The final helping

neil donnelly

Neil is a Fellow of the bDa and retired Dietetic Services Manager. His main areas of interest are weight management and eating disorders.

it was a wet sunday in November and a job needed doing. Here i was in my loft, cup of tea in hand, sitting on the floor near the loft ladder listening to the first single i ever bought, you really got Me by the kinks, being played on my original 1964 dansette standing record Player.

It had been a hard day decluttering, essentially because the Christmas decorations, placed at the far end of where was sitting, could not even be seen, let alone brought downstairs for the forthcoming celebrations. It was a day unintentionally filled with memories of my time as a student, as books and journals were unearthed from the loft and tough decisions had to be made as to what I should and should not keep, to the sound of music!

Now this process had essentially taken place some years earlier, when most of my University notes had been removed, but now our loft seemed once again to be full of a combination of ‘dietetic memorabilia’ and grandparenting ‘furniture’!

I have to admit that much of the former memorabilia had seen better days, so they subsequently found their place in the black recycling bin bag following a quick flick through. There were copies of the vivid orange BDA journal which I had arranged in chronological order going back to my starting date in 1966, until it ceased to be published in that form many years later. The dusty journals met the same fate. In the bin.

It all reminded me though, of how hard we had to work to find information in those days. If you wanted to borrow a book from the library you virtually had to order it a couple of weeks in advance to secure its use. Either that or spend some of your student grant (not a loan) on the aforementioned item rather than luxury commodities like alcohol and entertainment. Not likely. How times have changed on both accounts. Back in the NHD office they have been working really hard at pulling together lots of useful resources and tools for our subscribers giving them their own subscriber zone with so much information and resource literally just a click away.

Anyway, getting rid of pretty much everything dietetic from that time, which of course with advancing know ledge has now been superseded, was very cathartic both for myself and my growing family furniture. The journey to the modernised council tip to dispose of the contents of my four-year degree course provided an unexpected ignominy. I was expecting to literally post each item through an enclosed hole similar in size to that of a post box as on a previous visit, but when I asked where this now was I was told that now “all paper and books go in the cardboard skip”.

I know that getting rid of those relics from the past was long overdue, but emptying en masse those black bin bags in the Fylde countryside into an open skip in darkening skies and heavy rain, certainly brought a damp final closure on that particular chapter.

Watch out for a new and exciting chapter beginning 50 years later in 2016!

The Dansette will carry on playing.