How did last night go? Well let's just say that it was one of those "President of the Intergalactic Arts Council"¹ type experiences.

The meeting, for those who haven't been keeping up, was advertised thus:

'Skenar' is Russian space-age medicine. It's a bio-feedback tool which stimulates the nervous system to make the body heal itself.

Well as far as I could make out from the talk, "Skenar" appears to be a nine-volt battery with a wire attached.

Actually, I suspect it's more than that, and I can't actually say that all of what the speaker was saying was wrong. I can't really say anything, because it was the standard mixture (for these kinds of talks) of two parts unsubstantiated assertion to one part conspiracy theory.

The speaker appeared to be advancing three totally separate theories (I say "appeared" because I wasn't able to grasp, from what she was saying, how they might be linked).

- That illnesses can be caused by the blood's PH value being acidic.

- That pretty much all illnesses are caused by a yeast infection in the blood called Candida.

- That the Skenar can cure all illnesses, including cancer, diabetes and Parkinsons.

She didn't actually spend much time speaking about the Skenar. This was partly because she'd forgotten to bring it (she was going to do a demonstration) but I'm not sure that she would have spoken much about it anyway.

Most of her time was spent listing the foods that we should avoid eating to stop the Candida yeast (or it might have been to stop the acid, I'm not sure). This list appeared to be meat, fish, dairy, sugar, alcohol, bread, carrots, soya and various others - pretty much everything in fact.

I think the low point was during a explanation of magnetic therapy when she explained that there are three different kinds of magnets, ones with a north pole, ones with a south pole and "balanced" ones which have both north and south poles.

I was a bit glad jonnysfriendian wasn't there, because I think he might have spontaneously combusted at that point.

I feel a bit bad to criticise someone who was, after all, giving up her own time to talk to us for free (although then again, she was basically just publicising her alternative healthcare business) but it was a very, very poor talk - totally disorganised with no apparent structure. There was no beginning, middle, end. She just meandered in circles, covering the same topics again and again with various random digressions.

Eventually, we found ourselves in the "end-of-talk question-and-answer-session" (from time to time people were interrupting with questions, and then after one such interruption, she didn't continue speaking, but just looked around for another question) and it got into the usual dog-with-a-bone Q&A scenario where certain people kept on asking her question after question.

The bloke chairing the meeting, who at one point during the Q&A session had his head in his hands (it might have been at more than one point, but since I had my head in my hands for extended periods, I wouldn't have known) eventually managed to bring things to a close at 9:30, almost exactly two hours after it started.

(That's two hours without a single break by the way).

In the end I was so depressed that I pretty much left straight away, which is a pity because there were some people I really wanted to talk to.

It's a real shame: there are a whole bunch of people there that I really enjoy talking to (before the meetings) but I find most of the meeting talks themselves to be boring at best and depressing at worse. I don't like talking about health. Hell, I don't like thinking about health. And 90% of these talks seem to be health related.

(The one I really did enjoy was by an American vegan called Jerry Friedman, who was fired from his IT job after refusing to take a non-vegan, but more importantly completely unnecessary, vaccine and had switched careers to train as a lawyer in order to sue his former employers.

I know quite a few vegans who now refuse point-blank to go to these meetings, such as a good friend of mine (who ironically, I met at one of these meetings) and a friend of hers (who only went once, but who was unlucky enough to pick the meeting where the speaker, a vegan organic gardener who'd presumably thought he was on "home" territory, got viciously heckled by a mad woman).

So in conclusion...

The people (80% of them at least)... I like a lot.

The event... makes me wonder if I've got a bit confused and wandered into a meeting of London Vogons by mistake.

I'm honestly not sure if I'll go back next month.

¹i.e. An event where death through extreme boredom can be averted only by knawing one of your own legs off.