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kilkennyobserver.ie
The Kilkenny Observer Friday 21 January 2022
Opinion
Why we need a piazza culture here AS I SEE IT MARIANNE HERON
This is the time of year, festivities over when holiday brochures normally grab our attention. Those technicolour pictures hold the promise of golden sunshine, azure sea and a cultural shot-in-the-arm offered by somewhere abroad. Not yet though, given the rampant Omicron. Sometimes there were things you enjoyed on previous breaks that you tried bringing back with you. But did you ever notice how some things just don’t translate back home? Take a bottle of ouzo for instance, a cloudy, aromatic glass of the stuff just won’t taste the same as it did on some Greek island. No chance. There are plenty of experiences enjoyed abroad that we have successfully adopted, from tapas to barbeques; travel broadens commercial opportunities as well as the mind. Some things, though, we just don’t have and thinking back on recent holidays they are things that I really miss. I can reimagine the fabulous squares around grand buildings in France which allow space for pavement cafes, seating, social events and an appreciation of
the buildings themselves. Or I recall generous piazzas in Italy, splendid with fountains, fringed with cafes and used for concerts and performances funded by the taxes collected by the local commune. Of course, history played a part in making these spaces possible. It helps if you start building your grand cathedral or ministry centuries ago and
sunnier, warmer climates encourage the creation of outdoor spaces too. But here in Ireland we may be a pizza culture now but we don’t have a piazza culture with generous open public spaces. Just think how useful that would be now, given the need during the pandemic, for outdoor socialising and dining to have rather than to being squashed onto narrow
Support for Veganaury CLAIR WHITTY
HAVE you decided to take the 31-day challenge and go vegan for the month of the January? You might be wondering if there are any supplements you should be taking. In the short term you should be OK but if you plan to stick with it for longer then you could run the risk of falling low in calcium, iron, b12, d3, iodine, protein, or essential fatty acids, if you don’t eat a wide variety of foods. You might be worried about lacking the calcium you would have found in dairy products. You should be ok if you eat a variety of nuts, seeds, green leafy vegetables, pulses & lentils. Many plant-based milks are fortified with calcium. If you’re not eating much of these foods then consider taking a supplement. Talk to us first as it may be better to choose a supplement that contains magnesium and vitamin D too. Iron is a worry for some because iron found in meat is considered the best source. Iron is also found in soya products,
sea vegetables, green leafy vegetables, fortified breakfast cereal, dried fruit, and some pulses. Consider Floradix Liquid Iron, my favourite iron supplement if you feel you’re not eating enough iron rich foods. B12 is found in fish, meat, chicken, and dairy products, plant-based sources include nutritional yeast flakes, brewer’s yeast, fortified cereal and plant-base milks, and yeast spreads. Vitamin
B12 helps keep your body’s blood and nerve cells healthy and helps prevent anaemia. There are lots of B12 supplements that we can talk to you about if you need to top up on it. Essential Fatty Acids usually found in fish are important. You’ll also get them in nuts and seeds, good quality omega oils, grains, and avocados. They’re important for heart health, cognitive function, and mood. If you’re not getting enough Omega 3 Oils then Cleanmarine V-Good is a great place to start as it also contains vitamin D3, B vitamins, iron, folate, selenium, and zinc. Protein is found in seeds and nuts, tofu, legumes, and grains. It’s important for hair, skin, nails, muscles, and bones. Choose protein powders like rice, soya, or hemp if you need to top up on protein. Let us know if you have any questions about this as everyone’s needs will be different. Call into see us at Market Cross Shopping Centre Phone: O56 7764538 Email: info@ naturalhealthstore.ie Shop online: wwwnaturalhealthstore.ie
footpaths in makeshift pavement cafes. There is plenty of redevelopment and building going on in our cities but is there any requirement to create space — even a little for people? Not a bit of it. And the same applies to the many new apartment blocks, too, which are being constructed right beside noisy roads without breathing space
or trees around them. Another thing I wish we had more of are food markets. The markets selling local produce with the kind of fantabulous displays of fruit, vegetables, cheese, fish, meat and meat products like terrines and pates that have you reaching for a camera as well as your shopping basket are a weekly or a daily treat in France and Italy.
There’s social element too, friends meet for coffee, aperitifs or lunch around the markets. I can conjure up mouthwatering visions of the weekly markets which rolled into Italian villages with a designated day for each place where queues formed for delicacies like roast sucking pig stuffed with fennel and open-sided trucks turned into shops selling everything from tablecloths to saucy underwear. The English market in Cork and a few small pop-up markets apart, there’s very little like that here and yet we are a major food producing country and you can’t really blame supermarkets for taking away potential market trade, there are plenty of supermarkets in France and Italy but local markets still flourish. The traffic can work the other way too, Irish butter and beef have a proud reputation abroad. But Irish pubs overseas? Now there’s a missed opportunity, at least in my experience. Far from being a home from home of craic, showcase for Irish culture and bar-keeping expertise these are grim places more like to make you disown your Irish roots, stay away and avoid bring foreign friends to show them off as a taste of the welcome they might enjoy if they come to Ireland. No, pub culture doesn’t export well.
Letting go what you can’t control ANDREW MCDONALD HYPNOTHERAPIST
EVENTS which are bigger than us, that we have no way of controlling, are responsible for a great deal of anxiety. Whether bad news stories, and there are plenty of those, things which are happening to loved ones over which we have no influence, or even details about our own lives which are partly or wholly shaped by other people, all of them can lead to stress. The big question is whether that building up of mental tension is a worthwhile activity. Of course, it’s not easy to dismiss worries. As human beings, we crave certainty. Things which we have no control over leave us feeling uneasy because we can’t predict the outcome. However, we are also guilty of catastrophising, of building these details of life into such big issues that we can’t see the wood for the trees or that we view what will really, in the end,
turn out to be trivial as something life-changing. How many of us can remember what we were worrying about five years ago? One way of dealing with stressful events is to analyse what you can and can’t control. If there is a possibility of doing something to positively influence the outcome, do it. If there isn’t, all the worrying in the world isn’t going to change anything. All you’re doing is making yourself miserable. Sometimes thinking about what could happen is actually worse than the event itself. This, again, is human nature. By concerning ourselves with things outside our sphere of influence, we start to consider all kinds of possibilities, however unrealistic. Worse still, typically we start to fixate on the ways things could go wrong rather than how they could go right. Have you ever wondered why many newspapers seem full of bad stories? Simply because that’s what captures human imagination. In other words, it’s what sells. Nobody should ever
claim that preventing ourselves from worrying is easy. In fact, worry in and of itself can sometimes be a positive. It can motivate us to action, to do something to change our situation. However, it can only do that when we are actually able to influence events, otherwise it’s futile. That said, how can we avoid stressing over things we can’t do anything about? One useful technique is to get a blank piece of paper and write down your stream of thoughts. You don’t need to structure your writing, just let the ideas flow from your brain to the page. What this does is subconsciously send a signal to your mind that you’ve dealt with that particular issue, you’ve taken action. You may never actually do anything tangible about the issue but without you perhaps even realising it, your brain feels you’ve done something. If that’s all you can do, fine, leave it on the paper and get on with something you can alter the outcome of. That is, after all, a better use of your time.
