I love a bit of science. And especially when it justifies and encourages something I love. I’ve always been waiting for ‘tests have shown that watching football makes you incredibly fit and strong and will lengthen your life as well as your penis’.

I’m still waiting for that one. It’ll have its day in the sunshine at some point. Everything does.

And today its the turn of the humble peanut. That most wonderful of foods. Packaged by the gods into neat little individual twin pods, they’ve always been my nut of choice. Roasted with heaps of salt preferably, then adorned with honey, caramel, toffee, chocolate, or anything else that makes them really healthy.

And a team at Maastricht University have ‘proved’ that eating ‘a handful’ of peanuts every day will make you live longer. But, like, much longer. By chomping through a few peanuts a day you lower the risk of premature dying by a whopping 26%. So logically, if you double the 10 gram a day recommendation, or quadruple it, you’ll lower that risk above 50%. If you pig out on peanuts all day every day, you’ll fucking live forever. Like a vampire. But without the sun issues. Though maybe some weight problems.

And that’s the difficulty I find with peanuts. Eating a few is relatively easy. Stopping eating them is way more difficult, verging on the totally impossible until the pack/bag/sack is completely finished. The only people who find it easy to moderate their intake are the allergists, who will probably get to 5 grams before their airways start to close up, and just make it to 10 before going into anaphylactic shock.

Poor Eleanor Hawkins. She’s not so much in shock as in jail. The gap yaaaar student was arrested in Malaysia for posting naked photos of herself and some mates on top of a holy mountain. An act not just destined to upset that rather devout Muslim nation, but one which actually really pissed off the local gods to the point that it caused an earthquake. She must have SOME tits!!!

Or maybe they’re not very nice ones and the gods were disappointed and smiteth the people from on high as a sign of disappointment.

Whatever the reason (for the naked pics, not for the earthquake) you kind’a have to be aware of local sensitivities when you travel, making a conscious effort not to upset the locals with their strange ideas and folk lore. When we go to Scotland I won’t speak with an English accent because I know it to be inflammatory to those fine folk up there. And I won’t use the words ‘good’ and ‘football’ in the same sentence for fear of arrest or riots.

Happy peanut frenzied Thursday

A xxxx