Eat your greens

The haematologist may not have been physically sucking her teeth as she looked over my blood test results, but metaphorically she was doing it in spades. Tut-tutting even. You know, like the electrician looking around your wiring and saying, “what cowboy put this lot in for you, then?”

“You need to eat more greens,” she told me, sternly, like a judge not satisfied with the stiff sentence just pronounced who decides to add “without possibility of parole”:

She didn’t actually use the word ‘greens’. Being Spanish, she said ‘verduras’. However, you can see that the word is just a derivate of ‘verde’, green and means the same thing.

It’s obviously sound advice. It put me in mind of a fine episode of The West Wing. That’s The Supremes (season 5, episode 17, if you really want know). Commenting on the death of a Supreme Court Justice, Owen Brady, the Chief Justice tells Toby Ziegler, “Brady was your age. Eat your greens”.

Chief Justice Roy Ashland: “Eat your greens”

If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, even a fictional one, confirms my haematologist’s advice, that’s good enough for me.

Well, I’ve been following her injunction, like the well-behaved convict I am, anxious to establish my good behaviour even if I have no hope of parole. In fact, parole is available for no part of my sentence. For instance, another worrying element that my blood test led to was a further rise in the number of pills I have to take. 

This seems to be one of those milestones (or do I mean millstones?) in the ageing process. For nearly thirty years, I was taking one pill daily. Then last year, following the weird experience that various neurologists have decided must have been a TIA – a transient ischaemic attack or mini-stroke – the number grew to three, increased by my GP to four, with the extra one there to try to counter the noxious side-effects of one of the others.

Now the number has increased still further to five, with a sixth added two to three times a week. I feel there’s a bit of a race on. Will I go to my grave out of natural causes first or will I succumb to strangulation by excessive pill consumption before that happens?

Anyway,  back to the greens. I’m now consuming a lot more than ever before. Dutifully. Daily. Diligently. 

It’s actually not such a bad thing to do. But that’s chiefly because I don’t stick to what are strictly greens. Fortunately, I’ve discovered that in Spanish as in English, the word ‘greens’ isn’t restricted to green things. 

Fortunately, it also includes reds and yellows and oranges and purples, and no doubt others besides. This means I can get my ration of greens not just from peas and broccoli and lettuce, but also from cherries (just as well, since the season here isn’t quite over yet), black figs (season well under way and more purple than black), nectarines (one of my favourites and now hitting the shops in large quantities), to say nothing of lemons and bananas, mandarins and oranges (sadly out of season locally but available from abroad), both kinds of grapes, alongside carrots and tomatoes and beetroot.

A selection of greens

That’s one of the things I like about general language. That’s as opposed to lawyer-speak or scientific jargon. It’s fluid, it’s wide ranging, it allows bending to cover far more than its literal meaning. 

As a result, while still enjoying spinach and celery and cucumber, I can also go looking for variety, by choosing other fruits and vegetables of as many colours as in Joseph's famous coat.

I can do that while continuing to obey, and strictly obey, the spirit, even if not the letter, of the instructions of that wise though severe haematologist.