Recursive Words

It’s Easter Sunday Morning. I’m sitting in the junk room, eating chocolate at 11am. It seems wrong somehow. I probably need the chocolate – after staying up until 3:30am last night waiting for my middle daughter to get home from work. She’s up too, and making chocolate brownies in the kitchen.

I wonder if people that work in chocolate factories can’t stand the sight or smell of it? I know M&Ms have a distinct smell – from the times we have visited M&M’s World in London. It’s a strange acrid sugar smell.

I remember watching a scientific demonstration of our body’s defences against “too much of a good thing” on the internet years ago. A tutor asked the members of a class to volunteer if they liked pop-tarts. Somebody was chosen from the class, and given a box full of pop-tarts, and instructed to try to eat them – one after another – with no break – but to stop if they started to feel sick.

It was interesting – after perhaps the third pop-tart, the student felt sick and couldn’t carry on. The tutor explained about the physiological reaction going on inside the body – that the brain will change how it processes taste receptors – and that in extreme situations it will begin to form the same response it does to a virus – essentially building a defence against the substance that is causing the overload. It doesn’t always get it right either – which is how food intollerances and allergies happen.

I remember talking to a friend years ago that had lived in Japan for some time – he remarked that you could broadly group Japanese people into “those that can deal with alcohol” (at all), and “those that cannot”. It’s not just a tolerance thing – it appears to be genetic – in the same way that some people’s urine smells awful if they eat asparagus.

I wonder how much coffee I can consume before my body decides to form defences against it? Perhaps it already has – people are often shocked to discover I can drink coffee throughout the evening and still fall asleep within moments of falling into bed.

Anyway.

I better get on. My in-laws are arriving in a bit – we’re wandering into town together for lunch.

This evening we’ve been invited over to our neighbours for a drink or three – I haven’t seen any of them for months, so it will be a good chance to kick back, relax, and catch up. I’m looking forward to it.