Last night I did one of the things I like best; I went down to M&S and bought some stuff, took it home and did a three course meal for E. [my wife] and me to sit down at like we have our own restaurant at home. Seriously. We have really good quality plates and cutlery, crystal glasses and the full works in order to re-create the 'feel' of eating out - but instead you're at home. This a) saves you a shed load of money and b) means you can get as pissed as a stick without i) making a tit of yourself at a posh reataurant and ii) having to spring for a taxi home [unless you're the kind who screw's convention and just drives home anyway in which case ignore ii; hey - I'm not in the judgement game]. I bought M&S 'Gravad-Lax' which is drop dead gorgeous and has a dill-sauce sachet included that avoids that bitter after-taste you get with some brands. The downside is there is only enough actual salmon for about one decent mouthfull per person and for this you have to bung £6 - so it's actually gram for gram probably dearer than beluga caviar but there you have it, who said being a gourmand was cheap! [Quick diversion; who can tell me the difference between a gourmand, a gourmet and a gastronome because there is one. I'll leave this one hanging as a hook to draw you back in here again, and reveal all at some later point when I have actually remembered [or re-checked] what the answer is.] Anyway next we had a roast pheasant [nearly typed roast peasant there - I'll save that one for closer to Christmas] with stuffing, roast pots and a little trio of veg. M&S do this small bag of trimmed carrots, broccoli and mangé-tout that you just bung into a microwave bag and all and two minutes later you've got all your veg done. It's reaaly nice veg, crisp and well flavoured and it comes in at 80 pence a bag which is enough for two. [Quick lesson; for those who do those 'great big fuck-off roasts' you must be mad. A roast should be small enough to fit in as part of a three course meal and so simple to get onto the plate you could do it while simultaneously watching 'Debbie does Dallas' if you wanted to. Screw all of that standing around over boiling pans!] Anyway, the whole pheasant we bought from Marks was good flavoured, but I think it would have benefitted from a bit more 'hanging' - like for about a year! It was so tough I had to ask E. to pre-chew mine [not really] and that was the best bits. The tougher parts [legs and thighs] are currenly forming the major part of a PhD thesis on 'natures toughest matereals' which I will bring to you in due course. Actually I gave a piece to one of our cats who this morning is still chewing away like he's John Travolta in 'Grease' - I'll probably have to pay to have it surgically removed at some point in the near future! But aside from that the meal was actually ok. Dessert was a Bon Mamma rum-baba, as near to the real french thing as you are ever going to get [served with a Sainsbury's own brand pudding wine which was actually ok ay £4 a half bottle - much better [and more of it] than the M&S sweet muscat at £3 for which you only get 2 glasses. Cheese would have been an M&S 'Cornish Cruncher' which is out in front the best cheddar you can get anywhere, including the 'speciality' high end brands, but alas I was stuffed to the gills by this point and it was all I could do to retire to the front room and finnish of the three bottles of wine we had opened. Why do I do it? [Wine info; 'The Ridge' Sauvingnon Blanc 2012, 6/10 Tesco's; A Rioja of no note and an Argentinian Malbec that was drier than the Rioja. Don't worry - when I find something worth directing you to, you will get all the details.]

a new beginning.

For whatever reason, my blog site seems to be messing around with me today and not letting me 'compose in the normal manner. Ok - I can deal with it; I'm a big boy now. Anyhows - I've decided to change the way this blog is going to work. From now on, rather than being about the crap I think, it's going to be about the crap I experience. So let me tell you a bit about myself and the sort of stuff I do. I work in a seven-eleven store as a 'supervisor' of sorts. I've done some other stuff in my life [but thats no matter and It's really just my way of letting you know 'I'm Better than thet - honestly!' - but of course I'm really not]. My chief loves in my life [after me that is] are my wife and family, the occasional bouts of travel I get up to and the more regular meals that I either cook at home [I specialise in getting stuff from the supermarkets etc and making it better] or out in restaurants. From now on I'm going to tell you about this stuff. Not probably daily, but hopefully often enough to make things fun and interesting for you to want to keep up with. There'll be lots of spelling errors and gramatical bollocks, and shed loads of swearing and politically incorrect stupp. That's just the way I am. So please, drop in every once in a while and say hello. Hell - it might be fun ;)

So Mrs Thatcher is dead. One of the things she is being credited with acheiving is 'breaking the Unions' (ie divesting them of the power they had held to influence how working people were paid and the conditions of their work).  This may indeed be true - but is this the good thing it is presented as being. Most of us seem to forget that without the Unions we would for the most part still be labouring in squalid conditions for a pitance and at the complete mercy of employers who could use or discard us as their wont dictated. The rights, such as they are, that we now enjoy were not freely given; they were fought tooth and nail for by the very Unions whose demise we celebrate. There is a greater division now between rich and poor than there has been for the last thirty years and, we are told, it is getting greater by the day. I do not believe that this can be conceived as being good for a country. It seems to me that a state where the wealth of a nation is held by fewer and fewer individuals rather than being enjoyed by the people as a whole cannot be a healthy one. Surely under such conditions discontent and agitation can be the only end result. Yes the Unions did things wrong. Yes they got out of hand. But they also did things right, they also had their place in the improvement of the common mans lot and lets remember that had their power not been so badly damaged by their confrontation with Mrs Thatcher, it is possible that the increasing gap between rich and poor, haves and have nots, that we spoke of above might not be increasing quite so fast.

Another of her acheivements I have heard touted in the last day or two is that she made us all realise that any of us could make it; it didn't matter who we were we all had a chance of getting to the top. Lets look at that. There are something over one hundred ministers of state in the UK, be they of the Government or of the Opposition. Of this group currently fourteen were educated in state schools, the rest in the public school system. The higher up the pecking order of these fee paying schools you go, the more you will see their ex-pupils represented. In a recent survey of the top 2000 influential people in the UK, 80% were found to have been to public schools and the top universities. Radio 4 aired a biographical program on the current health minister Jeremy Hunt where another MP who had been a chum of his at Chaterhouse, a prestigious UK public school remenisced "as we left on the final day the last thing Jeremy said to me was 'See you at Westminster'."  The moral of these stories if there is one, is, if you are educated in the comprehensive (state) school education system in the UK then you might make it to the top, you might........but the chances are against it.

Last week the Sun (I think - one of the crap redtops at least) ran a side headline on the front page 'Adele [a singer of medium talent] earns £41,000 a day. Below this was a follow up line 'Here's how she would look holding the money!' together with a picture of the singers head grafted on to a body holding a double armfull of bundles of banknotes. What I ask. was the purpose of this crude story. Were we supposed to feel jealous that in these days when we at the bottom end of the labour market earn less than half in a year what this girl earns a day, someone could be doing so well. Were we supposed to applaud her in her good fortune and say she deserved every penny. Were we supposed to take to the streets and put every rich money grabbing bastard up against the wall. What, I ask again was the point of this story. The incident was not of course isolated. Last year we learned of Tara Ecclestone (the playgirl daughter of a motor racing magnate) spending £1 million on a marble bath with gold taps ("Well - I spend alot of time in the bath was her rather plaintiff excuse for this ludicrous extravigence) but again I failed to see what we were supossed to make of the matter. Do the papers really want to see the downtrodden masses rise up and take vengence ala russian revolution style on these bloated plutocrats - is that what it's all about. They spoon feed the masses crap about the lives of the celebrities thereby generating the opium of publicity that fuels these ridiculous fools - and then publish these stories with a sort of slimy "Look at what they've got that you haven't" feel to them. Get real Papers - stop playing silly games. Get real people - stop supporting papers that provide no more than brain numbing pap at the expense of the news you need to know.

I've just made a sandwich for my lunch at work. Nothing to get exited about there you say, but wait on! I threw the first three pieces of bread I took from the bag away - they were so flimsy as a result of all of the fibre and nutritional goodness being washed out of them, so full of air pockets and holes, that they fell apart in my hand on the way from the wrapper to the work-surface. Luckily I managed to get the next two onto a flat surface before they disintigrated and then glue them into slome semblance of stable rigidity with a thick layer of butter. The cheese my wife had bought (from Poundland so I shouldn't complain too much), on cutting felt decidedly rubbery for what was desribed as extea mature cheddar. I tasted a bit and wished I hadn't. A more tasteless elastic mass I have never before put into my mouth exept as a child when I used to eat my pencil-top erasers in class out of boredom with the lessons (another subject I must adress at some point!). No, I tell a lie - the erasers tasted better. This 'thing' was so far removed from anything recognisable as cheese that it could have stolen first prize in an 'animal, vegetable, mineral' competition any day of the week. I progressed to the tomato - not a good colour, not a nice red that would fire the loins of any self-respecting bull eyeing the jacket of a tourist in a west-country feild, but a wishy orange streaked yellow red, a neither here nor there red, a not really red at all red. I sliced of a ...slice. No seeds and juice - just that mushy bit that normally sits in the central section. Slice again - more mush. Slice mush. Slice mush. I breathed a bit through my nose and turned the remnant through 90 degrees. Slice mush. Eye twitch. Slice seeds! Slice seeds! At last I had hit pay-dirt and I wasn't giving up now untill the mine ran dry. Four slices in - just enough to barely cover the cheese lying like a pvc cover on my air pocket peppered bread (a culinary version of the memory foam matress) - the mine ran dry. Still it was enough. More out of a sense of cynical prescience than out of any genuine expectation I popped the last piece of tomato into my mouth. Yep - tasteless as shit. A mushy-pap pulpy mess of tastless pith and skin. Not the remotest resmblance to what a real tomato tastes like; not even in the same universe as the tomato's of my youth, those dark red sweet and juicy globes that were heaven to eat all alone with a squirt of salad cream or a shot of salt and viniger.

Somehow I had to inject some flavor into this thing that was to serve as my main sustenence in the eight hours ahead. To date the entire list of the ingedients of my sandwhich had been without exeption as devoid of anything even approaching flavor as the packaging they were wrapped in. The sweet lamb of flavor had been mercilessly hung on the foul gibbet of shelf-life, drawn on the bloody alter of processing, quatered on the smug decking of healthy eating. Anything remotely nutrtious or flavorsome had been ruthlessly extracted, mercilessly driven out, spirited away on the chariot of modern 'food science'. "The bastards! The complete bastards!", I said to myself. Little wonder that more children proportionately are being admitted to hospital with malnutrition now than were done so fifty years ago. The processing of food and the modification (genetic or otherwise) carried out to increase shelf life and thus profitability have slaughtered the nutritional value of our food. And the food industry is proud, I say proud of this! Adverts like 'Why sell them meat when you can sell them water' abound in the meat trade journals. Bakers joke that the current aim is to make as much water stand up on it's own as possible. Nutritional value is washed out of grain and used to feed pigs and we are fed the remaining husk ground up for bread and cereals. Long-life fruit is sold on the supermarket shelves as if to our advantage. 'Ripen at home peaches' that simply never ripen at all but wither dirctly from the hard unripened state they are sold in. Meat with no fat, cereal with no salt, food with no taste.

I looked disconsolately into the cuboard. Taste, taste, how to get it. Ahh - there we have it. Mustard and pickle. A good teaspoon of each and things were looking better. Against all the rules of hygene I licked the spoon clean and the resulting blast of umami made my eyes roll back in my head. There - thats what I want. I don't want to live for ever. I don't want to look like a twenty year old at eighty. I don't even mind paying a bit more for my food. Just please, please, please stop fucking around with my grub. I want to tast my food!

When I am sixteen I can join the army and be shot at for a living. I can decide I am homosexual (or indeed heterosexual) and persue a relationship to the limits of it's ...er....limits. I can have a baby, get married, leave school, get a full time job, pay taxes and go to jail. But I can't buy a cigarette, I can't buy a drink and I can't cast a vote. Who makes up these rules?

Now I am fifty I can drink, smoke (and vote) myself to death. I can buy 2 kg of chocolate a day and eat untill I'm fifty f*****g stone - but I can't buy a breakfast cereal with enough salt in it so I can actually taste the mushy-pap crap. Who I ask again, makes up these stupid f*****g rules!

"Formerly when religion was strong and science was weak, men mistook magic for medicine. Now when science is strong and religion weak men mistake medicine for magic."

So goes the quote from Thomas Szasz in his 1973 work 'Science and Scientism'. That we still place an almost unreserved trust in the medical proffession and it's ability to heal our ills goes without saying but the following two anecdotes should serve to illustrate it's limitations and bring what can and can't be expected of it back into perspective. Some ten years ago my father in law started having pains in his abdomen. he went to the doctor who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and prescribed a peppermint based preparation that had no effect whatsoever. For 18 or so months Ted returned intermittently to the GP with the same complaint which, while he could live with, was making his life uncomfortable. After this period had elapsed the GP referred Ted, in his 70's, to a consultant. The wait for the consultants appointment was some 6 months, by which time the trouble was getting more problematic and he was clearly loosing weight. The consultant recognised that something was amis and within two weeks Ted was attending his local hospital for scans etc to determine the nature of the problem, Sure enough the expected diagnosis of cancer of the large intestine was made and a short while later we took Ted in to have a colostomy opperation.

As we waited in the waiting room for Ted to be admitted we were given some information to read about his forthcoming opperation. Sucess (if it can be called such) was, we were informed entierly dependant on early diagnosis. The leaflet gave a range of 'five fear survival rates' based on the speed of the diagnosis being made after the condition had developed. If diagnosed in six months, survival rates after five years were good. After 1 year, a little less so. After two years (Ted's diagnosis time) the chances of being alive in five years time were pretty bleak. Given our situation I breathed hard but did not make the observation that had Teds GP reffered him at the outset then we would have been in a much better situation and it remained to be seen how much that delay was going to cost him!

The colostomy was performed and for the next 18 months or so Ted muddled along, not unwell but not well either. After this period of time he was again feeling pretty rotten and was refered again to see his consultant who carried out a colonoscopy examination and gave him the all clear. Ted began to loose weight and suffer from collapses and following a particularly nasty one of these was readmitted to hospital. A CAT scan was carried out and again the all clear was given. Ted was sent home after being given a 'talking to' by the nurse. "You have to eat." she told him. "No wonder you are falling over all the time!"

Ted returned home and tried to follow the advice but he was feeling sick all the time and couldn't keep his food down anyway. He was as thin as a stick and it was obvious he was dying. Two days after returning home he collapsed, was readmitted to hospital and an exploratory opperation carried out. When we saw the egyptian doctor who had performed this he was grave. "I'm afraid your father is dying." he said to my wife (not too great a shock as I had already told her this some weeks before), "He has no functional bowel left due to the spread of the cancer and will pass away soon." Within three days he was dead. This a man who had been given an all clear by his consultant, an all clear by a CAT scan and sent home with the instructions to 'feed himself up' all within two weeks of being dead.

My second anecdote is a sad story concerning the father of a girl I work with. The man, in his fifties, was suffering chest pains, arm pains, pains in his jaw etc (ie all the normal indicators of heart problems) and attended his GP. He was referred to a consultant and a thorough examination was carried out. He was subjected to exercise stress on the treadmill, blood samples for heart function taken, ECG's and scans perforned. Given a clean bill of health the man was sent back to work. On the strength of this even the man's family started to doubt that his symptoms were 'for real' (this was one of the hardest things of all to deal with said the girl). He returned to work and then one evening a short while later died of a massive coronary heart attack. The doctors somewhat weakly said that 'other vessels in his heart must have been taking up some of the work-load and thus disguising his symptoms'. Cold comfort to the mans family I'm afraid.

My point in recounting these sad tales is important. Medicine is not magic. Make no mistake there is far, far more that doctors do not know about what goes on inside us than what they do. But here is the thing you have to remember - doctors are trying their best. They are doing what they have been taught - and are often fooled themselves by their own press. They have allowed this image of themselves as infalable beings to be built up in the public mind and have done nothing to stop it. They have flown high on borrowed wings and it is no suprise that often do they take a fall. And one final thing; medicine may when all is said and done be pretty weak - but it's the best we've got!