human body, regulates the body more efficiently.
• The improved blood circulation to brain including microcirculation in smaller capillaries increases memory and metabolic efficiency including neurotransmitters regulation.
• Ginkgo biloba is useful for relaxing coronary arteries constricted by cholesterol.
• Ginkgo biloba is also useful for relieving tension and anxiety.
• Ginkgo biloba is also beneficial to elevate mood and restore energy.
• Ginkgo biloba controls platelet activity factor (PAF). Excessive platelet factor (PAF) in the body may cause physical stress, brain disorder, and skin problem including psoriasis, cardiovascular disease and other hearing disorders.
• Ginkgo biloba is beneficial for treating vertigo and tinnitus.
• Ginkgo biloba acts as an antioxidant and inhibits free radical formed in the body. Antioxidant plays a vital role for protecting cardiovascular and central nervous system (CNS). The combined effect of improved circulatory system and antioxidant improves blood flow to retina and controls retinal deterioration causing an overall improvement in visual activity.
• Some of the clinical trials indicate that ginkgo biloba is beneficial for treating Alzheimer’s disease.
• Ginkgo biloba is also used as supportive herbal medicine for treating infertility disorder in males.

Precaution:

Although it is a herbal medicine with enormous benefits, it should not be combined with certain antidepressants such as MAO (mono amine oxidase). Persons taking medicine for blood clotting disorders should avoid taking ginkgo biloba, as the medicine will increase the effect of prescribed medicine.

If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant, you should not take ginkgo biloba.

Side Effects:

The possible side effects of the medicine include

• Ginkgo biloba may cause some gastrointestinal disorders.
• Ginkgo biloba increases the risk of bleeding and if you have or had any blood clotting disorder, you should not take ginkgo biloba.
• The other common side effects of ginkgo biloba may include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness, headache and restlessness.

If you observe any of the side effect as mentioned above or any other side effect, you should stop taking ginkgo biloba and always consult your doctor. Lately there have been reports that ginkgo has long term side effects. Learn about it and use it for good.

Related articles

• Gingko tree (scrapydo.wordpress.com)
• Herbs with testosterone-like effects: Ginkgo Biloba (drsusansolutions.wordpress.com)
• Potential Benefits To Incorporating Ginkgo Biloba Into Your Diet (dietnewsinfo.com)
• Get Smarter With Gingko’ (survivenowfitness.wordpress.com)
• Ginkgo biloba poses cancer risk, CSPI says (wjla.com)

I was way back in the yesterdays with my first best friend, the first person I remember loving, and that one person that once asked me for something that I did not possess at the time. In last night’s escape we journeyed on the back of my time machine from the southern Arizona desert, where a praying monk once blessed us while bats gathered nectar from the night blooming flowers of the saguaros, to the Canadian Rockies where Alberta and British Columbia are divided by some of the most spectacular scenery on our little planet. What a Joy it was to pilot my Magna through the mountains with her once again holding tight about my waist, combating the wind by shouting into my ear on the Trans-Canadian Highway; Yoho, Golden, Kimbasket Lake, and her long hair blowing in the wind. Freedom, as it was meant to be.

I once read an article by a physicist who claimed that time travel was theoretically possible but it would require more energy to pull off than was contained within our visible universe. That is probably a very good thing as I loathe imagining how much more we could screw up with our simian brains. I for one have never really been able to wrap my mind around this dimension of time because, from my perspective, there is only the eternal Now and this human construct of time is simply a yardstick by which we measure the distance between events.

But, I’m thankful for my little time travels when I’m fortunate to be blessed by them. To be able to once again enjoy the company of those whose corporal experiences were cut way too short is nothing short of a miracle. Carol took her own life on Monday, December 13, 1976 and there is not a day goes by that I don’t have a thought and a prayer for my first best friend.

Escape

Concealed from life in dreary black linen
Abject love lies in endless decay.
Robbed of life by that curious demon,
On shadowy wings of Cimmerian gray.

Legended by ancestral states, to usher
Journeys to unfamiliar lands, where helpless
On the shores of your Stygian master,
You yearn for love you cannot possess.

Haunted by a silent phantom, my vague
Apparition of virgin splendor
Resurrects anew our relative plague
Released forever from social dolor.

In suicide a life is squandered,
Surrendered, but, forever remembered.

Samuel Thomas Nichols
January 31, 1979

Hot Discovery #5: Omega-3s for mood, mind, and memory

The DHA omega-3 fats in fatty fish are the building blocks of healthy brain cells and must come from your diet because your body does not produce them. Research from Oxford found DHA supplements could help improve reading in underperforming children and help curb behavioral problems. In 2006, the American Psychiatric Association even added this fat to its recommendations for treating depression.

Aim for at least two servings a week of DHA-rich salmon or include DHA-fortified foods in your diet. Try ActiLean Snack Bars or take a supplement that supplies at least 200 milligrams of DHA like Ovega-3.

Hot Discovery #6: Resveratrol: The anti-aging secret of red wine

Resveratrol is a polyphenol found in abundance in red wine and in lower amounts in red grapes, peanuts, pomegranates and berries. It is an antioxidant that helps turn on cells’ production of anti-aging substances. It can also speed cell repair.

Hot Discovery #7: Berries: Beyond just tasty

Because the antioxidant mix in berries is so powerful, they are one of the most nutritious foods in the diet. A hot area of nutrition right now is berries’ phytonutrients, which are compounds that can help protect cells from disease and aging.

You should aim for at least one cup of berries a day, most days of the week. Select the darkest berries that are richly hued from skin to core for the strongest antioxidant power.

Hot Discovery #8: Nuts can aid in weight loss

We’ve often been told to stay away from fattening nuts and nut butters. However, nuts contain two of the three most helpful ingredients for weight loss: fiber and protein, which fill us up and keep us satisfied. They also are packed with vitamins, minerals, healthy fats and a few of those phytonutrients so important for health. Just be careful of the serving size. Stick with 1 ounce, or about 12 nuts, to ensure you don’t consume too many calories.

For more Info log on to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/05/21/one-final-round-up-of-every-xbox-720-rumor-to-date/

1. The church life. Youth! Young and energetic group of people which brighten up the dull life. On the other hand, they’re good in presenting the truth of the bible and giving testimonies.

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   
   
2. Visited some interesting place: night safari, raffles place and Clarke Quay

   

   

   

   
   

   

   
   

Nice place for some memory.

I understand about growing old, and I don’t mind it, really. No, really, there are a few perks that tag along with decrepitude. Like being able to take a nap any time of the day without having to explain yourself. Or the well-practiced art of feigning random episodes of deafness when the wife has her chore list out. Oh, another biggie is the ability to dodge helping the neighbors with any heavy lifting. That’s a personal favorite.

“Oh, look, hon,” says the wife one glorious Saturday afternoon. “That new couple across the street bought a new hutch. Go over and see what you can do. They need help getting that big ol’ thing out of their truck.”

The glorious day turns dark. “Yes, dear.”

I toddle over.

“Hey, there, young fellah,” I rasp, sounding in the terminal throes of emphysema. “Need a hand?”

“Well. If you think you can, sure!”

“Okay, now,” I wheeze. “I’ll hop up in the truck bed and push her your way.” I go to climb up in the truck and freeze, back bent double. “Uh, oh.”

“You all right?” the wary young couple inquires simultaneously.

“Darn it. Ol’ war wound.”

“War wound? Vietnam?”

“Yep. Battle of Inchon.”

“That was Korea.”

“Oh, yeah. Korea.”

“Well, look, mister. You go on home and rest your back. We can get this. But thank you, anyway!”

I toddle away as the gloriousness of Saturday brightly returns.

Alas, some very real maladies have visited themselves upon me with the piling up of the years, and these are the things that make me ponder my mortality. My weekly stab at playing tennis, for example, has been indefinitely curtailed because of some vague pain in my lower neck that feels like I have an angry lobster attached to my spine. I went to the doc about it; he felt around for a while, wrote me a scrip for steroids, and sent me on my way. Well, I have a big mat of chest hair now and I’m prone to wild fits of road rage, but I’ve yet to feel any relief from the spine lobster. Doc thinks I’ve torn my trapezoid or something. Sounds like a circus injury, I know.

Another aging ailment (AA for short) that has come to squat upon my person is flab. Funny word, isn’t it? Flab. Flab is something I never suffered from as a kid, as a teen, or as a young man. If anything, I could have used a little extra body acreage. I was always skinny as a pipe cleaner—and about as shy. Yes, that is correct. Pipe cleaners are notoriously shy. Anyway, as the seasons have passed and I’m now in the autumn of my years, I’ve noticed my leaves turning brown and…wait, wrong metaphor. I’ve noticed a bit of girth round my midships. The wife insists my beer intake and stubborn sedentarianism are the culprit, but I cling to advancing age as the true cause. By the way, that’s a new religion I’m starting—Sedentarianism—but that’s for another column.

The upshot of this is: I’ve a bit of a muffin top, you see. Well don’t stare.

The thing of it is, it’s not just our outer bods that fall victim to flab. Noticing that I’ve been having trouble staying asleep for any considerable stretch lately, I’ve set myself up for one of those sleep studies. Wifey seems to think I have a flabby uvula. Sounds naughty, I know, but no, we all have uvulas, fellahs. It’s that dangly thing in the back of your throat. Mine is apparently sagging into my breathing passage and clogging me up at night. Yes, even my innards have grown old and tired. My uvula has a beer belly.

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat dachshund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.