Text 12 Health and Medical Care

Once I went to hospital in England to have an eye operation to sew my retine back on, as the lining came away. That was really frightening. The hospital staff were great, though. It was in Leeds, the Leeds General Infirmary, and the nurses were great: really sympathetic, and really friendly. I don’t remember the operation very much. They gave me some kind of anaesthetic before I became unconscious, and it just felt really great. I felt so relaxed and wasn’t nervous at all about it, after having a huge injection in my bum. Then I woke up in the recovery room with them pulling the tube out of my throat, and I was there for about 5 days afterwards, lying with a patch over my eye. My operation lasted about 5 hours but it took a year to recover.

I had an awful dentist who I wouldn’t go back to again, so I’m looking for another dentist. He seemed to be quite oblivious to any pain and never gave injections and just dug around in my roots, and it was really painful. One of the things he put in has fallen out since, so I don’t have much faith in him now. I really don’t like going to the dentist, not so much because of the pain, but because you have to have a lot of things in your mouth. I had my wisdom teeth pulled out once, with only a local anaesthetic. I remember I had one done by a woman dentist and she ripped it out with a wrist action – very forcefully.

I know that homeopathy is getting very popular now, and holistic medicine, where people look for herbal healing and healing that looks at the whole person, their psychological problems and their psychological make-up as well as just their physiological symptoms. It threats the whole person and not just the illness, which I think is a sensible way of dealing with it. So many illnesses come from the mind. Some people get stomach aches, not because of what they’ve eaten, just because they’re stressed out from worrying about something and they don’t even realise it, and it’s their body telling them they need to relax a bit more.

Text 13 Shopping

Shopping has common elements wherever it takes place. A buyer looks for a seller who is offering something the buyer wants or needs at a price the buyer can afford to pay. Sellers often advertise their wares in newspapers, on the radio or TV, on posters etc. Sellers use a variety of tactics to induce buyers to purchase from them at a price which leaves some profit.

Shopping is a part of our daily life. And we have to deal with it whether we like it or not. There are people who hate going shopping. So they make a list of what they need and run through stores buying the needed things. Sometimes they even don't care about the price. And there are people who go from store to store looking for goods of better quality and lower price. Those don't worry about the time they spend shopping.

Everyday shopping is rather traditional: some white and brown bread, some milk, butter, sugar, salt, eggs, some sausages or frankfurters. But it’s not necessary to visit different provisional shops such as bakery, grocery or butchery to buy food for the family because we could buy foodstuffs in a supermarket. Different goods are sold under one roof, so customers can save their time having all goods bought in no time.

The method of shopping may vary. In a supermarket a customer goes from counter to counter selecting and putting into a basket or trolley the goods he wants to buy. It’s absolutely necessary to check the dates before which this or that foodstuff should be used, not to buy something of bad quality. Then a customer takes the basket to the check-out counter where the prices of the purchases are added up. If it’s not a supermarket and most small shops aren’t, the shop-assistant helps the customer in finding and getting what he wants. After paying money to the cashier the customer can get his purchases.

Text 14 Food

To promote a healthy way of life, I suppose the cliché is “You are what you eat”. I think it is. They’re always telling us in newspapers and magazines to eat low-fat food, to cut down on fat. The most healthy diets are in places like Greece where they eat a lot of oils like olive oil, which belongs to a kind of fats which are more healthy. They eat a lot of fresh fruit and tomatoes, and suffer from less heart disease.

We should eat more fiber. And that’s another thing in favour of a vegetarian diet, as if you eat no meat, then you have to get your protein in some other way, for example by eating beans, brown rice or lentils, which are also full of fibre. In England, they have breakfast cereals that are full of bran, but they’re horrible really. They have no taste, but if you eat a bowl you get lots of fibre.

Vegetables and fruit also have a lot of fibre in them. If possible, eat them raw. Sometimes, in the winter, it’s difficult to get a good choice of vegetables – well, you can get them but they’re more expensive. I think vegetables and fruit are my favourite things to eat, so, all in all, I do eat quite healthily. I still have a similar diet to that that I had when I was strictly vegetarian. But occasionally, when my flat-mate and I cook together, we eat meat, as she’s a real carnivore and gets a bit fed up if it’s always broccoli and brown rice.

Fish is also really very good to eat. Tinned fish like sardines are full of vitamin A and it’s especially good for women. It’s full of calcium which is good for your bones and your joints. So you become less likely to get rheumatism when you get older if you eat lots of fish.

We used to have a lot of old superstitions at home about what food to eat. You should eat fish for your brain. You should eat cabbage if you have spots, as it cleans your skin, your complexion, and you should eat liver to improve your liver so if you’ve been drinking or you’ve been to a party or something – eat liver. Those are just a few things.