And how to eat an artichoke!

Artichoke has much more to it than shown by chefs; it's one of the great messy starters.  The whole thing should have the whiskers removed from the bottom of the beast and the outermost leaves removed; boiled in salted water and then served with a small bowl or ramikin of Normandy salted butter; the dinner then peels the leaves one by one from the beast, dipping the base of the leave into the butter and stripping the gorgeous titbit of flesh away.  When you have used up the leaves which repay their dividend, then remove the rest of the useless flaccid small leaves and the wretched and aptly named choke, poor the remainder of the butter over the exposed and delectable heart and scoff!   You will end up with butter all over your chops and a huge pile of discarded, stripped leaves in the middle of the table/

As for Jerusalem artichokes... if you've ever had to spend a couple of days digging them out of someone's garden then you would not regard them with anything other than horror.  Double-digging in a wet and cold Spring to a depth of 2' over an entire garden and I'm pretty sure I did not get all of them; but after two days I was so tired and cold, I couldn't dig any further down. Ifor, the bloke whose garden it was kept saying what good topsoil it was...

Another light has gone out, and yet another

Just recently almost my last remaining really  close friend has died.  For the blog let's call him RJW. 

RJW as he was popularly known in the UK Diplomacy hobby was one of the founding fathers of the UK hobby, His 'zine, Mad Policy was one of the foundation and seminal zines of Diplomacy, first published in August 1972, he went on to publish more than 150 issues with a circulation which was international.

Mad Policy was also home of the Zine Poll for a lot of the time, eventually winning it, after a controversial change of rules in the eighties, which then resulted in RJW passing it on to John Piggott in 1986*. 

RJW was also one of the organisers for many years of Manorcon, which was an eminently successful games convention in the UK started in 1983 and still running. 

Richard was also instrumental in formulating the idea of the formation of the IDA/UK.  As Stephen Agar says: "...interest in Britain was focused on the Calhamer Awards which were organized by the IDA in the States. Thanks to some electioneering, British zines were nominated in 9 of the 11 categories and duly went on to win all 9 awards. This feat was accomplished by the fact that 75 of the 400 or so active UK players had voted in the poll, as opposed to a mere 50 votes from the 2,000 or so active US players. The US promptly changed the rules."  This coup was deliberately plotted it has to be said as a slightly nationalistic response to being patronised by some US players!  However, RJW remained good friends with people like Edi Birsan and Conrad von Metzke, in spite of some opprobrium.  It's worth saying that Richard loved to cock a snook at any kind of pomposity or pretension.

RJW also hated any kind of mawkish sentimentality, which rather showed itself in his spare, dry wit and prose.  He absolutely loved to puncture my innate tendency to pomposity.  Now, I shall have to resort to listening to what he would have said, like an additional internal critic.

His Imrryr by-line in Mad Policy was from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series, RJW was a very avid collector of Moorcock and read a lot of Science Fiction.  He was also a great fan of Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and also particularly loved the film Excalibur.  Besides this he was a very great fan of early 60s UK female pop singers like Susan Maughan and Sandie Shore and collected rare songs and records by such until he died.  His collections, besides a mountain of SF, also included cigarette cards, which he turned into a semi-profitable hobby in his retirement.

On a personal level, Richard was my best friend.  His qualities were those of a true Englishman as both he and I saw them: honourable, decent, honest and loyal.  His passion as a one-time resident of Essex was for the county and England cricket teams, the latter which I shared with him, and he did so love to crow over the success of his team over mine in the county championship.  But Richard's real passion was for the football (soccer) team closest to him in his youth and to his heart throughout his life, which was West Ham.

One of the reasons why Richard became and was such a close friend of mine was that we both shared a passion for strategy board games that took a long time... Britannia, Civilization (the Hartland Trefoil game) were just two of these.  If you don’t get on with someone very well, spending many hours staring at each other over a board would have been intolerable.  He played to win and was a very careful strategist, hugely capable when it came to assessing probabilities.  Which was understandable as he had a gift for figures.  He started his working life as a statistician with British Aerospace before progressing on to a very senior position for BAe.  This involved supporting negotiations with the UK government providing statistical and financial information for BAe during these.  He said that his experience in playing Diplomacy was invaluable in achieving results at these meetings!

But I would not wish to give the idea of an earnest man, as those who have read Richard's press saga in this august zine, you will know or guess that RJW was witty, charming, creative and highly intelligent in print as well as in person.  A great conversationalist, some of our joint flights of fantasy and extemporisation got us into some strange situations!  You will have (or can) read of the spoof which he and I perpetrated on the UK hobby in launching my zine Gallimaufry under a pseudonym, as part of which he created Selena King, a femme fatale for the hobby, and then proceeded to torment Pete Birks with her for a while, by getting people to send cards from her from all over the world!

Let me finish with my recollection of one such piece of insanity, which occurred back in the late 1970s.  In those days there was an annual holiday get-together called Eurocon, typically taking place in France.  That year Richard and Claire had agreed to give me a lift down and back.  In France in those days, there was nearly always spare capacity in hotels so getting a couple of rooms was not too much of a problem.  Until on the way back we found one which, to our horror, only had one last room left above the kitchen.  So I said that I would sleep in the car, but Richard and Claire being lovely people, because the room had a cot bed, wouldn't hear of it.  So we went downstairs, Claire went out for a walk and left Richard and I to secure the room.  This caused some whispered conversations which we realised was caused by them thinking that Claire was une Belle de la Nuit and that we were going to enjoy a bit more than just the meal and a sleep.  Madame's son, who was our waiter, was terrified by the thoughts of what we might do later on and so we regaled him with little winks and whispered "Ménage a trois!".  We could not resist.  Needless to say we had a fitful night as the room was above the kitchen with all the pots and pans, but eventually we got to sleep!

He was my friend: decent, honest, charming, witty, loyal and funny besides being a great gamesplayer!  After 40 years of friendship I will very much miss him.

*I have just heard that John has also passed away, a couple of weekends ago, Sic Transit Gloria Rana...

A trip to remember

My father made us 'do' Copenhagen on the cheap by buying a Dormobile and a second-hand 2 man pup tent for 'the boys' (as if you could use a collective term for a sadistic thug of an acquisitive, amoral elder brother and an introverted, bookish younger sibling - both over 6' - constantly at war).  "It will be educational..."

2 weeks of driving in a battered old camper van at never more than 45 mph through the Low Countries (so named because slow, long-distance travel on endless flat autobahns is horrible). Nights spent rolling up to campsites putting up a ropy old tent in the near dark with your mortal enemy before squeezing back into the van to eat warmed through tinned rubbish*, before the pair of us increasingly feral siblings were shoe-horned into the leaky old tent.

Mile after mile of boredom; across the N German plain and up into Jutland... Dutch fields, German fields, Danish fucking fields ... we stopped for a day in Copenhagen - my mother insisting we saw the Tivoli Gardens, but we had no money for the rides etc. then up the coast to the Helsingborg ferry, down the Scanian coast to catch the Lübeck ferry.

By this stage my father confessed that money was a 'bit tight' so we weren't to go near the hot buffet ...  I was so, so hungry i started silently weeping, shoulders shaking; folk at other tables started to turn and stare at us so I was allowed to get 2 bangers, mash and baked beans as my parents reckoned that would be cheapest ... Back to the table with 5 minutes to boarding giving my father his wallet back... "How much?" "s'free - part of the fare" I engulfed this heavenly, properly cooked food in 2 minutes. It was the highlight of the holiday for me... we had to grind our way back, penniless, ravenous ... I'm amazed they let us back into the country ...  2,700 miles in a fortnight at an average of 28 mph... 😢

*I've mentioned before just how abysmal a cook my mother was? Well on this trip she managed to plumb new depths of culinary disaster... the exploding steak and kidney pie trick she left at home... but boiled spuds with no salt, burnt baked beans, boil in a tin frankfurters came with us because "We can't trust that foreign muck"  Jesus, the rest of us were so fucking hungry we used to bless the late arrivals because on the few occasions we were early my brother and I used to go and stand near where others were cooking whimpering and salivating away, tears in our eyes hoping they would take pity on us and feed us a few scraps.  My father would come and haul us back lying through his teeth that "Food was ready"

Where have all the libraries gone...

Sorry, not to have posted sooner.  Been on the loo.  It's only recently I got rid of my copy of Ranganathan's Colon Classification System, which has a certain ironic resonance.  Actually, it's not so much a system, more a selection of principles which a classifier can apply to where to put books so that no other person can find them.  This is because only 1 in 10 librarians actually understand it, so what hope does Joe Punter have.

On the other hand, the Dewey Decimal Classification system was designed in the late 19th Century before modern advances in science and engineering; it originally sort of spread all knowledge evenly around.  After this, the sub-classes have gradually been increased until "629 Applied Science (aka Technology) - Other branches of Engineering" includes most of what the modern world uses.  You know, computers, cars, aka modern technology etc. etc.  This means that you need some very long numerical additions to differentiate between things.  Try 629.22199982988.  Guess what?  Some of these are so meaningless that they now rival Ranganathan for incomprehensibility.  In an effort to actually assist the punter in finding, say a car manual for a particular make of car; modern information scientists (sic) have resorted to using the first three letters of the make in order to help.

Of course, in modern libraries, whole number groups have been hunted down, rounded up and sold off in order to pay for internet access, making the whole classification system redundant*. Yee hi There was a secondary purpose. This was to enable vast areas of space to be turned into internet cafes, drop-in and drop-dead (deadbeats and old fogies like me) centres. Dewey is still used.

*I went into what was a reasonably major library a while back - I worked there in the 70s.  It now resembles a slightly seedy community centre with a few oversized women and blokes with ponytails and glasses pretending to be experts in finding information on the internet.  There are a few shelves of books, all leaning drunkenly into each other, dog-eared and looking slightly defeated like the staff...

 Dun't need none of that book lernin.

Just as well.  You won't find it in a modern British public library.

Thunderbangs and Pink Grandad

The Thunderbang, a wonderful cardboard and paper giveaway with the Dandy, came out about 1962, I think. My brother and I used this to great effect until my mother burnt them... You would creep up on a neighbour and accidentally crack one off, so to speak, the neighbour would scream and you would say, I wasn't sure it worked, can you try. And then you'd get the neighbours at it too.

Apart from Mrs Williams... a very Welsh (coincidentally), very nasty piece of work who flat out accused my mother of killing my grandfather*. I painted BUM on her perfectly manicured front garden in weedkiller. It was quite small so I had to keep the number of letters down. And it worked quite effectively. I think my Mum and Dad guessed it was me, but although I heard the old harpy complaining to them about their evil kids, all that happened was I got an extra ice cream!

*For those that keep track of my ramblings, this was Pink Grandad. A tremendous, Olympian figure who enlisted at the start of the Great War and was eventually invalided out at the end of 1917; I know he was at the first battle of the Somme, so how any of us that descend from him (three at current count) did so is a miracle. When he fell down the stairs and died, they had to do an autopsy, as they do with all sudden deaths. Apart from being mostly deaf and completely blind, the poor old fellow had been gassed, and subjected to all the diseases of the Western Front. His heart gave out in the fall, but these never actually fully left him and one of the things they found was the Bubonic Plague. You could not make this up. He was bloody tough. 

The Paralymics 2012

The Channel 4 adverts for the Paralympics are brilliant.  They have also been showing little vignettes about the sport called Meet the Paralympians, which are excellent.  You can catch these on YouTube.  But also I must to say that Eddie Marsan (who I thought was OK, but not that good), is superb as Dr Ludwig Guttman in The Best of Men...  As is Rob Brydon.  Someone implied elsewhere that my reaction to these guys and girls was that of pity; there may be some of that, but there is infinitely more admiration, the feeling you get when you see human beings overcome disadvantage to succeed and also that in every essential way they are people we need to emulate, who inspire me, at least. What they do affirms all of us in our humanity.

But you have to be my age to realise just how the public's attitude to disability or deformity has come.  We aren't there yet, us theoretically normal people, but we are a lot further than in the 1950s when we would be told not to touch or be near anyone with a disability.  "They ought to be locked up"  and that from a sensible, otherwise pleasant middle-aged working class Mum.  At the back of the comment was a kind of shibboleth, a superstition that if her children touched the afflicted one, then they would somehow become infected.  I am happy that that is no longer as bad.

In France, though, with hunchbacks it is different.  A friend of mine loved going to France as all the pretty girls wanted to touch his back for luck.  This please him no end, but not so much his wife!

A new thing arises...

OK, sometimes I rush in here and shout about some foodie programme or other. But if are halfway interested in Chinese food and culture (and why not!) and you watch no other please watch what remains of Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure - that's the i-Player link. About 3.8 weeks to go.  I was caught out last night; as BBC2 are showing this series at 8 on Sundays on Beeb2. And it is brilliant, both in terms of sharing some of the back story of two chefs who I really like and also the food and culture of China. If you're into any of that then don't miss it...

Me? I dived out of bed (read NHS stuff to know why I was there) out of horizontal mode, down the stairs switched stuff on and cued the recording, missing the first 15 minutes of episode 1. I will watch the i-Player bit when the Olympics are over but I watched/listened to the rest whilst prepping, cooking and eating my evening meal. Simply the best. An awesome piece of programme making; it tells you more about what and where China is than most travel documentaries.  And I love both Ken Hom and Ching; I dreamt once about Mich-bot and Ching doing a cooking series called East meets East...

NHS rant

If you refer back a year ago, you will find a similar story.  I didn't bother with December's episode, which had the same farrago of nonsense, but the latest one is spectacular.

Do not read if you are bored with this:

1. Make appt in good term to get blood tests done for medicine review, told need new appointment, but that I can order repeat prescriptions.
2. Order repeats; do not notice short-changed one item (there are a lot of them)
3. Have second blood test appointment,
4. Have Doctor's appt for review,
5. Run out of anti-oedema tablets; go without for two days.
6. Get emergency prescription for enough to synch with the remaining meds. Request count not decreased.
7. Pick up meds, count is decreased, write letter to Doctor explaining the situation
8. Put in request for repeat items ten days later...
9. Not only has the count not been rectified, they tell me I have enough to last me when I very shortly run out.
10. Writing stinking letter to all and sundry, expect it to go where all the other stinking letters go.

This is simply asinine stupidity. I pointed out over a year ago that this fault in the system would ensure that everyone using this Internet system would suffer this intensely annoying kind of problem, so I have to write another letter, go into the surgery to explain this, get an appointment with someone to hear my complaint, get a repeat for the missing item and what's worse: THEY ARE GOING TO SCREW IT UP AGAIN. I know they are busy, but this idiocy in both staff and system is costing them as well as me time and effort to correct. There will have been five additional appointments + a further two letters + 3 emails, this time round with four car journeys for me.

A Visit to Green Grandad, or a Fish Supper in ...

The old man is sitting down to a fish supper: fish and chips, a saveloy, three gherkins and a pickled onion; with a cup of sergeant major tea. The fish supper is still on its newspaper - yesterday's Evening Standard. The tea is well, you know, a half pint tin mug full of a milky amber liquid and a spoon in it, that surfaces every so often like a diver rising for air... because the amount of sugar in it has changed it to a viscous solid. it's on a paper doily. By the side of the tin mug is an open tin, full of Old Holborn Ready Rub and a packet of Rizla papers in a natty little compartment. The lid has a rolling machine with one in the slot; the battered old prewar enamel ashtray has a half-smoked cigarette in it, brought in from a quiet puff in the outside khazi*, listening to the bees in the loganberry trellis. Besides this is a an older silver sixpenny piece.

*This was a strange place where wartime habits still survived, he had a special toilet roll he would hand visitors. It was an Izal... a special one impregnated with disinfectant and made from shiny paper. It was completely unabsorbent. I used to use some of granddad's carefully torn up Evening Standards** (thrifty, that's what he was, thrifty). They might leave week old news on my bottom, but at least they were marginally absorbent. The smell was incredible; in the height of Summer a machete would have been useful to fight your way in through the miasma and the runners from the loganberries. ("I grew those from canes sent all the way from Scotland; Logan's a Scottish name, boy") Once in there, the many layered olfactory experience was devastating for a young boy. I reckon if we'd lived closer and visited more often I would have ended up with the lung capacity of a Pacific island pearl diver. Breath in there? Are you kidding? It would be as easy as breathing on Venus...

**When green grandad died (so named after the colour of his front door - it is now blue [Thanks Google Earth] but next door's is still pink and you can guess that that was my maternal 'pink' grandfather's house...)  Ah, where was I? When he died, I had this idea that his body would be left to the Evening Standard, his body mummified and his backside peeled with one of those cheese slicers. Old staffers would gather round the thin layers, formaldehyde dripping from them, reminiscing over old stories..

***This post has been brought to you at the request of Destry54 blame him!

The Concert - Storyvillette

A sad tale from my tweenies (20-29):  Well, I had got involved with this lass from Yorkshire... she was so, so pretty. Not sexy, but delicately pretty, the sort of looks where she was so fragile looking, like a fine china vase... She was living on a farm in the dales with a guy who beat her. I kid you not. I was not happy, we gradually got closer whilst I tried to provide advice. You might have gathered by now that my natural inclination is to help people. And when they're very pretty, well...

I offered to come and intercede with the guy, but apparently she was frightened he'd shoot me (he had a 12-bore shotgun), I said I was scared, but what he was doing was unspeakable and I was happy to remonstrate with him. But even so I was careful to try not to get too involved, but her letters got, frankly much more interested than they should have been. So I moved out of my house share (she couldn't bear to be with other house-sharers) and into a flat I could barely afford. But the lass had various commitments which she couldn't... like her horses, you guessed... I was a romantic fool, Galahad to the rescue...

She had always loved Bob Dylan, so I booked a room in the Wembley Hilton for two nights, a reservation in the resto there and bought tickets to the Bob Dylan concert at Wembley Stadium. I was not particularly a fan but Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds were one of the support acts (and they were awesome). What I hadn't realised was that the door opened at 11.00 a.m. with the supports and that it was 8 before Saint Bob turned up. There were no seats, just the concrete of the stands...   The guys on the terraces above having been drinking and god knows what else above us, decided it would be cool to relieve themselves on the steps before them and watch it trickle down past and through those sitting down on the concrete levels nearer the pitch... that was not the best day of my life... made worse by the fact that the racket from the people around overwhelmed the sound system, and it was substandard anyway.  With the screaming, we could not. hear. a. single. word. Dylan. sang. At this point, having missed our dinner reservation... I said we had to leave.

When we got back to the hotel room, the pain in my bottom (and hers) from the concrete and the hours of miserable sitting had left it's mark; even her shapely bottom had bruises, I had massive black bruises on my buttocks. No nooky, no romance, just physical pain and despair. In her case of a wasted weekend and mine, for the lack of maturity for not saying earlier, this is a waste of time. Oh. And it was two months disposable income... Even now it makes me wince; the thick end of £500.

Piquant peppers

Normally I'd do a full ingredients breakdown, but it's not really necessary as this is a really simply recipe.  You'll need a medium-small flat roasting pan.  Slice a large onion (enough to layer a single layer on the floor of the pan), sprinkle a tbsp of Olive Oil, then 1/2 tsp of ground Cumin, 1/2 tsp of ground Coriander.

Take 3 bell peppers, de-seed them and cut them into thin lengthwise strips and lay them evenly on the onion.  Then sprinkle a tsp of Balsamic vinegar, a tsp of Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire Sauce and a tbsp of Olive Oil on that, grind a goodly amount of black pepper over this.  Then put a couple of layers of foil across the pan so that it is effectively sealed.  Put this into the middle of an oven on it's lowest setting.  On mine it's called Miser...  No comments, please! for about 3 hours.  Then after that loosen the foil (make sure the roasting tray is on a bigger tray), put the trays on the top shelf and turn the gas up to GM8 for about 20-30 minutes.

You can serve it hot or put the contents into an air-tight jar and use it effectively as a condiment or pickle.  I love this; minimum of effort but a really versatile result.

What is a barmaid?

Just a question. Are there any real barmaids left? I mean the type who was very well-endowed who could carefully dispose of the bounteous nature of her assets to allow the pulling of a full pint, whilst mysteriously a third hand would bat away any lecherous advances whilst; smiling genially and discussing Irish literature with a fourth patron? She would also be able to drink any bloke under the table, cheer up anyone who had been dumped by a would-be date, without seeming to want to be a stand-in? I thought not. Kate, from the early 70s Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street, must be a granny now, but by the gods us young blokes lusted after her, would have defended her and in no small measure revered her as the epitome of the barmaid. Her counterpart, was the urbane, well-dressed but often fractious and very gay, Ray. He catered for the Bloomsbury crowd and their antecedents with real style and panache. So camp and so courageous in those less understanding times that even us straight blokes wanted to give him a big hug.

About then, I made it a point of honour on a Monday (a regular day off, in lieu of Saturday) to set off from Loughton, in Essex, and then travel only by bus and foot to the Lamb, having lunch there with a very good friend and a quick spag bol at the resto in the Sicilian Parade, which is still there! I then got back on the buses to travel all the way to Staines. This was a very, very long journey by the then London Transport.  This plan only failed once, when the driver and conductor of the 117, thinking that there was no-one on board, turned round and went back to Hammersmith with one sterterously snoring drunkard on the top deck. But Kate and her impossible talents, and sunny good humour remain in my memory forever...   There is something really quite magical about a good barmaid.

Why "Sorrow"?

I have been, in a sense, writing this ever since I heard Rachel Luttrell's death song in Stargate Atlantis.  I don't share my feelings easily, unless I think that it might help someone else.  There is no shame in being helpless, there is no guilt in not doing what you feel is, at least in one sense, a moral imperative.  And in some senses, your grief must have a voice and that is what Teyla gave to me at a very, very dark time.

Sorrow

I miss and grieve for my mother.  I still do, five years after her death; in some senses, ten years after.  Fifteen years ago she started to exhibit the early signs of senile dementia.  I started to miss her then; about two years after that she stopped solving the Telegraph crossword on her own; three years after that she stopped trying to solve it.  At that point I knew what hadn't been said, that her brain was silently destroying itself, that she was effectively passing into shadow and distress.  Inevitably, she was going.  The pain of this is like a knife in my heart, even now.  Nine years ago, when my then wife was not in the room, she simply looked at me and said "I know I'm repeating myself, but if I'm not me any more; if it gets worse, please make sure I don't just carry on."

I am still unbearably upset by that, the true measure of helplessness is when someone you love asks you to do something you know you can't do.  Even so, I felt I should do it for her - I wrestled with this, in the dark of the night.  When, three years before she died, I came to visit and she had wandered out of the house leaving the front door open; I knew it was time.  But although I found her and brought her back I had someone much younger with me, so there was no opportunity.  There is something about age and appreciation of mortality which only age can bring.  Her time had come.  I knew it, and what was much worse, so did she in her lucid moments.  But then we had to get her into a care home.  I am still in a part of me, ashamed that I could not kill her, bring her long long suffering to an end.  You can judge me or not, as you please.  But I still miss that very bright, highly intelligent cantankerous old bitch.  She was my Mum.

Time is flying

The bluebells have been and gone and the poppies are now gathering pace.

This is just a quick post to give you all (if anyone is still reading!) a quick grovel; my spare time is spent on ephemeral activities, mainly to take my mind off my imminent redundancy.  I am and have been working really hard on finalising the accounts, closing down the office and all the consequent transfers and notifications.  The transfer is to my erstwhile boss's house and at the end of June I will be unemployed.  This is not immediately a problem, as I have rainy day money, but it is a long-term concern, because at 61 it will be really difficult to gain further employment (even for a bloke of my calibre!).  The worst of it is that all this hard work feels, if I may use a grim simile, like digging my own grave!  Anyway, apologies all...

Gauloise

I miss smoking, I know it was killing me quickly, but I loved the silly theatre of rolling my Gauloise tobacco; the forays into Belgium to buy the cheapest supply; sitting in a corner of a French brasserie, slowly rolling my own, watching England v France at the rugby saying things in my limited French "C'est un bon equipe ca?"; what amazed me was just how friendly the French are in these circumstances (I am not talking about Paris). I have never failed to be astounded by their civility and their acceptance. I have had meals bought for me, been left bottles of vintage wine behind the bar and generally been treated like an honoured guest in a country whose food and wine culture I deeply love. And part of this was the theatre of the roll-up.

What non-smokers don't understand is that there is a visceral pleasure in smoking that is as close and tight to the addict's cortex as the love of food is to sane people and, in some cases, the two are very closely linked. This, like food, is associated with people and memory and, more profoundly, in some respects, a sense of self. To give up smoking is like saying, I am not that person. It is denying yourself and therein lies the core of probably the most insidious addiction. That visceral connection leads your subconcious mind to continually provide excuses (aka reasons) for which giving up is not convenient, sensible etc. Why is why I'm proud to say that four and a little bit years ago I burnt nearly 1 kilo of hand-rolling Gauloise. I decided to give up on find out that my lung capacity had shrunk to 22% of what it should be and that my shot arteries and veins were going to spawn ulcers at increasing rates. Sorry to be graphic, but that's just one of the effects of smoking. And I'm also celebrating my book-keeping exam pass (first class, no less)!

Seasonality

Odd really; I know the theory of when the seasons come and go, but my feelling is:

Winter = December-February (includes two of the darkest months of the year)
Spring=March-May (latter only occasionally is sunny and rarely hot)
Summer=June-August
Autumn=September-November

Once, in the 70s, I used to take my holidays in September and go at least every second year to France. For many years, the weather in September and sometimes even October, was glorious, but since the millenium that has proven in the years I've been there not to have been the case.

I feel sorry for you if you have never been to the Dordogne in the 70s and even 80s; the food was eccentric to say the least, often wonderful, sometimes abysmal...

The strangest meal was one which was served at Chez Jeannot [in Beaumont-du-Perigord], which is no longer there (in sad circumstances); a spectacular 11 course meal for 110 Francs - approximately £11 at the time, including aperitif, vins, et digestif. There were trestle tables and bench seats and you rather expected there to be small portions. Nothing of it; the four centre courses were virtually meals in themselves. One of these, which was a stunning lamb dish in a rich gravy had one piece left in it which others suggested we should eat "for the honour of the English" (there were Dutch and Danes also there), so I obliged wondering about the remaining courses... Jeannot appeared with his wife (the chef) obviously delighted that this dish had been finished. With another of the same course... an amazing place. But I couldn't eat there again!

When we left we were given a bag of sweets, a bottle of the wonderful, dry peach aperitif they had served and a huge slab of saffron cake. We then drove back down an unlit very twisty (hairpins) narrow road to where we were staying. Not ideal!

Shopping Trolley rant

I need to vent!

A real annoyance for me, is the way able-bodied middle-aged or elderly people leave shopping trolleys all over the place. By the time I've finished my shopping, my knee is screaming at me (I'm not young), but I still put mine back in the trolley shed. So 6.50 a.m. yesterday morning, there I am, and a bloke about my age with a stick, unloads his trolley and sticks it into the middle of the parking spot next to him. I says "Why not be a human being and put it in the shed?" he does a double take and says "On your bike." To which I respond, "Well, allow me to put in the correct place for you, so you know what to do next time." to which he responds "F*** off", and as I approach gets in his car and drives off. Oh, and he had a very heavy Glaswegian accent, so I guess I was lucky he didn't chin me. But I hate these unmentionable people; they pollute the world without a thought for anyone else. You just know that this guy regards his waste as someone else's problem.

Me? Victor Medlrew? Surely not!