My new Fitbit tells me too much and too little – so I've ordered an upgrade

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/26/my-new-fitbit-tells-me-too-much-and-too-little-so-ive-ordered-an-upgrade

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Monday

With MPs on holiday – the one time when they can generally be relied on to cause less harm – attention has temporarily been diverted from Brexit to the other major national crisis: what to do with Harry and Meghan. According to some sources, William and Kate are feeling their style is being a little cramped by the Sussexes and want them shipped out of the country for a few years. And since Harry spent some of his gap year in Africa and went on a safari where he took some arty photos of a rhino, it’s being suggested he may go back there. Exactly which of the 54 countries he might settle in, no one has yet decided. There’s a world of difference between a battle zone in South Sudan and a suburban enclave outside Cape Town guarded by a private militia. Maybe he’ll do just under a week in each country each year. Nor has it been announced what he would be doing in Africa, other than Britain’s roving royal in charge of being nice to Africans and wildlife. I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Harry. It must be hard to have a sense of purpose when nobody takes you particularly seriously and your prime function is merely to exist. Your entire life has a largely symbolic and ceremonial value and it must be humiliating to have retainers trying to find vaguely worthwhile things for you to do to fill the existential void. When I was at a particularly aimless point in my own life and had barely left my bedroom for more than a year, my parents suggested I get out a bit. I managed a night in a youth hostel in Chelmsford before heading back to London.

Tuesday

It never crossed my mind not to have my children vaccinated – they got everything available – but people who have become parents more recently appear to take a somewhat more casual attitude. There are now half a million unvaccinated children in the UK and the incidence of measles has risen sharply between 2010 and 2017. Quite why parents should want their children exposed to the risk of potentially life-changing illnesses escapes me. Not that I was ever immunised against measles, because the vaccine didn’t yet exist in the 1950s. I was taken to the doctor to be given a sugar-lump polio vaccine, but measles, mumps, German measles and chicken pox were just treated like everyday hazards of growing up. My sisters copped the lot before me and no one batted an eyelid when I went down with them all. If anything, my mother seemed relieved when I got measles. Having presumably established I was unlikely to die – though parenting was a lot more laissez-faire in those days and it’s possible she took an easy come, easy go attitude to my life expectancy – she just sent me off to bed for a week or so. Where presumably I was less of a nuisance to her than when I was up and about, pestering her for attention. Maybe that’s the attraction of measles to the latest generation of parents. Either that or it’s a Brexit-related cry of nostalgia for the past.

Wednesday

Westminster feels like it’s entered a period of a phoney war. There’s a weird sense of displacement inactivity, with MPs barely going through the motions even though they know everything is falling apart. The Commons chamber was almost empty by the end of PMQs, which were taken by David Lidington and Emily Thornberry in the absence of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn who were attending the funeral of Lyra McKee. Everyone appears to be doing their best to do anything but talk about Brexit. Largely because even though they all know it’s the most critical issue, no one has a clue what to do about it. So the Tories and Labour carry on with cross-party talks, which they both know are going to go nowhere because neither side wants to be the one to take the blame for failing to agree a compromise. Meanwhile the government is so clueless about how to proceed it is contemplating bringing back a variation of the withdrawal agreement for a fourth Commons vote. Not because it has any expectation of it being passed but because it feels it has to be seen to be doing something to suggest the European elections are not inevitable. Which everyone knows is a lie. At the last European council summit, Donald Tusk begged us not to waste the extra time we had been given with the extension of article 50 to 31 October. Since then we’ve done nothing. It’s a form of madness, and the silence from the government is doing nothing for my levels of anxiety.

Thursday

As a lifelong hypochondriac, I had always thought it a good idea to steer clear of having a Fitbit. Obsessively checking on how many steps I’ve walked, how fast my heart is beating and how well I am sleeping did not sound like a healthy lifestyle for someone with an addictive personality. But after listening to my friend Debby go on about her key performance indicators, I have finally cracked and can now be found staring at my wrist for hours on end. The new relationship with my Fitbit has not got off to the best of starts because it manages to give me both too much information and too little. For instance, I can tell you that last night I went to sleep at 11.20 and woke up at 7.40. In between those times, I was awake for one hour and three minutes from about 4.30, in REM sleep for one hour and 15 minutes, in deep sleep for 45 minutes and in light sleep for four hours and 51 minutes. Whether this constitutes a good night and what I am supposed to do to improve things – getting rid of the anxiety dreams would be a start – I have no idea. And the Fitbit also doesn’t tell me a whole lot of other stuff I would quite like to know. Like, am I about to drop down dead any time soon? So I have already decided to send the Fitbit back and have ordered a better one that gives me more detailed data on things like my VO2 max and comes with its own basic ECG and stress monitoring. I am hoping my health will improve, even if my sanity suffers another hit.

Friday

For the last few years, ministers have used cabinet meetings as an opportunity to liveblog. Within minutes of cabinet ending, every newspaper and TV station has a full rundown on every Brexit exchange and embarrassing incident. Until now, though, politicians had drawn the line at leaking matters of national security. But that changed this week when one minister who attended the national security council, a meeting at which military top brass and high-level spooks with one-letter names brief selected members of the cabinet on intelligence matters, chose to give the Telegraph full details on proposals to outsource part of the 5G network to the Chinese state-controlled tech firm Huawei. Suspicion immediately fell on Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Gavin Williamson, Penny Mordaunt and Liam Fox, all of whom were known to be hawkish on Chinese involvement. Mordaunt and Fox were considered rank outsiders, having nothing much to gain as neither – except possibly in their own delusions – have any chance of becoming the next Tory leader. The most likely suspect was Williamson, who is the only one both ambitious enough and dim enough to imagine he could get away with it. But all five have now issued strong denials, and British politics has become a further international laughing stock as the race to discover which minister leaked security secrets turns into a game of Cluedo. The one person we can be sure it wasn’t, though, is Boris Johnson, as he’s not invited to NSC meetings. But Boris did his bit to give politicians a bad name by raking in £161k for two speaking engagements last month on top of the £275k he gets from the Telegraph. However will he get by on a prime ministerial salary?