How come I do this to myself?

I have been on very few proper diets in my life. Mainly because I have managed just fine without them, but also because I have sometimes made some simple changes, such as cutting carbs without following specific recipes. For the past 18 months, however, I have not been exercising much, and as I have also been unable to gather up enough willpower to merely skip the carb part of normal meals, I really wanted to start shaping up a bit more again. So, when I spotted a simple-looking 4-week eating plan in a magazine, I went for it. Which is possibly why, one morning, I find myself walking slowly down the stairs, feeling rather pathetic. I need to eat breakfast because I feel ridiculously faint (and, truth be told, faintly ridiculous). Weakly, I manage to make my (admittedly delicious) breakfast smoothie. I am convinced that I have just not eaten enough the day before, as we were possibly not meant to eat our raw courgette with raw garlic pesto on its own, but rather with a side dish. A few hours later that morning, the raw garlic dinner makes a swift, unannounced exit. Suffice it to say I am grateful to be at home when it happens. Is this the reason I felt so weak? Possibly, since I have been okay since.

The next day, I am eating an unauthorised breakfast in a cafe with our youngest daughter. Feeling rebellious, I pour some skimmed milk into my tea. As I tuck into the familiar berry Bircher muesli/yoghurt, it suddenly tastes overly sweet and I feel even more guilty eating that, than I do about the milk in my tea. Clearly, I should have gone for the boring-looking fruit pot instead, but I thought this was vaguely okay, and more filling. The Bircher muesli really does taste far too sweet - have I become sensitised? Surely I don't eat that much sugar normally. Perhaps I am more unhealthy than I realised? Damn you eating plan woman - for hating sugar and making me fear it too. 

Imagine how guilty I feel later that day when I sneak a few licks of coffee cupcake dough. Oh, so evil but oh so good.....

I do love the immediate changes in my body as I seem to miraculously de-bloat after a day but also feel un -realistically slimmer than I can be at this stage. Surely that is psychological? The reason I feel ridiculous, is because this eating plan has managed to make me feel even more paranoid and guilty about what I am eating, than I usually do. And that is saying something. I mean really, why do I feel like a random eating plan, made up by a woman I have never met, should rule my life? I suppose because I can be very determined when I aim for something - in this case, a slimmer version of my current self. The fact that I feel happier in myself when I am slimmer and more toned is rather depressing. Honestly, I would have thought that I would have managed to shake my body shape obsession by now, aged 37. That I could find enough redeeming qualities in myself to enable me to feel happy with who I am - whatever size I may be. I don't think I am alone in feeling like my body is all-important though. The headline introducing the 4 week plan says it all really: "Get back to your fighting weight" - who are we fighting? Ourselves, surely. 

How come Eurovision is so amusing?

I mean that affectionately, by the way, rather than in a sneering way. Luckily, this year's crop of hopefuls was as weird and wonderful as ever: The Ukrainian entry featured a guy in a hamster wheel, manically running around while his female colleague belted out the song - perhaps we could connect his wheel to the mains and sell off the electricity generated. Or, box him up and pass him off as a desk toy for giants.

Belarus, meanwhile, opted for a cheesy man with hedgehog hair and a painted-on moustache, who, along with his equally un-cool backing singers sang about being someone's "cheesecake". Yes really.    

Iceland was very catchy and full of energetic, colourfully dressed men, while Norway had opted for a lovely, but very serious bloke who makes window frames and doors? This was his first experience of singing professionally, and though he had a great voice, his attempt at looking sincere involved squinting. "He looks tired", our 6 year old observed. 

Poland's entry made me regret the fact that the children were still up: The group was dressed in traditional folk costumes, but soon, one of the milkmaids took off her second top, thereby exposing her churn(s). She then proceeded to slowly pump a stick up and down into the bucket, while looking lustily into the camera. Her colleague was doing something similar. So, I guess this is what porny Eurovision looks like. This was obviously an insulting attempt to distract from the fact that the singer sounded like a tortured cat. Luckily, it did not work. While I would say that it is the singing rather than the spectacle of Eurovision that should count at voting time, I do understand that acts want to create a good show. But this is no place to parade bazumbas - of any nationality.

Austria's Conchita Wurst created her own controversy, as she turned out to be not a giant sausage, but rather a bearded man in a dress. In Belarus (the country who voted for the cheesecake song) many disgruntled citizens signed a petition asking for Conchita's performance to be edited out, saying that Eurovision would become a hotbed of sodomy. In Austria itself, a Facebook page, asking for Conchita to be removed, had 38000 likes. Although I did not particularly like the song, Conchita had a fantastic voice and the fact that she won the Eurovision last night is testament to the heart-warming truth that most people, at least most Eurovision viewers, are fairly sane people. 

Speaking of controversies, the Russian twins had a fairly unremarkable song, but stood out because the audience kept booing them, whenever they got high points. As our British commentator Graham Norton pointed out, the poor girls are only 17 and can really not be blamed for any of Russia's political actions. As a Dane, I was embarrassed and could only hope that most of the booing audience were not Danish. 

Being Danish did give me an insight into why the Danish hosts decided to surprise Graham Norton in the box, and why the host jokingly remarked that Norton had made fun of his weird Chinese jokes. You see, the Danes take Eurovision very seriously and really enjoy the spectacle each year. Certainly while I lived in Denmark, the Danish commentator was always respectful of the acts. It came as a big shock to the Danes, therefore, when they hosted the Eurovision in 2001 and British commentator Terry Wogan did his usual routine of making fun of the acts and the hosts. While I do agree that Terry and Graham's comments are funny, I also wonder why the Brits, Terry especially, seem so scathing. Nobody is forcing the Brits to take part, watch it or fly abroad to comment on it. If you can't stand the cheese, get out of the kitsch(en). 

How come the North Korean prison camps still exist?

You have probably heard about the North Korean dictatorship regime with its ridiculously strict rules and punishments. Perhaps you already know about the prison camps - a modern day version of the Nazi concentration camps, where citizens are detained for any number of imagined crimes: Imagine rolling a cigarette using newspaper, which happens to bear the dictator's photograph. Or listening to South Korean radio stations. Maybe you own a Bible or you may have just been talking in a public place about your dislike of the regime. Many of the prisoners in these camps have no idea what they have done wrong. In a way, it doesn't matter, because they are unlikely to ever be let out anyway. Even worse, the North Korean regime operates a system of "guilt by association", meaning that if you commit a "crime", your parents and children will be sent to the prison camps too. Can you imagine being sent to a concentration camp - for life - because your grand-dad was considered to be disloyal to the leader or made a mistake at work?

As Amnesty points out, these camps are difficult to imagine because they are so extreme and so we don't like to think about them, because they are so horrific. However, here is a brief outline: Life in the camps is unbearable - torture, forced labour from dawn until night, child abuse, murder, women being forced to kill their babies etc. These inhumane camps have existed for 50 years and hold some 100.000 people, yet the North Korean authorities deny that they exist. Amnesty International has satellite photos proving that they do exist, and encouragingly, Amnesty believes that one prison camp was closed down because of the international attention a previous Amnesty report generated. However, their satellite images suggest that some of the camps are getting bigger.

Outside the prison camps, the regime survives partly by brainwashing it's citizens, partly by banning all outside influences and non-approved media (though slowly the North Koreans are getting glimpses of the internet and other media, such as South Korea dropping leaflets there), partly by encouraging people to report on each other and partly by eliminating people by sending them go the prison camps. Not to mention the starvation levels: Defectors even talk of children rooting through cow dung to find un digested seeds. Also, people cannot move freely out of the country - they have to escape through a mined and heavily guarded area. However, defectors estimate that most citizens now realise that the propaganda about how happy and healthy everybody is, is propaganda.

If you don't want to stand by, what can you do? By donating to Amnesty International, you help their campaign to lobby for pressure to be put on governments, collecting and verifying testimonies, placing newspaper ads and commissioning satellite photographs. Amnesty's evidence was used at the UN Geneva Summit in 2013. Go to https://www.amnesty.org.uk/giving/north-korea-issue. 

You can also join http://northkoreacampaignuk.org/how-you-can-help-3/ and http://www.northkoreanow.org

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