Uncle Jack was sorry to read about the passing of Jack Lalanne, the fitness fanatic who is credited by many with starting the current fitness/exercise/nutrition craze many years ago. Through his TV programs, books and magazine articles he preached the health benefits of rigorous exercise and proper diet and he "walked the walk" by personally engaging in many hours of strenuous workouts every day and sticking to a diet that would probably discourage most people from eating at all. He was 96 when he died of pneumonia last week so it might appear that he knew what he was doing.
But then again maybe not. Uncle Jack's fabled Aunt Esther never exercised at all as far as he knows and she ate whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it and was famous in her family for her lethal "Texas Longhorn" cocktails which she served at every gathering of the tribe. She was rarely sick and lived alone and cared for herself right up until the day she died of heart failure just five days short of 100.
The same could be said of the lifestyle of the late Queen Mother Elizabeth of England who was never known to frequent the Royal Gym, ate like a Queen and was known for her fondness for gin in all its delectable forms. She died in 2002, still going strong, at the age of 102, having outlived both of her brothers.
Uncle Jack is not sure what to make of all this but at the very least he is not going to worry too much about being snowed in today and not getting his usual walk.
In his last entry he reprinted a piece from his extensive archives about a trip he and Mrs. U.J. made to Ireland a few years back. Here's another installment in case you are snowed in, too, and have nothing better to do than read old travelogues:
Galway
Uncle Jack is happy to report that he is back from Ireland in one piece and also that he had a terrific time while he was over there. If you want to know the truth he had such a good time that he feels a little bit guilty telling about it because he knows that many people have never had a chance to go to Ireland and if he says too much about how wonderful Ireland is they might get jealous. This is why he has decided to devote only his next twenty columns to his trip to Ireland even though he could probably spend the rest of his life talking about it to anybody who would listen.
He has to confess right off that he failed miserably when it came to visiting pubs. He was hoping he could get to every pub in Ireland while he was there but even though he tried hard he could not even get to all the pubs in Galway which is where he and Mrs. Uncle Jack stayed most of the time. In fact he did not even get to all the pubs in downtown Galway much less the suburbs. Trying to visit all the pubs in Ireland is about as hopeless as trying to visit all the T-shirt shops on the Outer Banks---by the time you get to the last one another 200 have opened up.
The first pub Uncle Jack went into was right across the street from the bus depot in Galway and he could hardly believe what he saw when he went in there. The whole place was decorated with Budweiser banners and Bud Light signs and they even had Bud on draft. At first he thought he was suffering from some extreme form of jet lag and he was back in New York or something but it was real.
Needless to say he got out of there fast and into the pub next door which was very reassuring; as soon as he walked into O'Flaherty's he knew he was really in Ireland. For one thing everybody in there was drinking Guinness stout and if they had any Budweiser on the premises they were keeping it a secret. This is where Uncle Jack had his first pint of Guinness and he could tell right away why it is Ireland's national drink and also its major export. He could say a lot more about Guinness and he probably will.
O'Flaherty's at first looks a little like those fake American pubs you find in fancy shopping malls because it is full of dark wood panelling and old wooden tables and chairs and lots of "antiques" all over the place. Halfway through Uncle Jack's first pint he realized that the antiques in O'Flaherty's were just the things they furnished the place with back in l849 when it opened and they have been in continuous use ever since. One of the wall decorations was an ornate timetable for the brand new Galway-Dublin train service which had just started in l849 and which probably did more to change Galway than anything since the Norman invasion in the l2th century.
For one thing the railroad started bringing in tourists and l50 years later the tourists are pouring into Galway by train, plane, car, bus, bicycle and on foot in such numbers that they threaten to destroy the old Galway more completely than all the invading armies of foreigners have managed to do in the past eight centuries.
Uncle Jack could not help noticing the similarities between Galway and the Outer Banks every time he walked into the center of town where the streets were laid out during the middle ages, primarily for pedestrians and the occasional horse but which now have to carry a load of foot, car, bus and truck traffic that is almost laughable unless you are stuck in it.
He read in the paper that Galway is one of the fastest growing cities in all of Europe and he can believe it. The sound he heard most often in Galway was not the lilting tones of the Irish flute but rather the raucous chattering of jackhammers tearing down the quaint but dreadfully inefficient old stone buildings that still make up most of the city center.
The other side of the coin (and coin of the realm is what it is all about) is that along with the tourists comes prosperity for a lot of people---everybody from the jackhammer jockies to the people who pay them to tear down the old and put up the new. Progress has come to Galway and just like on the Outer Banks it is very much a mixed blessing if you ask Uncle Jack.
View from Uncle Jack's back window this morning---two inches on the ground already and much more to come as the day progresses.
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