BREXIT SPECIAL.

In view of what is happening in Italy it looks like my prediction, that the EU will break up following our exit, is becoming more likely. It would be a pity, a reformed EU would be worth staying in; but, until the rise of the populist parties in many member states it looked like it would never happen, all those overpaid incompetents are not going to let go and see themselves out of a job.  However, people have now had enough of the political establishment as they get poorer and the Eurocrats get richer, on their money, the rules get ever more labyrinthine and sovereignty is sacrificed to an unelected collective of the man, who makes appalling decisions that affect the lives of all ordinary people.

I think it would now be worthwhile to have another referendum, please hear me out. As the result of the last one was so close and reflected the will of the people to give the establishment a bloody nose rather than a genuine desire to leave. There is now a realistic possibility of reform and the choice should be between hard Brexit or staying in if the EU was prepared to reform. We would have to have control over our borders, our own laws would override any EU laws and the whole EU would made leaner and more efficient by getting rid of most of the Eurocrats and the stupid rules about the size of cabbages and all the other crap. As I have said before we could have the Euro as a common currency and we would all keep our own currencies whose value would rise and fall against the Euro.

The government are making such a bog of Brexit that we will end up with the worst of both worlds, having to accept most of the EU rules and paying in without even having a say in the running of it. Being members of a reformed EU would make much more sense and we would have to be vigilant that it didn’t get out of control again. It is a good plan and I recommend it to the House. Then we could carry on and sort out our own politicians and establishment. Hear,hear.

Wine O’clock 2.

Today I was in Lakeland in Windermere, brilliant shop! They have wine aerators which are a more sophisticated version of my carantor. Unfortunately, they cost £37.99, but would probably work a bit quicker.

WINE O’CLOCK .

 

A handy tip I would like to pass on. Recent events mean I have to be a bit careful with my money until I can sell at least one of the properties. I am now buying some wine at Aldi rather than the Sunday Times Wine Club. In the case of red wines, I have a handy bit of kit that changes a £5 wine into a £7.50 wine and a £9 wine into something sublime. This will not work with plonk! But you can buy a reasonable red with potential for £5 or £6. As a favour to you all I have done some research tonight. I opened a Sunday Times Wine Club Cabalie, one of my favourite wines about £ 8 or £9 a bottle depending on special offers etc. and a £5 Aldi Animus Douro from Portugal. Portugese wine is not usually my favourite, except for Port of course, but this is a decent little wine and incredible value for £5. Tasted against the Cabalie it has potential but is a little bit sharp.

The thing with red wine is all about breathing. You are supposed to open the wine a couple of hours before drinking to let it breathe, but it is not going to breathe much through the little hole in the top of the bottle. I have however noticed that with a cheaper wine, if you don’t drink it all, doesn’t happen very often, it is much smoother a couple of days later. Apparently, and I have no personal experience of this, very old and very expensive wine has to be drunk within minutes of opening the bottle or it oxidises and is spoilt.

However, this container does the trick of letting it breathe as it exposes a greater surface area of the wine to the atmosphere. I don’t know if you would call it a carafe or a decanter, lets call it a caranter. You just have to be careful pouring, it’s a bit like a yard of ale, it all comes in a rush towards the end if you’ll pardon the expression. In order to make this experiment as scientific as possible I included a shoulder joint of lamb with spring greens and Jersey Royal potatoes in the equation. Without a doubt the Cabalie won hands down, but the Douro when decanted was much improved and even more passable than in it’s raw state. The Cabalie when decanted was sublime. I am not sure where you would get one of these caranters, mine was a free gift with an order from the Sunday Times  Wine Club, it has been in the cupboard for about 3 years.

This is another bit of useful information from whaleoilbeefoct.

SWEETS FOR MY SWEET, SUGAR FOR MY HONEY

Please be aware of a presumably unintended consequence of the government’s new sugar tax. In order to keep below the threshold, manufacturers are taking out sugar and adding artificial sweeteners to products that previously didn’t have them. I noticed when buying my walking squash in Morrisons it used to be only the ones with no added sugar that had them, now they all seem to, I couldn’t find any that didn’t. There are those who say sugar is poison, but a bit of sugar is OK; artificial sweeteners however really are poison and they don’t even help you to lose weight.

It seems amazing to me that manufacturers are allowed to get away with adulterating our food and creating an unhealthy population for the sake of greater profits. I wonder how much the cost is to the NHS for every extra £ profit the companies make, £10, £100? and yet successive governments have let them get away with it. Ironically it is the Tories who introduced the sugar tax, presumably, the cost to the NHS now spiraling out of control and being considerably more than is justified by the backhanders they get from their pals in the sugar industry. The sugar tax is a start but not enough, companies should be punitively fined if they continue to poison people. Sugar and salt and all kinds of other crap is added to all junk food in industrial quantities as a cheap way to add bulk, i.e. sugar and salt are much cheaper than what is supposed to be in there. The formulation of these non-foods is now decided by accountants not nutritionists. Never mind that we now have several generations of porkers with rotten teeth and high blood pressure, not to mention diabetes and all manner of other complaints.

At the end of the day people are responsible for their own, and their children’s health, but it is not easy, especially if you have kids, to make the right choices, there is a lot of pressure to keep eating the junk. It would be much easier if the junk wasn’t there in the first place, but let’s make sure we don’t take out something harmful and replace it with something else harmful. We are now facing a situation where most children are not going to live as long as their parents generation; I suppose it helps to reduce the population but it is an expensive way of doing it. I am happy to say that my family and friends are all pretty good in this respect. Obviously, the best thing we can do is boycott the companies that are ruining our health; however, I will not be holding my breath waiting for that to happen. So, we are back down to my usual scenario, the alternative. We can eat healthily but, unfortunately, we still have to pay for the health problems of all those who don’t. We can carry on trying to educate them, and TV and social media are useful for this, but most of them don’t watch programs by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and they can get quite aggressive about middle class fuckers telling them not to eat traditional British food like oven chips, turkey twizzlers and microwave chicken tikka marsala. When schools banned kids from going out for take-aways some of them wobbled all the way to the schools to pass their kids junk food through the railings at lunchtime. So, bad habits pass from generation to generation, it should really be classed as abuse giving your kids nothing but junk food, but as I said it would make life much easier health wise if there was no junk food in the first place. Having said that we are all allowed the occasional lapse, with the middle classes especially the older ones it is wine, but it’s OK if you aim to eat healthily most of the time, and have few nights off the booze every week.

So, back to the squash situation, and artificial sweeteners being added to my usual squash. It very often turns out there is at least some advantage to nearly everything that happens. In this case I popped into Booths in Windemere on the way home from my walk the other day and found the solution, a range of traditional flavoured cordials. They do have sugar in them but no artificial sweeteners, so I just don’t drink too much and dilute it a bit more than they say especially for walking drinks. I am drinking Belvoir ginger cordial at the moment and very nice too, with some fizzy water, still water when walking, for those alcohol-free nights. Still to try is Mrs Fitzpatricks dandelion and burdock and sarsaparilla. Next on my shopping list is a soda stream so I don’t need to buy fizzy water in plastic bottles. I am also going to try and find some old recipes, nothing in my “Mrs Beetons” surprisingly, and have a go at making my own. I remember home made ginger beer when I was a kid, it was called Albert and you had to get some from someone else to start it. Actually, it would just have been the yeast in it that was put in to make it fizzy. It would have been mildly alchoholic more so if you kept it for a while and I had an uncle who professed to be tee-total but he drank Albert by the gallon!!

Bye for now have fun rechecking all those labels. Actually, unless it says no artificial additives or sweeteners it almost certainly will have. My apologies to Morrisons they do sell the Belvoir ginger cordial.