Risking My Life

I have a love-hate relationship with water.  I love it, in that without water I'd die of dehydration, and hate it in that I've never learned to swim.

I've always vaguely thought that I ought to learn how to swim, but to be honest it's never been a priority.  However, recently I've encountered swimming pools, on more than one occasion. (And by that I mean two occasions)

The first was as part of a spa day that I and my wife enjoyed as an anniversary present.  After a surprisingly pleasant facial, and an absolutely agonising back massage - next time I'm going to get a pedicure instead - we hit the pool, and I spent an hour slowly walking up and down the pool, occasionally attempting to hold on to the side and lift my body into a floating position.

The second time was last Sunday at a birthday party held for one of my son's school friends - I was quite impressed of the choice of a swimming pool rather than a soft play centre (I have long standing issues with soft play centres, as can be read in past posts here and here), and being a childrens pool it was reasonably shallow, and foolishly I thought that I could use the pool as an opportunity to practice my swimming skills.

After slipping and falling over, getting wholeheartedly submerged, and thinking for a moment "I'm actually going to drown in three feet of water, " I somehow successfully found my footing and rose to my feet, water gushing out of my nose and ears as my lungs attempted to reestablish the normal pattern of breathing air.

My wife, to be quite honest, looked wholly unimpressed by the way that I had managed to save my own life, and if I hadn't known better was possibly even tempted to point out that the water was so low that there was every chance that I could have just drank it.  I argued that I had been let down by the floating noodle that I was clutching on to for dear life, it's supposed to be something that kids can grab hold of and float with, and yet it seems totally unable to support my well-built figure.

Sadly my son absolutely loves being in swimming pools and so I'm returning to the same pool in a couple of weeks.  Not to worry though, there's a shop that rents out scuba gear so I'll be prepared for the depths.  Plus I've been reading Tim's advice on avoiding shark attacks.

Finally, my wife's YouTube channel has received some positive attention - she's started up a flosstube channel (cross stitching), and is apparently reasonably good at it, looking at her views and subscribers - go check it out :)

Water

Not that I would ever mention the rivalry that some people think still exists between Yorkshire and Lancashire - after all, the Lancastrians did beat us in the War of the Roses (at least that's what Wikipedia says), fair play to them.

Still, at least we can actually drink our tap water without having to boil it.

Cheers!

(Full marks to the BBC for the news headline below - I like the well placed apostrophes!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-33833340

And to keep up the Yorkshire bias, the 3 Yorkshireteers have put up a new music video - enjoy!

Water, Burritos, and Train Drivers chatting in Selby

So, I was in London yesterday.

The day started off with a touch of bloody-mindedness.  Before getting the train I stopped in at WH Smith to grab a bottle of water.  I selected my favoured bottle (the cheapest one I could find, which was fairly small - good to put in my bag), and went to the checkout to pay.  The guy at the checkout, kindly trying to save me some money, advised me that the bottle of water would be £1.49, and I could buy a copy of the Telegraph for £1.40, which came with a free, bigger, bottle of water.

I'm afraid my bloody-mindedness reared its head at this point, because:
a) I had already spent several seconds of my life choosing a bottle of water, and I didn't want that time to have been wasted, and;
b) I don't read the Telegraph.

I don't actually have anything against the Telegraph, except that it's a broadsheet i.e. really big when you open it, which is fine at home on a weekend when you can spread it over a large table, but totally useless when you're under some sort of space restriction (like being on a train).

The train journey both ways was fine, I got some work done which was good, the meeting in London was useful and interesting (although for some reason there was a toilet roll jammed between two of the legs supporting my table - I never did work out why), and, most importantly, I got to King's Cross station in time to get a burrito.

There's a place called Benito's Hat at Kings Cross station in London, I understand that they have a number of places open across central London but I've only ever experienced the one at Kings Cross. The food is absolutely excellent with the burritos being the best I've ever tasted - whenever I see burritos on the menu at places I'm eating I always try them, but they're never as good as the ones at Benito's Hat.

(In fact in general Kings Cross is a great place to get fed, I'd recommend Wasabi and Leon too)

I also got a free bottle of Lipton's iced tea from someone them handing out on the way to the train, so I was very pleased.

An excellent way to start a train journey.

On the way back, one of the stations stopped at was Selby.  Selby is a town roughly in the middle of Yorkshire, situated such that you can probably get to most cities within the county from Selby within an hour.  It has some decent shows on at the Town Hall, and I bought a car from Selby.  That's pretty much everything I know about the place.

Actually, there is one other thing about Selby.  At Selby train station, the train drivers stand outside their trains and chat.

I don't know why this is so remarkable, but it is.  I never see train drivers out of their trains just chatting anywhere else.  At smaller stations the trains never stop, and I guess at bigger stations the drivers perhaps have a break room or somewhere that they go when taking a break?  I have absolutely no problem with them having a break - indeed I doubt that it is up to them anyway, it'll be that the train has got to Selby (probably from Leeds, stopping at all the little villages on the way), and it isn't due to return towards Leeds for a while.

Mineral Water and stuff

Attribution: W.J.Pilsak at the German language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

The other week, I had mineral water.  Of my own volition.

That's right - I was thirsty, so I poured some from a bottle into a glass, and I drank it.

To fully explain this, I probably need to go back in time a bit.  You see, when I was a kid, I didn't like mineral water, or spring water, or soda water, or carbonated water of any kind.  It tasted nasty.  I liked lemonade and other fizzy drinks (I assume that they had some decent additives which covered up the flavour of the bubble or something) but when it came to water, I just wanted the stuff that came out of the tap.

I remember the first time having some sort of fizzy water, I was at someones house and had asked for some water, and instead of a glass of tap water, this strange liquid was presented to me.  I certainly hope that I wasn't rude enough to complain about it, but I do recall being amazed at how nasty it tasted.  I don't think a small tumbler of water ever took me so long to drink.

My gran periodically attempted to convert me to bottled water - she'd came back from shopping, clutching a new bottle of clear unpleasant effervescent water to apparently drink.  "This one is different," she'd say optimistically, "you'll like this one!"

I never did.

And yet, somewhere in the last twenty years, I've become able to drink the stuff, and beyond that, I could even say that I enjoy it.  Of course it's not the same as a pint of beer, but it's entirely acceptable.

After carrying out a minimal amount of research from here, I understand that as we age the number of taste buds we have decreases, and the ones that are left atrophy (aka they wither away like one of the potted plants in the back garden that I've forgotten to water again) so your sense of taste diminishes - this was probably aided by a large quantity of deliciously hot curries in days gone past.  So I'm pleased to think that fizzy waters are probably just as nasty as they ever was, but I just don't notice it nowadays.

In other news - early next month, I'm getting married.  I'm very much looking forward to the big day of course, I am aware however that things are likely to get very busy around the wedding day, plus we'll be going away at some point in the next month or two for a honeymoon.  So I'm after guest bloggers to help fill the gaps!

If you're familiar with my blog, I tend to ramble on about pretty much anything, in the vague hopes that some of it might be entertaining.  If you think that you could do a post, get in touch with me - my email is mike.raven@gmail.com and my Twitter is @ravenswingthog .  I did write some guidance for guest bloggers a while back if you want more info.  I can't say exactly when your post will be going up (but if it's topical I'll endeavour to slot it into an appropriate time) but I'd be very grateful for your interest, and of course you're welcome to link back to your own blogs and the like.

Finally I've noticed that this, if Blogger is counting correctly, is my 390th post, so I'm ten away from my 400th (I can do math).  I'm not one for marking big numbers - mainly because I forget to keep track - but I'm going to try to do something half decent for the 400th.  Then again, I might just forget all about it and realise in three months time that I've passed the 400 mark without a comment.  Watch this space!

4 rants about certain products who cornered their markets

1 - Why have blueberries cornered the fruit-in-muffins market?  Who does their PR?

No one likes blueberries.  You don't ever think "I know!  I'll get the kids a treat, they can have some lovely blueberries".

No.  It doesn't happen.  You buy strawberries BECAUSE THEY TASTE NICE.

And yet, in muffins, it's chocolate, it's lemon and poppy seed (poppy seed?!? Again - what's going on there), or it's blueberry.  Try and get a strawberry muffin, I challenge you.


2 - If water is so good for you, why doesn't it taste of anything?

There is a reason that bacon, sausages, pork scratchings, cheese etc taste nice - it's because they have fat in them.  Fat, for the majority of the human population, is in short supply and we are genetically designed to like the taste of it, because we need the energy supply of fat to survive.  It's better than stuff like carbohydrates because it's easy for the body to store until needed.

It's just that in the current "modern" western civilisations, we have an excess of it, so we pretend to like salad.

But taking this reasoning, why don't we love the taste of water?  Apparently we need it to survive, and yet the taste of it is nowhere near as good as lemonade, or beer, or coffee or any number of other drinks.

There's only one explanation for it - it's actually bad for us.


3 - Cranberry sauce with Christmas dinner?

Why is it acceptable to have weird jam with a Sunday dinner, if you happen to have it on December 25th.  I'm not saying that I don't like Cranberry sauce, I do, but if we're allowing jam to be spread all over our turkey then what about when we have pheasant?  Can we have some blackcurrant jelly on that?  What about some lemon curd on a ribeye steak?  Perhaps marmalade is the Colonels secret ingredient in his Kentucky Fried Chicken?

(If this post vanishes abruptly, you know that the last suggestion was right)


4 - WHY DO WE HANG A PINE SMELLING CARDBOARD TREE IN OUR CARS TO MAKE THEM SMELL NICE?

No one likes the smell of pine, at least not the smell of pine cleaner.  Pine cleaner is inevitably the "bargain" or "value" brand of linoleum cleanser you've bought because it's only twenty pence for five litres, and the trade off for buying such an inexperience cleaning solution is that it stinks of nasty pine, probably it's the smell that you'd get if an elk urinated on a rotting pine branch, it was left to soak in for a few days, and then you brought the branch in to lighten the atmosphere of your kitchen.

And yet we choose - voluntarily - this smell to go in our cars.

Mad!