Tag Archives: greens

After the Election

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The Artist – Charlie Uzzel-Edwards

Well, I voted. I then wrote about it several times. My views on compulsory voting (with musings on enfranchisement and the Chartists) tend to take me off message).

So do my thoughts on Police Commissioners and why we don’t need such as elected law enforcement personnel and no win-no fee lawyers. I deleted them.

So, I will treat this as third time lucky and try to stick to the results. The Green party seems to be doing well. Reform is doing even better. To me that means that people are more concerned with illegal immigration than they are with climate change.

OK, fourth time, as the third time was a bit dull.

The local Green candidate won. We also got an extra Green councillor in Peterborough, meaning we now have six. . So far, so good. There are 8 Peterborough First councillors and 9 Independents, plus Conservative, Reform, Labour and LibDem. It is a very fragmented council and nobody has overall control. At one time, according to  newspaper article last year 25% of sitting councillors had been elected for a party that was different to the one they were currently claiming to be in. That often happens where you have Greens, Independents and someone in  a party with a town name and “First” after it.

Nationally the Greens did quite well, despite the fact we are supposedly anti-semitic and Reform did even better because they are riding a wave of populism.

And that is a summary of politics in England today – the big winner is a party led by a man who accepted a £5,000,000 gift from a businessman who wants nothing in return, is a friend of Donald Trump and has, several times,  been caught out for using anti-semitic and racist language.

In Wales Reform is going to be the second biggest party but in Scotland they did not prosper. The Greens won two seats in each country, which is a start.

Counting is still proceeding.

However, despite the shifts in power I don’t expect much will change, because they never do, The political climate will probably become less compassionate towards refugees, and to those with immigrant backgrounds, parties which promise a lot in opposition often fail to life up to the rhetoric when they come into contact with reality.

 

 

Dumplings, Dreams and Diet

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As I sit here at my desk (which is actually the dining table covered in junk) I can hear the gentle bubbling of a vegetable stew on the top of the stove and smell the waft of garlic and simmering vegetables. I am  a simple man and this is my simple life.

That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t like the £900,000 house I have just viewed on the internet. It’s just outside the Lake District National Park and has outbuildings, an office an acre of garden and a section of fishing rights. I am sighing as I write. I don’t need the hot tub in the conservatory, as sitting in a warm bacterial soup has little charm to me. However, it will be somewhere to keep a pet alligator, I suppose.

However, I take some consolation in the thought that it was an  excellent vegetable stew and the dumplings were top class. It’s been at least six months from my last dumpling, so it was a welcome seasonal change to the diet.

The other seasonal variation to watch out fro is the increasing number of greens in my diet. This is a phenomenon noted by the Anti-Coagulant Service, and not just in me. People start eating more greens around Christmas, and these greens act as an antidote to the Warfarin. It has happened to me several times at this time of year. I now try to eat more greens at all points of the year. It’s not the antidote effect that’s a problem, it’s the variation in diet throwing the Warfarin calculations out. Now I try to keep the consumption of greens up a bit more through the year so the seasonal change doesn’t show up.

A Quiet Day

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The lockdown continues, though in a much diluted form, and Nottingham’s uncut verges continue to be good for bees. I noticed this on the way to work, where the Gas Board continues to dig up our frontage and block access to the shop. I spent all day listing medals of Edward VIII and forgot to move so my legs seized up when I tried to get up.

bee-friendly-logo

We had saag paneer last night using the spice kit Number One Son arranged for us. We didn’t quite have all the ingredients, so we used some kale in place of the spinach. It had a notably different texture but worked quite well. I checked up, and it seems that saag is not, as I thought, spinach, but, depending on who you believe, either a mix of spinach and mustard greens, or simply mixed greens.

Always so much to learn.

We still have three spice mixes to use and will reconfigure the week’s shopping to use them all this week. Unfortunately Julia can’t find out how to cancel the spice subscription. As with so many of these offers (£1 for four spice kits) they make it difficult to cancel. Even worse, if you don’t order your next lot in time you have to take what they send you. That’s how Number One Son ended up making moqueca. I had to look it up – it’s Brazilian Fish Stew. I think I can do without this.

Number Two Son, still in Canada, applied for, and was turned down for, a job as a dog groomer. As he has no experience of dogs or grooming this was not unexpected. However, he has had a call back and they want him to work in some sort of management capacity. He has an amazing capacity for getting strange jobs. If he ever writes a book he will not be short of material for his biographical notes.

I think I’ll leave it there for now. Dog grooming and fish stew is quite enough excitement for one day.

Thinking of Food and Health

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We switched the heating on low a couple of nights ago and had the gas fire on last night because it’s getting a bit chilly. The fire was very dusty and didn’t do my throat a lot of good. At around six o’clock this morning I woke up wheezing like a pair of Victorian bellows with a painful cough and a dry throat.

It mainly passed within an hour, and I’m feeling pretty good now, though still a little tender in the throat.

This year is really proving to be a bit of a trial from the health point of view.

The good news is that in general I’m feeling much healthier than I have for some time. I attribute this to large quantities of turmeric and the new low carb diet (which mainly means no chips and no bread). The advantage with not eating bread is that you don’t eat any burgers or sugary spreads either. In truth the feeling of well-being may be coincidence, but by claiming credit for it I’m able to feel both healthy and virtuous.

I’m now looking at articles about superfoods and foods for winter. I’ve been a bit lax about this sort of thing over the last year so it’s time to tighten up.

Overnight oats with fruit for breakfast tomorrow, vegetable soup for lunch and Cottage Pie for tea (incorporating onions, peas and carrots) with sweet potato topping, cabbage and Brussels sprouts. I can probably work lentils and tinned tomatoes in too, so that should do wonders for my vegetable intake.