4.- Friday; October 23, 1987 - North Shore News

Bob Hunter

® strictly personal @

i KICKED the coffee habit
about eight months ago.

ly wasn't that hard, although,
sure, there were three days of
fairly bumpy withdrawal. That
is, I] was grouchy and depressed.

On the third day 1 became so
outraged by the barking of my
neighbor’s dog as it played in the
traffic, its negligent owners being
away, I presumed, that I leapt in-
to my car and revved the engine
in anticipation of wheeling out
on to the road and running the
dog down.

What stopped me wasn’t self-
control. It was fate. Somebody
came out of the neighbor’s house
and got the dog, just as 1 reached

« che ‘top of my driveway and was
aiming my car uown the read at
the e furry target.

‘Even if caffeine
did no physical
damage af all to
your body in the
long run, tt could
still be said to be
bad because it was,
in fact, addicting, I :
reasoned. ”’

Would 1 have gone through
with it — actually run the beast
down? I like to doubt it, but caf-
feine. withdrawal can do strange
things to a man,

Normally, as you can imagine,
I am mild-mannered to a fault.

But for a moment there, my
thoughts were murderous, no
doubt about it. 1 felt weak with
relief afterwards that somebody
had rescued the dog inadvertent-
ly.

Moreover, nobody in the
neighborhood noticed me there in
my car, targetting, and even if
they had, how could they have
known I had gone nearly insane
with rage? I say nearly because
somebody really ought to do
something about that dog, but
that’s another story.

lam not kidding about this.

1 - feel duty-bound to report
myself because there may be
other people out there trying to
give up coffee, and unlike me
they might not be harmless ec-
centrics. who work alone, well
away from  densely-populated
areas, a menace only to yappy
hounds.

Caffeine gets blamed for all
sorts of medical conditions, rang-
ing from heart failure to ulcers,
but I think the general badness of
coffee is summed up in the folk
wisdom that says children

Shouldn’t drink it because it will
Stunt their growth.

Stunt their growth?
grief, what's in there?

Once you’d grown up, though,
coffee couldn’t harm you, unlike
cigarettes. Or so went popular
belief until quite recently.

I} don’t believe the idea of ac-
tually quitting coffee entered my
mind until as recently as this de-
cade. And then it did in a

Good

generalized way, as part of an

ideal.
Even if caffeine did no physi-

-cal damage at all to your body in

the Jong run, it could still be said
to be bad because it was, in fact,
addicting, I reasoned.

The notion that I might live
longer if 1 stopped drinking cof-
fee did not really sink in until a
couple of years ago — that is,
well after I had passed the 40-
year mark.

It is true that nothing so
sharpens your focus on your life
than the knowledge that it is
statistically at least half over.

Coffee had been part of my
style since 1 was 16, about the

‘same time nicotine entered my

life in terms of needing several
daily fixes. :

Coffee and cigarettes — wow!
If you wanted to go’ into over-
drive, it was no secret. Wash
down a cuppa (sic) to get the oid
heart fired up, snorkle (sic) some
smoke back through your nostrils
to tickle the brain-stem, and you
are ready for the day, brother!

There were years when I was
living on my own when breakfast
was never anything more than
coffee and smokes, whole
ashtrays of them.

I would go to work as a young
reporter, drink coffee all day,
and smoke, and maybe take in a
liquid lunch, and keep on smok-
ing and drinking coffee.

I think I was 17, no more than
a year into full-time nicotine ad-
diction, when I made my first
Stab al quitting.

It took another couple of hun-
dred serious efforts before I but-
ted out for the last time some
eight years ago, and have not had
a cigarette since.

All along, I knew I was up
against a form of junk.

But coffee, surely, apart from
Stunting your growth, it got a
man through, didn’t it? It is a
kind of speed, 1 guess you’d call
it, a mild stimulant, but it
doesn’t kill, does it?

Apparently it does, after long
enough. So I thought, what the
heck? Near the end, Pll ap-
preciate the extra time if I trade
in this particular vice now and
save myself for later.

Life without coffee? It’s okay.
I can handle it.

Grrrrrrerr.

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it. Seymour ski club
gets $87,569 grant

THE MOUNT Seymour Ski Club
(MSSC) has been awarded $87,569
from the provincial Jobtrac Pro-
gram to help it in a host of ski run
improvement projects.

Annouced recently by West
Vancouver-Howe Sound MLA
John Reynolds, the award will
fund hill and run grooming, cre-
ation and improvement of perime-
ter trails for skiers and hikers, and
ground cover planting.

Nine jobs will be created by the
project, which will take an
estimated six months to complete.

Project manager and MSSC
head coach Rondi Fisher said the
funding will help both the club and
the mountain.

She said the club applied to the

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provincial program in August.

The MSSC was founded in the
1930s and currently has 125
members,

The project’s funding follows an
August annoucement from the new
ownership of Mount Seymour
Resorts Ltd. that it will install a
new $600,000 chairlift on the
mountain which will open cight
new alpine ski runs for the coming
ski season.

Cypress Bow! Recreations Ltd.,
the operators of the Cypress Bowl
ski area, will spend $1 million in
improvements this year, including
the addition of a new chairlift on
Mount Strachan that will open up
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alpine skiers three new runs and

over 600 metres of vertical fall.

On Grouse Mountain, final con-
firmation of the March 1, 1988
Molson World Giant Slalom for
the FIS (Federation Internationale
du Ski) Cafee Lavazza Ski World
Cup was aniiounced Monday in an
Oct. 21 News story.

The $300,000 project to prepare
the mourtain for the race has
Opened up more runs for interme-
diate and advanced skiers, and
vastly improved existing runs, in-
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