68 days ago
When you lose a lot of weight some folks say ”well done” but others are nervous. ls it is a sign that you are sick. I started the year at c17 stone, I ended August at 13 stone 4 pounds and it was deliberate. No booze, no biscuits: in fact my diet had become almost entirely rabbit food and fish. In an attempt to tackle cholesterol I was taking my coffee black and cheese, hitherto a great love, was out.
216 days ago
I was first up and my encounter was scheduled, it was my diabetes check up. When the Shipmans test your blood they obtain a three month average trailing score of blood sugars. So this chat was about bloods taken on March 4: two months of sobriety, healthy eating and exercise and one month of drinking and over indulgence during the olive harvest and then Christmas. Yet my results were stunning, a 25% reduction in blood sugars, albeit from a terrible start. The nurse was full of praise and said how much thinner I was looking. I think she meant I looked less fat but the trend is my friend.
406 days ago
Last year I had an apple glut so there was stacks of apple chutney. This year’s apple harvest has been dire. I have enough to put in storage wrapped in newspaper on an apple rack to fill Joshua’s snack bag until Christmas. Having emptied the tree, under cover of dusk, at Joshua’s school, I have enough for two more runs with the still and to make about ten litres of apple juice which I might bottle up tonight. And there were a few cooking apples but its been a piss poor year.
795 days ago
My favourite Northants cheesemaker, which gets an order from me every Christmas, is closing one of the two delis it operates and says the other one is fighting for survival. I’d hope that if you are a turophile you consider buying some Cobblers Nibble cheese online in support. The second deli has only been open a year but you can see from the cobbler twitterfeed what issue was bothering management was the cost of power.
821 days ago
I have a lot of time for the good Reverend the, now retired, vicar who started off with Jimmy Somerville in the Communards. He handled the death of his husband stoically and he serves up really quite interesting material, an increasing rarity on the BBC. On twitter he brought my attention to an interesting Northamptonshire artisan cheese. But yesterday on his show the subject turned to women’s soccer and he insisted that audiences at Euro 2022 were “huge” and that was a game changer. The problem, as I pointed out to him on a tweet he ignored, is that what he said is just not true.
1312 days ago
Under this country’s bonkers covid laws you are now allowed only 30 folks at a funeral plus the corpse even if that corpse is the husband of the Queen. It was the same rule for Phil the Greek as it was for my late father.
1316 days ago
Since everything is racist it was only a matter of time before conifers joined cheese, sacking a librarian for burning library books, women’s hockey, fancying Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak, coffee, sand, pants, fried chicken, not dating a person of colour, dating a person of colour and so much else besides as being guilty of the worst of cardinal sins. The shocking revelation that your Christmas Tree might as well be a burning cross from the KKK comes from Portland Oregon in the United States of lunacy.
1317 days ago
I sort of remember that cheese was first exposed as being racist back in 2020 along with sacking sacking a librarian for burning library books, women’s hockey, fancying Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak, coffee, sand, pants, fried chicken, not dating a person of colour, dating a person of colour and so much else besides. But in case the evils of cheese have not yet been exposed, they have been now. I guess this mixed race household must start emptying the fridge at once. Naturally it is from gender fluid crazy town, aka Brighton in Sussex, that this revelation comes.
2171 days ago
Yesterday was the day the cheeses arrived all over the country as part of family traditions. First up was a Cheddar, from Cheddar itself supplied by Uncle Chris Booker. This has been part of my life for all of my fifty years.
2301 days ago
Downing Street is desperate to bully us into backing its weedy sell out Chequers plan on Brexit, or indeed an even more pathetic version of it once the EU make demands which wretched Theresa May caves to. It has thus unleahsed , via pliant papers such as The Sunday Times and, especially, the Mail on Sunday, a deluge of scare stories about the possible consequences of not agreeing to its awful deal.
2346 days ago
Okay despite all the harsh ( but arguably fair) things I have said about him, thirsty Paul Scott has just donated £50 to the Woodlarks sponsored walk charity appeal so I am going to be nice about him for a while unless he has a twitter meltdown. Chaka Khan. Chaka Khan. Cheeese. Anyhow surely you can follow Paul, watch this video HERE to see the great works Woodlarks does then donate a few quid HERE. In the podcast I take MySquar (MYSQ) apart, John Meyer at SP Angel needs to wake up, listen and get off his arse. I also look at Frontera (FRR) - bailout placing at 0.3p? - IDOX (IDOX) and Herencia (GER)
2897 days ago
I am not sure when I discovered this particular gift but it is now a tradition at Christmas that I give to all my closest family (2 sisters, 3 steps, my father, one uncle, one Aunt and one cousin of my mother) that which I give to myself. My father gets a couple of other bottles as a bonus but for everyone else it is this one gift. Outside that circle I am afraid I tend to ignore a wider family.. Is that a sin? I do rather worry about that.
2902 days ago
Lunch on Thursday at the Greek Hovel was provided by the wife of George the Albanian. At least I think it was his wife, it was one of his two female assistants. I pondered how much an Islington bistro would have stung me for, offering similar fare.
4198 days ago
For once it is not Kent Police who stand accused of being Fascist morons in Airstrip One. It is the Gloucestershire Old Bill, the force which failed to capture serial killer Fred West for so many years. But fear not citizens of Gloucester when it comes to real villains your boys in blue are on the ball.
Diana Smart is an 86 year old maker of cheeses. She makes the 3lb Double Gloucester cheeses that are rolled down Cooper’s Hill Gloucester in an annual ritual dating back to the 19th century.
But the Old Bill do not approve. ‘elf n safey and all that. You see there has not be an official organiser since 2009 so what happens if someone attending the event of their own volition gets hit by a runaway cheese? Who to prosecute? Of course. The cheese maker. And so this poor old granny has been duly warned.
Jeepers. How about just putting up a sign saying “You attend the cheese roll at your own risk and if you are knocked over by a cheese, trip over a daisy, etc it is your own look out. There will be no Policeman on duty as they will all be attending a diversity awareness course, oops I meant to say out catching villains.”
