On routines, food fads and gender roles.

Today is a perfectly fine, almost springlike day. According to the online weather forecast, it is cloudy and will be cloudy all day. In reality, the sky is mostly blue, the sun is shining and it is mild, verging on warm. And this is despite the fact that Hurricane Ophelia, now no longer a true hurricane apparently, is supposed to be bringing us high winds. Why there are so many hurricanes is year is one of those things nobody has yet explained to me. Consequently, I put it all down to global warming.

Because today is Sunday and because I am mostly a creature of habit, I listened to The Food Programme on the radio while doing a variety of kitchen-based tasks. Today they were concentrating on people who eat according to strict rules.

There was a jockey who talked about how he maintains his weight at around 8 stone. Now, I know jockeys are not tall and that he might perhaps be my sort of height, 5 feet 5 inches more or less, but even so, 8 stone is skinny. I know because I have been that sort of weight in the past. Apparently when he started jockeying he weighed 5.5 stone. There must have been nothing of him but skin and bone. He likes to have the occasional blow-out Sunday lunch with his family and a glass or two of wine to accompany it. After that he gets back on his disciplined routine and quickly reverts to his low weight, following a diet which he did it specify.

Then there was the former boxer, who used to follow a chaotic routine in the six weeks before a big fight: get up at 6.00 am for a run, no breakfast, back to bed for a while, then a session at the gym, after which he bought a 6 inch Subway sandwich, which he really enjoyed, and then back to bed to sleep some more. Ye gods! Is that a life? He said that his skin was terrible and he was susceptible to cuts but he maintained this routine for a long time until he got involved in something with Liverpool John Moores University. They have him eating six small meals a day, with healthy snacks of nuts and bananas; he no longer shuts himself away in his room but eats with, and interacts more with, his family, feels healthier, has no skin problems and weighs less than when he was on his Subway diet!

The programme presenter also spoke to a Jain nun, who was visiting someone for lunch, something Jainists do quite often, or so it seems.  She was a strict vegetarian, one of the things that goes with the Jain philosophy. Her vegetarianism had an extreme I have not heard of before: Jainists eat no root vegetables because root vegetables have souls. In fact they have not just one soul per veg but the possibility of multiple souls. Who knew? It seems just a little extreme to me and perhaps a bit boring.

A food vlogger they interviewed spoke about her loathing for what she calls "beige" food, by which she seems to mean pasta, potatoes and bread. This is a consequence of her mother feeding her lots of boring sandwiches in her childhood. Food should be colourful, she maintained. I quite agree, but I do think it is possible to add colour to pasta and potatoes. Everything in moderation! The excerpt they played from her vlog was, in my opinion, annoyingly chirpy and sweet, sunny-voiced and more than a little too self-assured. However, quite a lot of people follow her and many even pay £50 to download her week-long diet advice. And so she makes a living in one of the new modern ways!

In yesterday's paper, I came across this article about women earning more than their husbands, not from vlogging but in more conventional business-related ways. The writer explained how he and a number of his friends became stay-at-home dads, working freelance from home and gradually accepting that it was okay for them no longer to be the main breadwinner for the family.

Phil and I have usually been pretty much equal breadwinners. At times one or other of us became the higher earner in the family but it never bothered us. The money always went into a common pot anyway. The fathers in the article had some difficulty initially accepting their "lesser" role in the family finances but adjusted fine in the end. Role-reversal has a lot to offer, they said.

However, I found myself wondering. It may work in professional, creative families but what about the out of work unskilled man whose wife keeps the family going with several cleaning jobs and whatever else she can find? That might be a different story!