Skiving Off on a Friday

Well, it's been a dead quiet week at work. Hardly anything to do really. I took the Monday off and when I got back on Tuesday, it took me all of 30 minutes to catch up on my mail. I don't think today would be a big deal. Hey, when your manager takes a day off in mid-week to take care of her cat, you know it's a slow week. So I blew off work to greet my husband home.

It's Valentine's Weekend, so I'm looking around for decadent and lovely meal ideas. I'm also celebrating because the folks at the Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article on the results of an eight-year study on the effects of a low-fat diet and its prevention of certain cancers. The proponents of the study were obviously eager to see dramatic results that would confirm the paranoid and prejudiced notion that low-fat = good health.

How wrong they were.

The results proved what fat activists have been shouting about for years: there is no correlation between a low-fat diet and incidence or risk of cancer, or cardiovascular disease.

This means that for once and for all, you and I can tell those mean-spirited, consumptive dragon-ladies who laughingly call themselves "nutritional therapists" to stuff it... preferably with a large block of triple-cream Brie.

I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about, reading and watching stories of how someone, usually a woman, is put on public trial, usually by some dragonette in a Dior suit, skin the hue of a winter Pimms cocktail, screeching about "too much sugar" in one's diet. The other day, I tuned in for about five minutes to the show "You Are What You Eat" on C4, where a divorced office employee, no harm to anyone, was roped and bamboozled into appearing on this most disgusting show, by her unbelievably insensitive workmates, who tattle-taled to this Diet Dragonette about how many sweets she ate.

The Diet Dragonettes will have to eat humble pie, I think, with extra cream and puff pastry when they read this. Low-fat diets do NOT guarantee good health. Eating cottage cheese and celery and skimming the foam off your cappuccino will not make you live longer.

So this weekend, I plan to go whole hog. Vodka, cream and tomato sauce, smoked salmon salad, strawberry and banana salad, a little bit of chocolate and lots of wine and champagne.