THE CRANBERRIES

Grumpy Old Man Blog #34

Don't you still hate cranberries.  Some of you may remember that, a while ago, I complained about the number of products we were now seeing over here with cranberries unnecessarily added to them.  Well, I still hate them!  And they get into everything.  Uninvited.  Smoothies, juices, cereals, pop groups; the list is endless.  It's either an Ocean Spray plot to take over the world or there's a world glut and they have so many of the damn things they have to hide them in other foods.  Well hide them in someone else's food, thank you very much.  Or better still - leave them in the trees or under the ground or wherever they come from.  All that trouble to pick them (or dig them up) and then nowhere to put them except in my breakfast, and lunch, and even in my dinner.

Strawberry, blueberry, banana and cranberry smoothie.  What's the cranberry for?  It's no doubt because cranberries taste so tart on their own that no one can eat them without concealing them under other fruit or tons of sugar.  Well just leave them out then!

Stilton with cranberries.  Agh!  What's so wrong with Stilton that we can't have it without cranberry contamination?  Stilton with red spots?!

Last night I had pate, served on little water biscuits.  They looked rather nice.  'Oh, I hope you like these,' said the hostess.  'The pate has cranberries in it.'  In a pate!!  What's that all about?

Then today I was offered mince pies.  'These are made with cranberry mincemeat for a change.'  Cranberry mincemeat!!!  Surely that's an oxymoron?  I have been eating mincemeat ever since it was invented and never has it required cranberries in it.  That lovely brown, sweet, aromatic, almost meaty flavour, sticky with syrup and sultanas!  Not a bit reddy in colour and stuck with cranberries!!  'No, I'll have the original sort, thanks.  That last one was fabulous!  Full of fruity flavour and oozing sugar'.  'But that was a cranberry one.'  Oh.

INCLEMENT WEATHERSPOONS

Grumpy Old Man Blog #33

Don’t you just hate Weatherspoons pubs!  I ate there last night and I couldn’t believe the place.

Weatherspoons come to our nice little towns and villages, taking away valuable business from the old established pubs, restaurants and cafes that we love.  They buy up beautiful old buildings, usually existing pubs, and then do them up, turning them into pubs with restaurants attached, packed with people and just destroying the run-down, slightly dirty, character of the original place.  

The Red Lion in Petersfield is just one such.  It incorporates the oldest pub in the town and is itself an important 18^th century coaching inn (the old London – Portsmouth road ran past here).  Then along come Bloody Weatherspoons.  And what do they do?  They waltz in, renovate everything, restoring all the lovely timbers to their original condition, and generally clean up and prettify the place.  It is now a spectacular example of old inn construction.  And I’ve seen exactly the same sort of wholesale refurbishing in Haslemere with the old Swan coaching inn – lots of original timbers preserved and displayed, sympathetic treatment of the old dining room and generally bringing the place back to its original glory.  They reportedly spent nearly a million quid on doing up the Red Lion.  But they don’t fool me!

The carpet!  I mean what’s that all about?  It’s thick and luxurious and a subtle mauvey colour, very much in keeping with this year’s living room colour schemes, according to the designer catalogues.  But why would you go to a designer catalogue for your furnishings?  And who has a fashionable carpet in their living room?!  It makes all the hundreds of customers lounging around with their wines and beers feel as though they’re relaxing at home.  Who wants to feel at home in a pub?!!!  And comfortable at that!!!!  There are even corners with easy chairs and bookcases of books that you can read whilst enjoying a coffee.  Lots of people take advantage of this facility, but who really wants that?  Pubs should be heaving and jolly and noisy and filled with laughter.  The Red Lion is all those things too, but that’s not the point.

And talking of beers – they have hundreds of different brands on offer, from all over the world.  How are you expected to choose?  Even if you manage 6, as I did, you can’t get through half of the range on offer.  And now I see they’re having a beer festival next month.  A beer festival!  Anyone would think this was a pub.  Well, it is of course, but we don’t need even more varieties of beer to choose from, do we.  There will not only be all the international bottled beers (one was from Latvia for goodness sake!), but now they are offering a dozen different cask-conditioned ales too.  I ask you!!

Coffee, by the way, I shouldn’t let them get off without telling you about the coffee, costs 99p.  Where else in the whole of Petersfield can you get a coffee for 99p?  And that’s cappuccino, latte, mocha, whatever you want.  Any old rubbish in fact.  Even down the Methodist Church it costs £1.  And there you have to promise not to do any evil for a while in exchange.  I bet Weatherspoons don’t insist on you being good.  Ha!

And, finally, the food.  Do you know, we ordered steak and kidney pudding with chips and peas (and extra gravy) which I only just managed to polish off, chilli con carne with rice, sour cream, etc, which was apparently also almost too much to finish, and 2 glasses of a rather excellent Cabernet Sauvignon, and that little lot cost, what do you think?  Go on, guess.  It cost £9.  Yes!!!!  How can someone who’s completely honest charge 2 unsuspecting elderly customers £9 for their dinner?  Isn’t it fabulous?  I mean terrible.

THINK BUSTED HEAD

Grumpy Old Man Blog #32

Don’t you just hate bikers!  They come into town in swarms, they occupy all the best spaces in the car park (and pay less for parking than real drivers), they drink all the beer in the local, and then they ride off with our girlfriends.  Actually, I don’t know why I said that last one.  Do they steal girls’ hearts away?  To be honest, I’m not aware of any fat, greasy bikers capturing any part of any of my girlfriends.  Perhaps bikers just have an image problem. 

OK, so not bikers then.  It’s the bikes, isn’t it?  Don’t you really hate bikes!  Can you imagine, if you invented the motorbike today, trying to get a roadworthiness certificate for one?  ‘So you want to go out on the road in a car with only 2 wheels?  Won’t you have to keep moving or fall over?  Oh, you’d put your foot down and hold the thing up manually when you stop.  So you have no doors or surrounding bodywork then?  You wear a suit of armour presumably to protect you.  No?!  Just jeans!  And where would the airbags go?  Oh, no airbags.  What about the bumpers on the front, how would they work in an accident?  No bumpers.  Right.  So you’d need extra strong seat belts.  Oh, don’t tell me, no seat belts.  So you have a vehicle where you sit on the fuel tank, with the engine between your knees, which travels at 100mph, and you wear nothing but jeans and a jacket (oh, and a scarf!), have no windscreen, no doors, no seat belts, no bumpers, no air bags, and the passenger sits behind you with their arms round you to hold on?  And you want to take that out onto the road?’

All the way along the main highway into the West Country they have signs saying ‘Think Bike’.  I have done.  What a stupid vehicle!  But why should I think bike at all?  This is pure discrimination, suggesting that a vehicle with 2 wheels is more worthy of attention than one with 18 wheels, say, or even one wheel.  Actually you don’t see many one-wheeled vehicles on the motorway into Devon.  But the highway is packed with traffic – 18-wheel intercontinental trucks full of groceries from Lithuania, SUVs full of children who have been taken out of school so that Mum and Dad can have a holiday on the cheap, and maybe just the odd unicycle.  ‘Is There a Biker in Your Mirror?’; that’s another sign you see along this road.  What’s wrong with bikers thinking ‘car’ or ‘truck’?  Don’t they have motor cars and trucks in their mirrors?  I’m far too busy thinking about that truck looming up in my mirror to think biker.  But surely, if you’re going to zoom around on a petrol tank, with an engine between your knees, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and a leather jacket, you’d be thinking car or truck or anything in fact on the road.  Why should I have to watch out for these suicidal lunatics?

They’re not all be suicidal lunatics?  OK, maybe it’s the notices, not the bikers, that I hate.  If you like to feel the wind zipping through your clothing and can’t afford a suit of armour, you don’t really have much choice but to wear jeans and ride a bike, I suppose.  Well, you could stand on the hill at Blackdown in your pyjamas perhaps; that’s quite a windy spot.  But there are no pubs up there.  Or girls very often.  And they seem to prefer leather to winceyette anyway.  And if you like leather jackets, I guess the bike is a natural progression.

Yes, that’s it; it's not the bikers or the bikes - it’s the notices.  Don’t you just hate them!  There is one on a particular stretch of main road, just as you enter Devon, which says, ‘7 bikers injured in the last 3 years.’  Surely this is a warning to bikers to steer clear of this lethal strip of tarmac.  It can’t mean I’ve got to get out of the way if a bike comes screaming along the road, can it?  It doesn’t mean that I have to think ‘bike’; it must mean that bikers have to think, ‘golly, this is a dangerous bit of road, I’ll go carefully along here.’  Doesn’t it?  And anyway 7 injured isn’t very many.  And ‘in 3 years’ doesn’t make for a very significant statistic actually.

Did you know – 10 people are injured every year from falling off chairs in their kitchen while trying to reach a jar of Nutella or Peanut Butter on the top shelf of the cupboard?  (Notice it’s never Marmite by the way, a much safer condiment to handle, especially when standing on one leg on a carver or a stool).  And 5 people a year are taken to hospital with fish bones stuck in their throats.  These are much more frequent and much more serious accidents.  And there is, so far, no regulatory regime for a chair or a fish knife either.  Yet you never see signs saying ‘Think Kitchen’ or ‘Think Vertebrae’, do you?  And no one has put up a sign saying ‘Watch Out for Housewives Standing on Chairs’ or ‘Is There a Seabass in your Mirror?’. 

Clearly this all has to stop.  What we need are signs all over the country saying, ‘If You’re Daft Enough to Ride Round on a Bike Without Chainmail, Think (if you’re capable of this action at all) Other Vehicles’. 

I sat in a traffic jam on my way back from the West Country on Sunday and streams of bikers swept past me down the middle of the road.  Yes, there was a biker in my mirror almost the whole time.  And they were getting back to a nice comfortable home with someone else’s girlfriend, while I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but read silly notices about bikes and bikers.  But then I realised how those hapless 7 bikers were injured.  It wasn’t from some freak accident as they overtook stationary motor cars and fell into a drainage ditch; it wasn’t from riding into an 18-wheel Lithuanian food truck or a rare shoal of seabass; it was from 7 jealous motorists who got out of their cars and hit them.  That’ll teach them to evade sensible road safety legislation, take our girlfriends and get home first.  So, if you fancy getting out onto the highway on your Super Cub C50 or your GL1800, think going north, young man, or east, or south, but, unless you feel you need to take even more risks, heed the notices and avoid the west on the last sunny weekend of summer.

Here’s a biker song from the Fountains of Wayne.