Hopefully you’ve all been following the girls over on beaut.ie as they were sending themselves and those closest to them for colonic hydrotherapy and reporting back on this mysterious procedure. I happened to mention to them that I had been thinking about going for a colonic or three and they kindly offered me a session that had been donated to them.

I’ve written a post which they’ve put up today, a no-holds barred ‘truth about colonics’ which you can read over here.

I’m not sure how I missed this article last week, but according to Yahoo, ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) have started campaigning to get the Irish government to ban smoking in all cars.

WTF???

They claim that it’s bad for children. Fair enough, but I don’t have kids - why should I be stopped from smoking in my car with no-one else present?

They claim that it’s dangerous:

Smokers must light up, hold the cigarette, deposit the ash and dispose of the cigarette — all whilst driving.

“If it is not safe to hold a mobile phone while driving — it’s difficult to see how it can be safe to smoke.”

Well, just how dangerous is it compared to putting on lipstick in traffic? Yelling at your kids while looking at them in the rear-view mirror? Changing CD’s or radio station? Using the in-car computer systems or GPS available on higher end car models?

Will they next propose to strip all cars back to the basic models with no radios or other distractions?

ASH - Get a grip!

Conor O’Neill posted about Roos and Hadyn’s blog entitled One Breast Less this week, so I popped over for a nosy. They are posting about Roos’ experience with breast cancer, it has been prevalent in her family and she’s now dealing with it herself. I took time out and read all the posts from the beginning, it’s some very powerful writing, some of which had me close to tears at times.

It’s a very valuable read for both men and women, as it not only describes their battle from Roos’ point of view, but also from Hadyn’s - the rollercoaster that is their emotions and how they are dealing with explaining this to their 4 children.

While this was still prevalent in my mind, I was on VideoJug this evening looking for a recipe for dinner when I noticed a video in their Top 10 entitled “How to become Breast Aware“. It’s a brilliant visual primer on how to examine your breasts each month and be aware of any changes. We are so often told to do this, yet it is so hard to explain exactly how to go about it using only words. This is the kind of video that would be brilliant to show to teenagers and get them into the habit early, and I’ll certainly be doing my checking more regularly from now on…

You can watch the video using the player below, but be warned, it’s probably NOT SAFE FOR WORK as it contains naked breasts!

from the story of my holiday, anyway…

I was ranting at G today about Mary Harney and he was sick of hearing me go on so he told me to “Blog It”, which now seems to be the house standard response to a rant you don’t want to hear!

We were talking about the smoking ban over here and in the UK, and how they are talking of taking it further. I think that the Irish smokers have been mostly excellent in adapting to the ban - and the pubs that have accommodated them are doing well because of that.

IMHO, if they try to ban cigarettes outright, i will be up in arms about it, unless they ban alcohol outright as well. Alcohol related admissions account for 40% of all hospital emergency admissions and use up way more government resources, so why is the Irish government not trying to do something about that as well? Apparently it’s an offence in this country to serve alcohol to an intoxicated person, but when was the last time you heard of a publican being convicted of that charge. If you go to nearly any city center pub you will see people falling over drunk, someone must have served them enough alcohol to let them get like that…

Anyway I started yammering about Mary Harney, so I should really get to the point! Mary is the government minister for health in this country and she is massively overweight. I’m not kidding here, the woman’s health is at risk, she is so fat. Exactly what kind of message is the government sending to their populace here? Surely with the image consultants that the government uses they could get someone to talk to her and get her on a diet?

I mention this ‘cos my friend Triona is doing WeightWatchers at the moment and she’s doing really well, with over a stone lost to date and she’s looking fantastic. Another friend of ours has also lost three stone this way and the message that they all send is that it is possible. So come on Mary, get thee to your local meeting and lose some of that blubber - set a better example to your country!