MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

This morning I had the pleasure of listening to a podcast about fat, from a recent ABC radio broadcast.

It was a pleasure because it celebrated fat. Duck fat, butter, lard, bread and dripping, and suet were all discussed.

There was an interview with a veteran Italian-Australian butcher whose pet hate was customers asking for fat to be trimmed from the meat, despite knowing it would diminish the flavour.

That's because, over the past 50 years or so, most of the developed world has, it seems, been brainwashed into thinking that fat is bad for us.

Recently I've also watched That Sugar Film on SBS, which traces the history of the tarnishing of fat's public image, to the heart attack suffered by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955.

This event thrust the issue of heart disease into the public domain, with two theories emerging. One, from US physiologist Ancel Keys, declared that fat was the problem. The other was from British physician John Yudkin, who believed sugar was to blame.

Over the next two decades, the discussion brought fierce arguments from both camps. Keys won out, fat became the villain, sugar was exonnerated, and 'low fat' was institutionalised as the only healthy diet.

Not surprisingly, sugar industry lobbyists played a major role in demonising fat, which was systematically removed from otherwise healthy foods and replaced by sugar and carbohydrates.

One of my greatest sources of pleasure this year has been cheeses and sausages and other high fat foods including nuts, offal and full-fat Greek yoghurt. I have embraced these at the expense of sugar and carbs, and received very favourable blood test results from the GP earlier this month.

I was a healthy weight and receiving good test results for several years before I made the change in my diet. Friends wondered about my motivation, and sometimes I did as well. I guess my best explanation was that I did it 'for the love of fat'.

If there's a lesson for all of us at this time of new year's resolution making, it's that it's better to choose a positive lifestyle change that seems more like an indulgence, and to forget about 'giving up' something that is supposed to be not good for us.

During the Christmas break I read Rick Morton's One Hundred Years of Dirt, which is one of the more acclaimed Australian memoirs published during 2018.

I found it an easy read in that it's less than 200 pages and beautifully written. But it was also very uncomfortable, for two reasons.

The first is its details of the wretched life he's led. This includes childhood trauma in outback Queensland followed by material poverty as an adolescent in a single parent household closer to the city. Then there's the emotional disability that has lasted to the present, in the life of the now 31 year old journalist at The Australian.

The second reason is that Morton's message is confronting for people with a world view like mine. He sees us as culture warriors from both sides of the political spectrum who never step outside our respective bubbles.

'We don't need more journalists from the right or from the left... What the media needs is more reporters with the ability to understand their subjects.'

Morton is speaking about politicians as much as he is journalists. He suggests that the quality of their understanding of people is just as important as the soundness of their policies.

That is a plausible explanation for the success of rogue politicians like Hanson and Trump, whose policies are inconsistent, shallow or non-existent.

The problem with the bubble-dwellers is that we grew up with university educations and a diet of comparatively abstract media content, largely from the ABC. This is where Rick Morton has the upper hand in understanding how people tick.

'Mum's life was hard and we relaxed by watching soap operas, reality television and The Today Show. I can't remember a time when we had ABC-anything on.'

Not only do the politicians and right and left culture warriors lack cut-through, but Morton talks about the anger they generate in the people they're seeking to win over.

'It's directed at a system that overwhelmingly keeps people in their place. ... I had no connections, no networks, no family even in the big cities where I would end up working.'

Morton attributes his eventual success to a combination of 'the handy resilience forged under such conditions' and 'dumb luck'.

He's now in a position to act as a bridge between those of us who believe that 'higher power prices are the cost of fighting climate change' and the many Australians for whom 'the slightest bump in their electricity bill means a deeper slide into poverty'.

Morton's first-hand experience of poverty enables him to credibly point the way to politicians in their bubbles, who are actually the ones who most need to be bridges between abstract thought and real life.

The blemish on this week's 'beautiful set of numbers' announced by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was wage growth.

Australia's economy is performing well, at least for now. This is due to a combination of fortuitously high commodity prices and government fiscal restraint.

But wage growth is around two per cent per year, half what it was a couple of years ago. That's the slowest sustained rate of growth since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This interests me because I'm coming to the end of a short-term paid research task for a Sydney academic. She is comparing the diminishment of the wage system during the Great Depression to that of the present day.

I've been listening to interviews with Australians who lived through the Great Depression. They tell of how they got by without wages. This involved relying upon food vouchers and work for the dole, as well as the generosity of shopkeepers and others.

Today we have many young people attempting to survive without wages in the digital economy. They are contractors or 'support partners' for companies such as Foodora or Deliveroo. They often receive remuneration at subsistence levels and lack almost all the usual benefits of wage earners.

Like workers who lived through the Great Depression, they are the victims of wagelessness.

Unusual for my generation, I experienced wagelessness when I was was in my twenties. A component of my studies for the Jesuit priesthood included full-time 'unwaged' work, as a secondary school teacher, and then in the media.

I received board and lodging but no payments. I did not have or need a bank account. Technically the work attracted a stipend (or a wage in the case of my ABC media work). But I did not see either because the funds went directly to the community.

At the time I didn't see the need for an income other than a little 'pocket money' to allow me to go to the movies or get a train out of the city for a bushwalk on a Saturday.

But we all need to build financial wealth to provide a secure future for ourselves, and our family if we have one. The way to do that is to receive not only a wage, but a wage that increases exponentially.

I was lucky that I received a proper 'growing' wage once I left the Jesuits at the age of 30 and, almost 30 years later, have financial security.

The wageless of the Great Depression eventually got jobs, and at least some made up the lost ground. But uncertainty remains for younger people today, including the wageless and those with stagnant wages. What kind of future will they enjoy?

Yesterday I invited Tony Kevin to lunch. He is a friend from Canberra whom I got to know as a frequent contributor to Eureka Street when I was editor. He's a former Australian diplomat and author who these days writes commentary on Russia. His 2017 book Return to Moscow reflects on his first visit in the 48 years since his posting there as a young diplomat at the height of the Cold War.

He told me that he's feeling demoralised because most editors reject his articles. He says they view them as too friendly to Russia. An exception is John Menadue, who today published Tony's Kerch Strait incident analysis, which scrutinises the pro-Ukrainian 'false narrative [that] is already solidifying in Western media'.

It's true that most people only want to read commentary they agree with. They don't want to be told their world view rests on shaky foundations, even if they're confident that this contrary view is wrong. If their news source includes unpalatable views, they will go elsewhere. Editors don't want to lose readers and most of them will only publish content that is is comforting. It makes commercial sense.

Science and tech communicator Ketan Joshi described 'algorithmic news' on ABC TV's The Drum on Monday. He said that Facebook and the like use their algorithms to create news that confirms their users' pre-existing views. If they gave them content with views they didn't like, chances are that the users would ditch the feed for a rival and revenues would drop.

People who've grown up with social media are particularly averse to discordant views. I'm from an older, more perverse generation that thrives on views we disagree with.

I like to avoid the journalistic junk food of social media news feeds. I don't even spend much time at The Guardian, which would have to be my own online comfort zone. Instead I pay money to Rupert Murdoch to subscribe to The Australian.

That goes against the grain and I don't like a lot of the views I read. But it makes me think, much more than content from The Guardian or the titles of Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment).

I often end up respecting commentators I disagree with. I have no doubt that grappling with diverse opinions gets me far closer to the truth than an algorithmic social media news feed would. But just as importantly, diverse news consumption habits also contribute to a less polarised society.

In The Australian this week, I read Greg Sheridan's argument for the rejection of UK prime minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. Sheridan didn't persuade me to change my mind, but he prompted me to identify exactly why I want to see the UK Parliament pass the deal.

Links: Menadue | The Drum

I'd been in Paris for two months and winter was fast approaching. So last week it was good to land back in Sydney, where summer is in the air.

It's the season for catching up with family and friends. I tend to do that in small measure, so it's always a pleasure. Yesterday I enjoyed a visit from my niece, who was up from Melbourne, and there are a couple of friends I hope to see before Christmas.

One is Catherine Marshall, a former colleague from Eureka Street's publisher Jesuit Communications. She left the security of institutional employment about the same time as me, to become a freelance travel writer. She's had notable success at that, having recently been named the Australian Society of Travel Writers' Travel Writer of the Year, for the second year in a row.

I don't get excited by most of the travel writing I read in Fairfax and The Australian newspapers. That's because because economic reality ensures that it is heavy on either promotion or click-bait. But Catherine has a knack of doing the obligatory product placement in a way that does not interfere with the integrity of her observations and life musings.

I was particularly interested in her latest piece on a recent visit to Paris and how she felt she'd aged in the 25 years since her previous visit.

She writes of having returned to Paris with her best friend and original travelling companion. Both were 'wide-eyed young women visiting Europe for the first time'.

As it happens, their first visit to Paris would have been in 1993 - the year of my first visit. My subsequent visit was also not until many years later (2011).

Catherine describes her first visit as a 'fleeting, whirlwind blitz' that contrasts with their 2018 desire to 'discover the city at an unhurried pace'.

I think that my 1993 visit would have been even more fleeting than theirs.

Mine lasted a mere four hours. I was a 33 year old mature age backpacker on my first trip to Europe. I'd not had the opportunity to travel before, so I wanted to cram as much as possible into the short time available. So Paris was part of the 'five countries in five days' itinerary I'd planned for myself.

I recall finding my way to the Sacré-Coeur basilica at Monmartre, feeling judged on the Metro for being so unkempt, and being served 'two' (deux) espresso coffees when I thought I was asking for 'some' coffee (du café). Then it was time to board the train for Barcelona.

The unhurried pace of Catherine's return visit involved slowly gliding along the Seine in a glass-roofed Batobus tourist barge (the subject of her product placement). The unhurried pace of my present-day return visiting is about giving the city two months - instead of four hours - of my time, in the hope of a far greater return on my investment.

Link: Catherine's article

Today is my last day in Paris until March. It's around 11:00 am and I'm sitting in my room a few kilometres from the Arc de Triomph, where world leaders are gathered to commemorate the Armistice that ended World War One.

While I can't avoid the sound of the jets that I can hear flying overhead, I'm not watching it on TV and don't feel inclined to go anywhere near the event itself.

I don't have much time for communal war remembrance as it is most commonly practised. I've been disturbed by the politicisation of war remembrance that has accompanied the disproportionate promotion of the Anzac myth since the Howard years.

In Australia there is a highly selective regime of remembrance that chooses to exclude the Frontier Wars that killed large numbers of indigenous Australians, and also the many unsavoury aspects of war such as the mistreatment of women by our 'heroes'.

My view is that communal war remembrance should be more nuanced. It needs to include an element of contrition for the shameful actions, alongside legitimate pride for actions that went towards achieving what must be the greatest degree of global harmony in the history of humankind.

Yesterday a cousin of my mother's sent some information and photos of Great-uncle Hugh, who volunteered for military service as a 44 year old in 1915. He was killed in action as a Driver in the Australian Field Artillery in northern France in September 1917.

I've always known about my grandfather's service in these parts during this war, but the detail about Great-uncle Hugh was new to me. The electronic album included a clipping from a regional Victorian local newspaper.

It describes him as a farmer and member of the local Agricultural Society who was 'held in high esteem for his sterling character and industrious habits'. He was a single man who left Australia as a gunner with the artillery and was subsequently appointed as a driver.

Great-uncle Hugh was buried in Godewaersvelde British Cemetery, which is located near the Belgian border in northern France. That gives me the opportunity to go there - perhaps on Anzac Day next year - to engage in my own act of private war remembrance.

As a single man myself, I will contemplate his leaving Australia on the adventure of his lifetime without having to be mindful of fidelity to a partner and possibly children back home. Having seen mention of his 'sterling character', I will take that on face value and imagine him resisting temptation to take advantage of vulnerable local civilians he comes across during the course of his service and recreational downtime. As family, I will share ownership of any lapses.

I will be paying respect and hoping to establish a connection that includes a degree of familial affection and solidarity. I will not regard him as a demigod, or even a 'hero' as such. For it seems to be that he was just a man of his time doing what men of his time did, and that his time happened to be a particularly dangerous one.

Would I have done what he did? I don't know. The nearest I came was going to East Timor to join Caritas Australia's relief effort following the destructive events of August 1999. There were known threats to our security.

Some time later I received a mass produced certificate of appreciation from Prime Minister John Howard that implied I was some kind of minor war hero.

I wanted to toss it in the bin but my mother framed it and put it on her wall, potentially establishing a myth that I was in fact some kind of hero. When all I doing was saying yes to adventure that was being offered to me. There may have been something worthy about it, but essentially it was adventure and I wasn't a hero.

I was touched when friend wrote to me this morning mentioning that he hadn't seen a 'tiny letter' from me in some time, suggesting he was worried that I might not be well.

The truth is that I am well, close to the end of my third two-month sojourn in Paris. I'm spending the weekend with my sister and her husband in rural Kent, England, after choosing to make the journey from Paris on the long-distance bus that includes the ferry crossing from Calais to Dover.

The email made me reflect that we all have 'signs of life' that we project - intentionally or otherwise - to friends, family, neighbours, and others. The signs are usually associated with habitual behaviour that is visible. When we break or vary our habits, it can seem that there is something awry.

Two years ago this month I started writing a letter - also referred to as a blog - almost every day. After a while it became less regular, and it's now over a month since I last posted during my visit to Luxembourg.

I didn't want to be bound to produce a piece of writing every day, as I was happily finished with the main part of my working life with all its deadlines and pressures. I wanted to become a free spirit and foster a certain creative randomness and circuitousness in what I do.

This is evident in many aspects of my life such as my choice the other day to travel using the old Dover ferry rather than the modern and more convenient Eurostar train.

While I haven't had a job as such for three years, this year I have started to undertake some paid 'hobby' employment. One of my part-time roles is to do English language subtitles for the Mubi arthouse movie streaming service, and the other involves compiling logs of oral history recordings for an academic at Sydney University.

I have also been doing more reading than usual, and continuing to keep up with my health and fitness regime, currently with a new dimension, which is my experimentation with the no sugar-low carb-high fat diet.

As I mentioned previously, my motivation is not to lose weight but rather to healthily enjoy the high fat part of the French diet, accepting that baguettes and cakes and pastries are definitely off the menu. I have faithfully kept this discipline and been rewarded with plenty of foie gras, duck confit, fatty sausages, and much more.

Will I stick with it into the future? I don't know. I contacted Thai Airways the other day and ordered raw vegetarian meals for my flights to Sydney, as that is the option that is most compatible with the diet. 

I'm currently in Luxembourg for two days. I'd long been curious about the country that is the world's second richest and the EU's second smallest. It's a grand duchy, which is really no different to a monarchy ruled by a king or queen, except that its head of state is a grand duke.

Luxembourg itself is not on the tourist map because it's dominated by banks and is not a spectacularly charming city. But the natural landscape and the rural villages are another matter, as I discovered this morning when I decided to travel to Schengen.

While it's only 33 km by road from the capital, Schengen is in a remote corner of the tiny country. It's where Luxembourg intersects with France and Germany, and it requires two separate regional buses to get there.

It's best known as the location of the 1985 signing of the Schengen agreement that abolished border controls between most EU countries, and a number of non-EU countries including Switzerland, Iceland and Norway.

I enjoyed a visit to the European Museum, which is all about the vision for a Europe without borders and how that came to be realised. Reduced border controls were seen as an antidote to the nationalism that was responsible for the suffering and destruction of the two world wars of the 20th century.

Nationalism and strong borders go hand in hand, whereas international co-operation invites us to rethink the need for strong borders, which divide humanity artificially and, arguably, unnecessarily.

I was aware of this as I walked from Luxembourg into Germany and then into France, all in the space of less than half an hour. The regions I walked into - Saarland in Germany and Lorraine in France - have been passed between France and Germany, as recently as the 20th century.

Does it really matter whether they're in France or Germany? Regional identity is one thing. It defines cultures. National identity is something else.

At the museum, the elephant in the room was the sad reality that the vision for a humanity united without borders is unravelling, with Europe's migrant crisis and the proliferation around the world of 'strong man' leaders who insist on strong borders.

The museum's focus on the lifting of border controls is intended to celebrate a remarkable achievement that is part of our present. The fear is that it will come to be viewed as a marking of the history of an idea that came and went.

While I was working out at my Paris gym today, I was listening to a podcast of Geraldine Doogue's Saturday morning ABC radio program.

She was interviewing Irish professor Brian O'Connor on his book Idleness: A Philosophical Essay.

He was presenting idleness as a virtue, or at least a state of being that does not deserve a bad press.

The message is that many of us have to fill our lives with productivity because that's what our various insecurities demand. We have a craving for recognition and think that the only way of achieving that is to do something others will notice and give us credit for.

Was I working out in the gym because I want others to regard my body as easy on the eye?

That was certainly part of my initial motivation a few years ago when I first started going to the gym in Sydney.

But these days - particularly here in Paris - it's just one of my various states of being. Gym time is thinking time, people watching time, podcast listening time, and body stretching time.

Perhaps it's idleness. At least I'm not a slave to anything, which is what you are if you are preoccupied with working hard to fulfill the expectations of others.

That is perhaps where there's a difference between the gym in Paris and the gym in Sydney.

In Sydney you're more likely to see people thrashing themselves in the hope of becoming something. In Paris - the home of existentialism - it's more a matter of being. As I see it, they're already proud of who they are, and some outsiders choose to regard that as arrogance.

There's definitely a different energy, and our term 'work out' to describe what gym goers do seems strangely out of place in Paris. You're there because you're there. Of course you don't just sit around. You do pump iron and jump on the treadmill. But essentially it seems less about goal orientation.

My approach is much the same during the hours I'm not at the gym. I walk around the streets of the Marais every day with no particular purpose in mind.

Today I entered five or six small art galleries and looked at the paintings on the walls and chatted to the attendants. In one sense I was idle and just passing time. But I don't feel the time was 'wasted' because I'm at home now with a stimulating mix of vivid images in my mind. A variation on the physical high I experience after my return from the gym.

I sometimes wonder whether I should feel ashamed that I'm a few minutes walk from some of the world's most famous art museums including the Louvre and don't feel inclined to visit them. It's too much like hard work.

I'm back in Paris after four months in Australia. There's no doubt the Sydney winter was more comfortable than Paris' summer heatwave would have been. Especially in my tiny non-air conditioned top floor room.

Even the city's autumn weather is unseasonal, with daytime temperatures currently in the mid to high 20s. I'm wearing shorts, and sleeping at night under the cover of just a sheet. When I arrived here in March, I was greeted with snow and sub-zero temperatures.

That's not the only thing that's different this time around. I've decided to limit cake consumption and to suspend my half-baguette a day bread habit, in favour of one or two croissants a week and a few high-fat treats.

It's the result of reading a new healthy lifestyle book that my brother put me on to when I visited him six weeks ago.

The book is written by former Australian Cricket team physician Dr Peter Brukner and titled A Fat Lot of Good. It's part memoir and part commonsense interpretation of the ketogenic or low carb diet. The diet advocates maximising meat and fat and vegetables grown above the ground, and minimising grains and sugars and processed foods.

I know that there's no good reason for me to tamper with my choice of foods. For several years I've maintained a healthy weight and blood pressure and enjoyed a balanced diet.

When I mentioned it to my GP, he was not particularly fussed one way or the other, as long as I manage to contain my zeal and my portion sizes. He pointed to a study in The Lancet that challenges thinking that meals such as bacon and eggs for breakfast can be a healthy choice. The study suggests we should replace grains and sugars with vegetable rather than animal products.

My motivation in varying my diet is to enjoy some of the delicious high fat foods available to me here in France. My rationale is that if I'm prepared to say no to baguettes (high in carbs), I can opt for croissants (which are mostly butter and therefore high in fat).

On my first day here, I headed for my nearby good food store Causses and brought home a duck terrine, Andouille pork sausage and vanilla butter. I've been using the vanilla butter to flavour the undeniably healthy broccoli I've steamed in the microwave.

I have long wondered why the French eat all these delicious foods while maintaining a low obesity rate (15% compared to 28% of Australians). Obviously portion control is a major factor. But I think that it's also their tendency to be less submissive to received orthodoxies.

According to Brukner, Australians have been duped in their acceptance in recent decades of the teaching that fat is bad and sugar is more or less OK.

The important thing is not to go to the other extreme and believe that fat is all good. The French don't believe fat is good or bad. They consume fat, and also sugar, in good measure.

My attitude to a healthy lifestyle is similar to my approach to religion. Our interests are best served when we take responsibility for our own choices and leave hard line preaching to the professional zealots.

UPDATE: I had an email exchange with Peter Brukner, who did not specifically mention croissants in his book. It turns out that they may be mainly butter, but they're still bread containing a significant proportion of carbs. So consuming them will be an occasional, not a daily, ritual. He also dismissed the 'crap research' contrary study that warned against animal product foods. He suggested it is discredited paid-for content from a commercial offshoot of the Lancet. He pointed me to articles and video that argue it is methodologically flawed data collected by individuals with a grain industry political agenda.