Stones, stones, stones! Recently everything has been about stones! How peculiar!

On the train back from Brighton yesterday I picked up my Kindle for inspiration and spent a few minutes reading the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Fascinatingly, in 1658 the famous diarist was “successfully cut for the stone on March 26th” (my son’s birth date – no stones to date, happily!). Forty years later, after not a peep, the stones broke out again and were to trouble Pepys for the last three years of his life (upon post-mortem examination seven stones were found in his ulcerated left kidney). Then the guard came and I put my Kindle away…

In bed last night I was slightly bemused to read in the paper that Yoko Ono has lost a stone – or rather, had it stolen – from her interactive installation at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum. The much missed pebble, signed and bearing the words Love Yourself , was one of a number of stones, “worn by water and time” (aren’t they all?), on which Yoko had written small but presumably meaningful messages. Ah… How…  How vapid. And what happened to “Love thy neighbour”? If you’re going to write messages on stones, and value them at £12,400 each, surely there are better things to write; not to mention the fact that people around the world are still being stoned to death. But maybe Yoko has addressed that issue in her exhibition. I don’t know.

Oh Yoko

Then, of course, there are all those stones lost by dieters; in particular, a lady called Alison who has lost ten stones on the Juices+ Diet – my present diet. We’re modern – we are Online dieters. No, we don’t eat virtual food (although I used to say that I ate virtually nothing); we substitute two meals with shakes and eat a sensible meal once a day. I have been sticking to the new regime for just over two weeks and I’ve lost… No, not a stone worth £12,400 but mere pebbles in the region of five pounds!