Cape Town - There's a man in Australia who is currently eating nothing but potatoes.
That doesn't sound too terrible, but there is more: he is planning to do this for a whole year.
The AFP news agency says Andrew Taylor is doing this to break his “food addiction”.
While alcohol or cigarette addicts can go “cold turkey” on their vice, it is impossible to do so with food, so Taylor settled on making his diet as boring as possible.
“The next best thing was to find one thing that sustained me healthily,” he said. He also considered mangoes, bananas and watermelon - but there more options with the humble spud: boiled, mashed and even made into pancakes.
There's no accounting for the madness of Australians (and of course this might just be a publicity stunt) but it got me musing: what would I eat for a whole year? Potato is a good choice because of the variety (and I do like them) but I think it would have to be cheese. I just couldn't do a whole year without cheese. Pursuing the "what if" theme on Facebook threw up some other ideas. Mutton curry. Eggs. Interesting.
There was another fascinating "what if" posed this week, by my niece: "What would you do if you could stop time and do anything?"
When the question was posed on Facebook, people said they would travel, or go to the beach, or read books. I've been mulling the issue for days. The question of what I would do if I could do anything is easy: travel, stop working, make cakes, sew quilts, garden all spring to mind. But stopping time takes it into another realm: perhaps stopping time would enable me to get back my 25-year-old body but keep all my hard-won life experience? That would work for me.
These random threads running through my week came together while listening to a personal finance slot on CapeTalk after the Budget was tabled in Parliament (another kind of what if exercise, but let's not go there).
A financial adviser (I was driving, so didn't get his name) said that the distinguishing factor of wealthy people was their ability to envision the future ("in 10 years time I will have this specific house") and to resist short-term gains in favour of the long game.
This, said host Bruce Whitfield, was different from the kind of fantasies that people indulge in when they picture a big lottery win. Very different, said the money man. The trick is having a specific goal for which you will work, and which enables you to set priorities in the present.
In our house, we have well-developed ideas about what we would do with a big lottery win. But perhaps the CapeTalk interviewee is right: those fantasies could be made real, perhaps in a smaller way, if translated into specific goals. Perhaps I can get a new(er) car if I set my mind to it, rather than looking longingly at the showroom?
The 25-year-old body may be a bridge too far though, especially if I eat too much cheese.
IOL
@reneemoodie
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