Chocaholics anonymous for me!

My colleague has just had to resort to a large bar of chocolate to get her through the stress that is the remainder of the working day.  Although she is a coeliac, she is able to buy large bars of milk chocolate from M&S that are gluten free and which she shares with the rest of us. Being  the person that sits next to her most days, I usually benefit quite nicely. I have had a large chunk today, as well as a bar of Twix. Just can’t resist.

Most of you know my love affair with the cocoa bean, which is responsible for quite a lot of my excess weight (although not all – the fermented grape and curry has quite an impact too). For me a dinner party isn’t a proper dinner party without a chocolate pudding of some sort (mousse, trifle, baked cheesecake etc) usually accompanied by extra thick double cream. Yum!

Chocolate is one of the major feel good foods of the world. Apparently it contains some enzyme or other which is similar to the one that is generated by the body during sex and which makes you feel fantastic. Can’t remember what it is, but it is mildly addictive and the more chocolate you have the more you crave it (presumably the same rule applies to sex!?)

I saw a programme on the telly the other day about how chocolate is actually produced in Ghana. The farmers there work for Fairtrade and use sustainable crops which they properly care for rather than treat them with growth hormones to get the maximum crop after which the plants die (as is the case elsewhere). The coca bean is the most unattractive thing, and whoever thought of extracting it and doing whatever they do to make Cadbury’s was a genius.

A few years ago I belonged to something called the Chocolate Tasting Club. For a payment of about £15 each month you got sent a box of the most gorgeous chocolates which were new fillings manufacturers worldwide were considering for their collections. You had to taste them all, and then give marks out of ten on a special website. Each month, one person won a box of posh chocolates worth £100. They have now been taken over by the retailer Hotel Chocolat, and have stopped giving away expensive boxes. And anyway I stopped being a member a couple of years ago – can’t afford it financially and weight wise – but it was fun while it lasted.

My next door neighbour has a pack of three bars of yummy chocolate next to her, so it must be a very stressful day indeed. I’ll have to go now and help her out!

Did video kill the radio star? I think not...

Friday. At last!

It seems like it’s been a long week and gosh, hasn’t it been cold? Even today, when the sun has been shining and there’s been enough blue in the sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers (an old saying of my mother’s) the wind has cut through you like a knife.

Most of the day, of course, I have been indoors slaving away over a hot keyboard, apart from the time when I nipped out to officially put my name down for a spot of volunteering.

Yes, you did read aright. Volunteering, but possibly not in the way that you think.

I am not going to work in an Oxfam shop sorting out rancid clothes from black sacks. I am not going to clean out animal cages at the RSPCA. I am not going to work at the local day centre serving up cabbage and gravy to toothless old ladies. No, I have volunteered to be a DJ at the local community radio station from 7am until 9am on a Saturday morning.

I got involved in this only recently through a friend (the lovely Alex) who already DJ’s this slot and wants someone to alternate with him, as getting up at some unearthly hour every Saturday morning as well as doing it in the week has got a little too much. The plan is that we share the slot for a few weeks until I feel confident and they trust me, then we do alternate weeks so we each get a week off and a lie in.

So today, I went over and met the head honcho, who is an ex BBC radio producer, to fill in the official forms and be initially approved. I seem to have passed the test, and tomorrow bright and early I will be broadcasting alongside Alex for the very first time.

I’m really quite excited about this, the 6.15 alarm call aside. It’s something I’ve always fancied having a go at and now I have the chance, although I have no idea whether I’ll be any good or not. Two hours is quite a long time to fill with popular music and chatter, and I have no idea whether I’ll cope. But it’s got to be worth a shot!

So if you’re up and about bright and early tomorrow tune in to Ridge Radio on the internet (www.ridgeradio.co.uk) and click on ‘Listen Live’ and you’ll hear Alex and me exchanging banal chatter and amusing anecdotes.

Apparently, they get an average of 10,000 listeners to the show, based upon the number of hits they get on their web pages. I had no idea so many people listened to web based stations, but they are growing all the time. Ridge do work experience for schools, training for kids that want to go and do media at university and loads of fund raising events and other stuff as well as broadcasting from 7am until 1am seven days a week, quite an achievement when you consider that most community radio just does a few hours on a Saturday only.

It’ll be fun, and although I’ll be knackered because of the early start (mornings are not my optimum time of day) I will thoroughly enjoy it. I went along with Alex last week just to see how it all worked and have a look at the equipment and this week I get to have a little go myself under his supervision! So if there are any nasty silences, that’s my fault.

Go on, tune in and see what you think. In a few weeks hopefully, I’ll be going solo, and then you can e-mail me with your messages, requests and dedications. Only nice ones, mind!

Tangled up in red tape

I have just been presented with a list of 180 separate pieces of red tape planning legislation to filter through and decide which we ought to comment upon, so that the government, bless their little cotton socks, can decide which to scrap and which to retain.

If my employers think I am going to read all that lot, they are seriously mistaken. I have foisted quite a few off onto colleagues, and have just gone through the headings of the rest trying to find something remotely interesting.

But the point is, why the f**k are there 180 separate pieces of legislation in the first place? If there are 180 just dealing with planning law, how many are there dealing with really serious stuff like care of vulnerable children and adults, with education and public health? No wonder the Civil Service is so huge; they must spend vast amounts of their time just filtering through this drivel trying to find something meaningful and useful.

To give credit where it is due, the Department of Communities and Local Government is trying to streamline stuff like this and that’s why they are asking for our comments. But they must know that the vast majority of it is useless and the rest could be distilled into one or two relatively short, plain English documents that would be understandable by planning geeks and Joe Public alike, and which would make all our lives easier. Why do they need us to tell them? Aren’t they supposed to be the experts?

But then CLG has been a shambles ever since the ignoramus Eric Pickles took the helm. What David Cameron sees in the man is a complete mystery, and how he survived the last reshuffle even more so. I have long been convinced that he is a Slitheen, which any aficionado of Doctor Who will know is an alien shaped like a big green pig which disguises itself inside a zipped up human skin, and which farts all the time in a particularly loud and noxious way. Having never been in the room with Mr Pickles I cannot personally comment on whether the farting takes place, but all the outward signs of Slitheen-ness are there.

So I am now going to waste probably several days of my life going through this rubbish just to say at the end of it that we ought to recommend scrapping 95% and rewriting the rest. Not that I’m pre-empting the outcomes, but it is almost inevitable. So I better get to it, or maybe I ought to save it up for this afternoon and the ‘graveyard slot’ so that it can help me nod off in a quiet corner where my colleagues won’t notice.

Difficult decision!

A waste of my life

My commute took me almost three hours this morning. That, quite frankly, is ridiculous. I could get to southern Europe in the time it took me to get from Bletchingley to Kensington, if you cut out the hanging about at the airport.

Problems this morning were numerous, so much so that a list is called for:-

1.    The train was late getting to Oxted

2.    There was a signalling equipment failure at Clapham Junction (the busiest station in England), which held up everything going everywhere

3.    Someone was very inconsiderately taken ill on a train at Clapham too, compounding the problems

4.    There was a fire at Victoria underground, so the tube station was closed

5.    About a million extra people were trying to cram on the buses, so the queues were enormous

6.    I had a heavy rucksack, so didn’t want to walk all the way

7.    There are road works in Knightsbridge (again)

8.    There was an accident by the Albert Hall and the police shut the road temporarily.

It was a complete and total catalogue of disasters!

As you will know if you read this regularly, I hate commuting. On a good day it takes in excess of three hours (ie 90 minutes each way) and usually it’s nearer four. But to take almost three hours to go one way, into one of the most well served cities in the world for public transport, is ludicrous as well as being a complete waste of my life and time.

I am just building up the energy to make the journey home. Hopefully they will have sorted out the signals, put out the fire and there won’t be any problems on the road at the homeward end. And to be fair, problems over the past few months have been minimal so this is the first time I have been seriously inconvenienced for ages. The frustration comes, I think, from not being able to do anything about it (and being stuck next to the most irritating girl in the world on the train who talked in a penetrating nasal voice to her friends the whole way up to London).

I am equipped for the journey now – sweets, bottle of water, magazine, ipod and a game on my Blackberry which I am getting quite good at and achieving very high scores (it’s so absorbing I nearly missed my stop the other night).

Girding the loins – off we go!

Winnie the Pooh weather!

As Winnie the Pooh would say, it’s a blustery day. Out in the garden I can see one of the more flimsy trees almost bending double with the force of the wind, and a little while ago the door of the summer house blew open with a tremendous crash which sent the dog into a frenzy of barking because, of course, the summer house is her usual day time luxury residence when we are at work.

The cats have hardly ventured out for days, slinking into the garden for a pee only when they absolutely have to at a still, dry moment and then being blown back in with their tails aloft, looking somewhat undignified and scruffy.

The dog quite likes it, chasing around after leaves, pieces of paper and other detritus which people have left lying about and which the wind is picking up and throwing all over the street. Where the black plastic with which we have covered the vegetable beds has blown loose, she dances round it, barking enthusiastically and trying to bite it (very ineffectually, I might add) wearing herself out in the process and going to sleep with her little legs twitching and nose flicking to and fro in excited dreaming (I have chucked her outside several times today and so she has had plenty of opportunity to do this. Last night she stole and ate four bananas from the kitchen counter and she now has terrible wind!)  

We have had it quite easy in the south east of England of course, as our friends in the north have had more snow, rain and gales than they care to think about in a remarkably short space of time. But then it happens fairly regularly up there and they’re tough aren’t they? As northerners are fond of saying, “You lot are soft down south”.

There’s no doubt that the weather is changing, and of course that will start up the climate change lobby again lecturing us on our carbon emissions from cars, planes, patio heaters and all sorts of other convenient but climatically unfriendly things. But the big debate is not whether the climate is changing, because it undoubtedly is, but whether it is anything to do with what we are doing, or whether it is part of a long term natural cycle of change which occurs every few hundred or thousand years. Or both. I guess that no matter how many scientific studies there are, we will never know for sure. And in our lifetimes, the effect will not be too dreadful. Whether it will be in our great grandchildren’s times remains to be seen.

But these things do go in cycles. It is well documented in mediaeval and Tudor times that there were catastrophic floods. It was torrential rains that lasted for weeks and then a flood which defeated Simon de Montfort at his final battle for the English crown about 1300 and something, where as a consequence his troops died of dysentery and water borne diseases, not battle wounds, and several times in the 1500s the Thames froze over due to the extreme cold.

Today the windy weather is made worse by the fact that it is also bitterly cold, although not Thames-freezingly cold. Although the thermometer says two degrees, it must be at least six degrees colder than that with wind chill. Having two open chimneys in the house, the wind swoops down one, round the room, through the door and up the other one, so we have a permanent draught. We could get rid of that by lighting a fire, but seems a little wasteful as I’m out tonight. Better get out the thermals (sexy, eh?) and remember to switch on the electric blanket tonight. Gonna be a chilly one!