If you don’t eat or drink then your body will think it’s night time and that would be
Posted in General on 11. Aug, 2010
“If you don’t eat or drink then your body will think it’s night time and that would be a disaster if it’s light outside. The important thing is to set it to the body clock of destination – do this 24 hours before you leave, if possible, and set your watch to your destination time as soon as you get on the plane.” His book is full of complex strategies: London to Singapore, a 13-hour flight departing at 11am, means boarding the plane at what is 7pm in Singapore. So cheers – have a pre-dinner drink and wine with the meal, go to sleep five or so hours into the flight and don’t wake up for breakfast. “Alcohol is an important sedative,” he says, “which can be usefully employed as a sleeping pill.” And because alcohol, unlike the sleeping pill, has been around for thousands of years, we know exactly what it’s going to do to us. As it’s a diuretic (it makes you want to pee more), he advises against “large volume” drinks like pints of lager or daiquiris, gin and tonics and screwdrivers; instead stick to “higher-proof strengths” like whisky, brandy, cognac, or “soporific clarets and red riojas” (yes!). Champagne and white wine are likely, unfortunately, to wake you up with heartburn or indigestion. He keeps a few cans of Diet Coke in the seat pocket in case he wakes up thirsty.
Leslie would not approve.
When I challenged Dr O’Connell about the raw carrot semi-fasting method, he was dismissive. Dr O’Connell, whose book also discusses melatonin, light visors and circadian cycle, is much more fun. Pretend, in fact, that you’re not there at all, and then perhaps your body will forgive you when you arrive in your new time zone. The flaw in this approach is that many of us are rigid with fear after take- off, and alcohol is important to maintain sanity, followed by food to fight off boredom.
Nonetheless, there is a thorn on the Internet rose; as non-cyber lovers already know, Danal, Park Bistro and Flute have been booked for Valentine’s Day since last Halloween; so many of the Internet-dependent have been left with a more virtual Valentine’s Day than they had planned – which has the potential to produce bang-up non-virtual lovers’ spats.. UNTIL I READ Dr David O’Connell’s book, Jetlag: How To Beat It, I believed, reluctantly, in the Leslie Kenton-Raw Energy approach to flying: take your own rice cakes, a few slivers of raw carrots and some mineral water; refuse all other food and alcohol as they will poison you even more than the stale, dry air of the aircraft; and sleep as much as you can. Restaurant suggestions have been finely calibrated, such that a three-heart, two dollar-sign couple gets fireside seats at Danal’s or Park Bistro, while the lucky three heart, three dollar signs clink champagne glasses at Flute. If you register three hearts and one dollar sign, Sidewalk will sigh, “Your heart is full, but your wallet’s empty,” and prescribe museum visits, ice-skating and a shared crepe at a French West Village pushcart. If your quotient is three dollar signs and one heart, you will be deemed, “A free spender but an emotional tightwad,” and sent off to buy caviar at Moomba, peignoirs at La Perla and tickets to a high-priced Broadway show. com has a Love Machine that allows visitors to plot their love quotient on a candy heart graph, which has cash on one axis, love on the other, so that busy New Yorkers can find out how much money they should put where their lips are on the Big Day. But past errors have been forgiven and forgotten and now New Yorkers have surrendered unconditionally to computer love connections, just in time for 14 February This was accidental, of course.
Any time a New Yorker logged on to the Net in the last month, he was confronted with a flashing icon at the top of the screen, next to the flashing icon labelled Clinton Scandal, which read “Valentine’s Day”. Clicking on it, hapless browsers often ordered a dozen long-stemmed roses by mistake, which, once they had arrived, were sent on to love interests they had long been vaguely meaning to give flowers to.
The result in many cases has been a viable couple, and so now, legions of accidental boyfriends and girlfriends are turning back to their desktop Cyranos for further instructions. One site supplies an Internet Kissing Booth, in which a giant pair of red lips plants a smacking virtual kiss on the screen, many have e-mailable birthday, anniversary and Valentine’s greetings for cads too cheap or too lazy to buy a paper card, and some provide window-steaming romantic verses for creatively-congested poets. A sample: “Candy kisses, flowers and cards are fine, but on the Internet is where we spend our time.” It’s not Herrick, but it gets the job done. On a more ominous note, last week, the first Valentine’s e-mail chain letter made the rounds; a short sappy love story, followed by instructions to forward it to three people for good luck, eleven people for true love, and twenty people for marriage.New York’s Sidewalk. com”, “My e-Male” and ” www.Cupid“. New inventions are generally regarded with suspicion, and so for the first few years, the Internet was mistrusted as a visionary accomplice in affairs of the heart.