The Cornish Bakery Cheese and Sugar Scones

What kind of weirdo adds sugar when making cheese scones? Sugar?

Well The Cornish Bakery think it’s acceptable.

A little while ago we had a couple of cheese scones from The Cornish Bakery in Southwold. We didn’t eat them in Southwold but ‘ate’ them later at home in Norwich. I say ate but in reality very little was consumed. On first biting into them you could tell that they had an awful lot of sugar in them. They would have been very sweet even for sweet scones. But high sugar content with cheese just tasted vile. Utterly vile. My partner took one bite and said ‘they’ve got sugar in them’ and being a diabetic didn’t eat any more. I got a bit further. I don’t like to waste food so ate several bites but in the end I just had to give up. It was hardly practical to take them back to the shop so I complained via Twitter. Apart from gleaning that they do actually have sugar in their recipe, a brief apology and them asking for my email address I have heard no more. No offer to refund our money. Very poor customer service.

I’ve consulted several recipes to make sure it is not me that’s out of step, but none of them suggest putting sugar in them. No wonder we have a problem with obesity, type two diabetes and other sugar related problems when companies do this sort of thing.

Oh Moses! - Murder in the family - Update

I've been meaning to write this blog post for quite some time. Back in 2011 I wrote a blog about my great, great grandfather Moses Whiting. He sadly murdered his youngest son, and as a result spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor. I speculated in my previous post the Moses might have had Huntington's Disease. But my theory about my great, great grandfather having Huntington's Disease might well be wrong.

About a year and a half ago I was contacted by a member of the Binks family. William Whiting, my great grandfather (Moses Whiting's son), married Elizabeth Binks. Elizabeth Binks was my grandmother's mother. My grandmother (and subsequently my father) had HD. Perhaps it didn't come from the Whiting line after all?

So when Moses in a fit of pique murdered his young son it might well not have been due to HD. Or maybe by some cruel twist of fate both sides of the family had the disease; either because HD was a bit more common in this region, or because it was a tight-knit community and some family connection occurred at some point before the birth of Moses. We will never know the answer.

Mind over matter

Last week I spent two days on a Mental Health First Aid course. I must say the more contact I have with the mental health charity Mind the more respect I have for them. Their two day First Aid course is most helpful, but there were one or two things that shocked me. First up, out of the twelve of us that attended, I was the only man. The person delivering the course was a man and another man came along to share his experiences but apart from that it was all women. Secondly when we came to the section on suicide I was very shocked to discover that the suicide rate for males is three times that of females. I don't think it's just that men are more successful at it. They just don't want to talk.

Men have an issue with health and as for mental health it's a definite no no. It seems to me that a lot of men are dying because they just won't talk about stuff. How to get men to talk? I have no idea. All I know is men need to chill a bit and give in to their feminine side. Do that and there's hope. Macho is a terminal disease. It consigns men to an early grave one way or another. So come on chaps let's talk. It's not cissy to have problems of stress or depression or prostate problems or libido problems. It's perfectly natural. Talking helps. So come on guys next time you're sharing a beer, sod the football, get chatting about touchy feely stuff like feelings and bodily functions. You'll feel a shed load better about it I promise.

Oh Moses! - Murder in the family

If you have a blog or a website you will know what hours of fun can be had from looking at the ‘search statistics’. These are the terms that people enter into a search engine that then bring them to your site. I like the serendipitous nature of it all. Some search terms are quite bizarre but I do like the strange but small degrees of separation that link sites around the interweb. But little did I know that when I looked at the statistics a few months ago where they would lead me or what would be revealed. It shocked me I can tell you, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me a little while to write about it.

One of my blog posts that gets quite a lot of hits is about a visit I made to Chatham Dockyard. Most of the hits seem to be generated by the bit about a Stanley Spencer exhibition. But I also wrote about the rope-making factory that they have there. In the piece I happen to mention the Haverhill Rope Works, a business that my great-grandfather William Whiting had a part share in. It was a search for ‘Haverhill rope works’ that lead me to discover quite a shocking fact. There can’t be that many people that knew about or would want to search for the Haverhill rope works. My curiosity was such that I had to find out what else came up apart from blog when I searched. I was not surprised to find the Museum of East Anglian Life came near the top for they actually have a rope making machine from the Haverhill factory. My blog was listed at that all important Nº7 spot. Just above was an entry entitled ‘William Whiting 1864-1941 - Haverhill Whitings’. I was intrigued. I had to visit this site. The site in question turns out to be a lovingly researched reference by Simon Hutchison who is like me descended from Haverhill Whitings. There on the page in question was mention of my great-grandfather, along with his wife and children, one of whom was my grandmother and several other great aunts and uncles that I had known.

It was then that I noticed Simon's mention of Moses Whiting “William was the eldest child of Moses and Emma Whiting. He was born in 1864 in Burton End, Haverhill, where he appears on the 1871 census. By this time he has two sisters, Emma and Alice, and a brother, John. Another brother, James, was born in 1874 but two years later tragedy befell him when he was murdered by his father.” In a sad and cruel irony great-great-grandfather had broken one of the commandments allegedly revealed by his namesake. That commandment was ‘thou shalt not kill’. It would seem that my great-great-grandfather had committed murder by taking the life of his own son, and by the newspaper account that Simon Hutchison references, it is a sad, sorry and macabre tale.

The newspaper report about the incident and in particular the coroner’s hearing suggests that there was a history of madness within the family: “The prisoner’s awful affliction is certainly hereditary, for a long list of attempted suicides, and, in fact, suicides which have been committed by various members of the prisoner’s family are mentioned.” The report makes reference to Moses in the court saying that he did not take the slightest interest in the proceedings and spent most of the time shuffling back and forth on his seat. Later on in the hearing there is reference made to Moses possibly suffering from Delirium Tremens although it was stated he had not taken drink for three or four weeks. There is also reference to the brother of Moses being in an asylum. Despite the jury’s verdict of “Wilful Murder” it is clear that this poor soul, my great-great-grandfather was not in charge of his mental faculties when he took the life of his two year old son.

Thankfully Moses did not face that most abhorrent of punishments, the death penalty, but instead the poor soul spent the rest of his days in Broadmoor. I have no doubt that Broadmoor was no picnic and that he suffered under a regime that probably neither recognised what his condition was nor was able to treat it particularly effectively.

As I pointed out in a previous post my father has HD. Huntington’s Disease is a particularly cruel disease that attacks parts of the brain, it affects different people in different ways, generating a number of symptoms including aggressive behaviour, involuntary movements and a whole host of others that are equally unpleasant. My grandmother Elsie, the granddaughter of Moses also had HD. HD is hereditary. Unfortunately I don’t know if my great-grandfather William had it, and it is possible that grandma received her faulty gene from her mother, but William selling his share of the Haverhill Rope Works at an early-ish age and moving to a different town suggests that he may we have had the disease even if it was never identified as such. My mother has told me that when my grandmother apparently first showed signs of HD relatives had said it as ‘nerves’ and suggested there was a history of ‘nerves’ in the family. Whilst I can prove nothing, I suspect it was grandma’s father William that had HD, and that it had been passed down from his father Moses. Every mention of Moses in the newspaper report points to behaviour consistent with Huntington’s disease. He was probably never diagnosed at the time with it because the first thorough description of the disease, by George Huntington, was only published four years before in 1872, and in the USA. There is no cure for HD. The only treatment is a range of drugs and dietary aids to help subdue the effects of its onset. Treatments that poor Moses would never had a chance to receive.

It doesn’t bear thinking about how tormented, ridiculed and abused a number of my ancestors must have been. They must have suffered terribly at the hands of people who I’m sure were quick to look at superstition for answers to why they displayed the symptoms that they did. No wonder it is alleged that a number attempted and some committed suicide. It could be that I have this awful condition, and whilst there still is no cure I am thankful that the treatment I will receive if I do will be so much more humane than the punishment presumably metered out on many a poor Whiting in years gone by.

I will never know if my grandmother knew about the murder in the family but I’m pretty sure my father doesn’t. Unfortunately in his present condition I don’t feel able to discuss it with him. My mother certainly didn’t know about it and she is confident that if father did know about he would have shared it with her whilst they were married. I am thankful to Simon Hutchison’s painstaking and comprehensive research into the Whiting family history for bringing this to light.


Updated here on 27/5/17

Semicircular canals

Don’t worry I haven’t gone all leather elbow patch and topographical on you. For the last week and a half I have felt like shit. Popular medical opinion would seem to be that after an initial diagnosis of “bulging eardrums” and “fluid in my middle ear” I’ve been suffering with a blockage in or before my semicircular canals. I was told at the surgery that there was nothing that they could do for me. It would sort of its own accord. Although they did persuade me to try an exercise that involved breathing in holding my nose and then letting blasts of air out once pressure had built up substantially. It gave me ear-ache and didn’t alleviate the symptoms. Reading up on the NHS website suggested that what I had should last around three or four days. Clearly my ears have to be awkward and attention seeking. Not content with being a bog-standard blockage the problem has to go on for a week and a half. The result is that you feel like you’ve downed ten pints and then been marooned in a dingy on the high seas during a force eight. My days would start with me sitting up in bed with the room spinning. This would last for anything from one to three hours and it was all about being vertical. I knew I had to be sitting upright and vertical for the duration to enable the room to stop spinning. Even once that feeling had subsided I still had problems with my sense of balance as well as a permanent feeling of nausea. I put up with this for just over a week when I decided enough was enough.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before but I suddenly remembered ear candles. I figured that at the very least they would get things moving a bit. The lady went off into the city, returning later with a couple of packs along with a bottle of a fresh herb tincture of Plantago drops from these people. I immediately started on my first set of drops followed closely by the ear candle treatment. I won’t go into too much detail but the candles did bring quite a lot of muck out. I then proceeded with an intense course of vapour rub steam inhalation, four or five times a day. That night I also slept with an extra pillow under my head. My thinking for this was that given that if it did need to drain, lying almost flat wasn’t going to help. The next day saw me feeling worse than ever. I was prepared for this though. I believe they call this a ‘healing crisis’. Undeterred I carried on with the tincture and the frequent steam inhalations. Thankfully by day three it appeared to have yielded results. Today was the first day in over a week and a half that the room didn’t spin when I awoke. I’ve been able to go to work and get through the day without wanting to give up and die. At the height of the discomfort you think that it’ll never end. Thankfully today, even though I’m not fully back to normal I do feel that I am getting better.

Of course I can’t categorically state that any of my home treatments have helped to cure me. They could just be placebo or a coincidental. But I’m convinced that the ear candles did at least a small amount of good because of the amount of wax they brought to the surface. Either way I’m thankful that I appear to be on the road to recovery.

I hope in some small way that I can help others who might be suffering in the same way with this information.

My father has HD, HD has my father

People usually look at you with a blank expression if you mention HD, or Huntington’s Disease. Most people have never heard of it, unless they’ve had some experience of it; perhaps from having met someone with it, worked in a caring profession or have family members with it. I suppose because it is not as widespread as something like Alzheimer's or as well known as MS. It is a genetic disease that is passed down directly from parent to child, and it cannot skip a generation. My grandma had it and now my father has it. And for all I know it could be me next. In grandma’s day it was known as Huntington’s Chorea, the Chorea describing the erratic limb movements that are one of the symptoms and characteristics of this cruel and wasting disease. This BBC web page offers a concise but reasonable explanation of what the disease is all about. For a more detailed information go to The Huntington's Disease Association.

As children we watched grandma’s deterioration with both bemusement and amusement. One occasion amongst many that will stick in my mind for ever was at a family tea party when grandma picked up the left-over crusts from my cousins plate, popped them into her mouth, eating them instead of her intended target, the untouched sandwich on the plate in front. It is to my eternal shame that I admit that we laughed heartily at this incident. Kids can be really cruel.

Grandma died at a relatively early age. She was in her early sixties. She was lucky enough, if I might be permitted to describe it like that, to die of a heart attack. She was spared the horrors of physical deterioration and then dying through painful complications brought about by HD. I’m not sure my father is going to fare quite as well. At almost eighty my dad is now on a definite downward spiral. Wasting away. I won’t go into detail as I don’t feel that would be right but as a son that has not always been that close to his father it is still very disturbing to witness. I’m pretty sure that all my life I have been a disappointment to my father. I was never really that interested in sport, diy or outdoor pursuits. I’ve always been the arty and cerebral type. Puny but philosophical. I’m not sure dad has ever understood what makes me tick, a feeling that is mutual. That said I still feel for my dad. I witness his bewilderment and frustration. It is as if he’s strapped in to a mysterious and scary roller-coaster ride. He has no control over the journey and he’s not totally sure of the destination. Sadly as a spectator I’m pretty sure I know where that destination is.

Given that my father has HD there is a good chance that amongst me and my sisters some if not all of us could well be struck down by this horrible disease. There is a test that would determine if I have the faulty gene and therefore could potentially develop the disease. But as there is no cure or any way of delaying it I don’t see the point of having the sword of Damocles hanging over me. I prefer to get on with life rather than worry greatly about if and when the symptoms might show. Besides something else could well get me before the HD works its magic. We are all mortal and we all have to deal with that fact in our own little way.

“Poor in UK dying 10 years earlier than rich, despite years of government action”

That’s a headline from the Guardian website today. It is sub-titled: “Department of Health and NHS criticised for making too little progress on tackling key barometer of inequality”. I think the point is being missed, big time!

Medical science and the health service have both come a long way in my lifetime. I think the NHS do a great job under the circumstances, and that’s not damning with faint praise. The NHS can only do so much on the life expectancy front. Throwing more money, resources and new procedures at ‘the problem’ I suspect would not really yield a significant return. It is not an NHS problem. There is a clue to the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ in the Guardian headline. It is the poor who are dying. The poor! Perhaps some of it is down to the standard of health care delivered, but I expect the greatest reason for the poor dying earlier than the rich is because they are poor. Poverty is a curable disease, but I don’t think it will be cured by a wonder-drug from some mega-rip-off-pharmaceutical company. Poverty might be a health issue but it is surely outside of the remit of the NHS.

Whilst we have poverty in this country, and whilst we continue to lack the courage to tackle the great wealth inequalities, the poor will continue to die prematurely, prisons will remain full, crime rates will soar, drug and alcohol dependency will continue to wreak havoc and social cohesion will remain a far off dream.

Equality saves lives.

We love the NHS

The Norfolk & Norwich Hospital has been great looking after my lady and her broken ankle. I love the NHS and I urge you to add your support.

You can read about the Conservative's conditional love for the NHS here.

"I have been profoundly moved by the enormous groundswell of support for the NHS in the last few days. A genuinely National Health Service ‘introduced by a Labour government in the teeth of opposition from the Conservatives and the medical establishment‘ is one of our nation’s finest achievements." - Gordon Brown

We’re all doomed!

THE RECESSION IS OVER!

The recession, that catastrophic financial near-Armageddon is over. We are no longer going to be forever bankrupt as a nation. The reason: The Media has a new scare to generate an abundance of hot air. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! Well I suppose that’s stating the bleedin’ obvious, but our doom is considerably more impending than perhaps we imagined if the newspapers, radio and telly are to be believed. Swine Flu is the latest craze, and boy are they going to town on it.

The News Media could best be described as a nagging old busybody, and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”* It seems to have nothing better to do than whip the public up into frenzy. In a world where there is so much disease, famine, poverty, injustice and war that largely goes unreported it is sickening when something that affects a few white people gets so heavily reported.

We received this email at work today. Opportunist or what?

I fully expect that any day now that a newspaper will report that the government has awarded a contract to Capita to recruit staff to push hand-carts, ring hand-bells and shout “bring out you dead!”

Is it me?






* Queen Gertrude - Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, by Willy the Spear shaker

My poor old back

A couple of weeks ago I hurt my back. I know exactly how I did it. I did it carrying my work-provided laptop. And before you all think what a wimp I am I’ll explain. I've had the laptop, from new, for about two years or so. It is a Dell of generous proportions, so a somewhat weighty beast. The case that it was provided with could be described as robust. I think it's been designed to withstand nuclear fallout. As a consequence the combination of bag and computer make their presence felt. Now, enter the need to get to the railway station in limited time and you have the makings of a disaster waiting to happen. Well it did, albeit in a perhaps more subtle way than you might imagine. Picture this. The strap was on my left shoulder and the bag itself was resting around my right hip area. This is all very well when you are standing still or even strolling along minding the view. But when walking a pace to catch a train Newton's law of motion comes into play. Your striding motion causes the bag to bang on your hip and then fly out side wards, a process that repeats continuously as you rush. To counteract this process I held the bag against my body to stop it flapping about. At the same time I must have braced myself in such a way that the whole process pulled a muscle or strained my back in some other fashion. All I know is that by the time I got home I was in agony. East Midlands' trains don't help of course with their ancient cattle-truck-carriages designed for short-arsed fuckers with 25" inside leg measurements.

After a night's sleep my back felt marginally better, so I went off to work, but as the day wore on it got more and more painful and started to stiffen up. That evening I had arranged to meet a friend at the Norwich Beer Festival. The venue is St Andrew's hall, an old church. We sat in the cloisters drinking our ale. I must say that the alcohol helped to deaden the pain, but at the same time the draft passing us where we sat was weaving its own spell. I arrived home and sat down for a while with a nice cup of tea. It was when I tried to get up that it hit me. I couldn't. I crawled to bed on my hands and knees in the most excruciating pain, and that's where I stayed for the next twenty-four hours, only moving to go to the toilet.

Sitting on the lavvy was the worst thing. No, I take that back. Getting up from sitting on it was what was really bad. Straightening up was just so painful. Standing up or lying out flat were fine, just anything in between didn't work quite so well.

After two weeks I’m still in some pain, but it is getting better. One of the joys of getting older is that defective parts of your body take a damned sight longer to repair than when you are young and supple. And sometimes they don't always fully repair. Who said that fifty was the new thirty?

Two for the price of three anyone?

There are some worrying noises coming out of the government at the moment on the subject of alcohol. The latest is about a crackdown on youngsters drinking in the streets; an interesting diversion from the usual binge drinking argument. The governmental solution would seem to be up the duty to such a rate that people can’t afford to get drunk. I also suspect that there are a few that would happily ban drink all together, although I don’t see prohibition being introduced here.

According to the BBC, “the home secretary is also demanding that drink manufacturers do more to stop alcohol being sold to under-18s”.

Apart from the drinks industry pumping money into advertising/education about drinks awareness I’m not sure what effective measures they could take. As an industry they could get together and agree to up the price of alcohol, but that would constitute a cartel, which is of course illegal.

Whilst some off-licences, pubs and clubs are no doubt guilty of promoting ‘binge drinking’ with promotions of various sorts, by far the biggest culprit in the cheap booze stakes is the supermarkets. When they are selling lager or cider at less than the price of bottled water you know there is a problem. Alcohol has never been as cheap in living memory as it is now, I’m sure. If duty goes up supermarkets will still continue to be cheap in relative terms. I’m a great believer in the nanny-state, so for me the answer would be for the government to set minimum prices for all alcohol wherever it was sold. For example if beer and cider had a minimum price of around £2.00 per pint it might well slow people down a bit. As would comparable prices for wine and spirits. A fair price for alcohol would be so much better than the extremes we live with now. A radical idea, and for all I know currently illegal under EU law. But an idea that’s less crazy than a duty hike. Discuss.

Neither were Gerald

I've agonised about whether or not I should write about the following subject. I've been concerned that it might be seen as looking for sympathy. I can assure you that I'm not. I'm writing about the following because I want to raise awareness.

Nothing can prepare you for being told that you have cancer. When you are first told it's a tremendous shock. You feel numb. It brings home to you that you are indeed mortal. My lady had been getting on at me (in a nice way) to get a two-coloured mole that I had on my arm checked out by the doctor. Eventually I did. It wasn't my normal doctor that I saw, but one at the practice who I think is close to retirement. He pronounced that “it is probably nothing to worry about”, but arranged for me to have it removed a week later by my doctor. I don't really believe in omens, but as I walked down to the doctors the following week for my surgery, a wasp flew into my face, landed on my lip, and as I brushed it away the bastard stung me. There I was lying on the operating chair with a fat lip while a piece of me was being removed. It didn’t look or feel good.

A week later, I returned to have the stitching/wound examined, being told by the nurse that it was healing up nicely. Indeed it healed up to what looked like quite a nice little scar. About three weeks later I got home from work to find a message on our answer phone from my doctor asking me to ring him. My heart sank. I knew exactly why he had rung. He told me that the tests on the mole that he had removed had shown that it was a superficial melanoma. He was going to refer me to a skin specialist at the hospital. The appointment at the hospital revealed that I would need to have more skin removed from my arm where the melanoma had been to see if there was any more cancer present. After an inspection of my torso it was decided that I was also to have a mole removed from my face. Two separate operations. I also had my initial wound and two moles photographed with measurement stickers stuck on me prior to being snapped.

The first operation at the hospital was to have the extra skin removed from my arm. It was quite a hefty cut, which now it has healed, looks like an act of desperation where I've tried to slit my wrist at some point in the past. Thankfully when the results came back there had been no more cancer found. But there was still the matter of the mole on my face. This was quite a painful experience. The doctor was very good. After lots of grinning and general face making he took his pen to my face and mapped out the incision he would finally make. I think the pain was mainly due to the blood vessels and nerve ending on your face being close to the surface. Or something like that. It started to heal up nicely and will hopefully blend into my face quite well. My only hope was that I didn't have to have more surgery.

Yesterday a letter arrived from the consultant. I wanted to know the results but at the same time I was somewhat apprehensive. I was so overjoyed when it said that the second mole was benign and that no further treatment was required. Words cannot explain the relief I felt!

I would urge anyone that has either two-coloured or odd shaped moles about their person to go see their doctor. I'm so glad I did!

the mole that is no more