Things that gladden one's heart!

Nice people in Norwich who turn off my bike lights (and don't steal them) so even when I accidentally leave them behind on the bike when I park it at the station, and I get back a week later, the batteries are not flat.
Hooray for generous kind people like that, whoever you are!

My guilty secrets

I confess...

This weekend we're flying to Naples for a wedding...

I can't even hail a taxi...

Overheard fleetingly on the way to the station last Monday, the middle of a conversation:

"And then she said 'why, I can't even hail a taxi!'". The speaker, on uttering this, was raising her hand above the shoulder, as in hailing taxis.

Now I don't know for sure what this conversation, of which I caught such a fleeting moment as I cycled past, was about. But it rang a sort of bell.

Why have so many people got rheumatic aches and pains in their arms this Autumn? And pains in their backs? I know of at least four with a similar rheumatic inflammation in the shoulder and arm that makes it hard to move the arm or lift anything. I feel sure that the person telling her interlocutor this story from her front door was reporting another case of the same illness. I've had it since the end of September.

Is it a virus going round Cambridge at the moment? Or is it a reaction to some kind of pollution? Or is it the effect of the vitamin deficiency we're all suffering following a summer with no sunshine? Or what is it? Does anyone else know of any cases? Are there any cases that are not women?

How to make your own semi-skimmed milk 3

Method 3

1. Don't shake your milk bottle. Carefully remove the foil top.
2. Stand the milk bottle on the kitchen surface.
3. Place a stool next to the surface and stand a jug on the stool. The top of the jug should be lower than the bottom of the milk bottle.
   
4. Take a length of flexible thin plastic tubing and plunge one end of it down to the bottom of the milk bottle.
5. Suck on the other end of the tubing until the milk is drawn up into the tube. Cover the end of the tube and lower it into the jug.
6. Milk will flow through the siphon from the bottom of the milk bottle into the jug.
7. Stop the siphon before it starts trying to take the cream (it'll probably get bunged up then anyway).

This way you get skimmed milk in the jug and a small quantity of top-of-the-milk cream in the bottle...

English Apples

Conversation with boy (apparently white, native) at the Liverpool Street Station greengrocers' stall on Tuesday:

I to boy: "Have you any English apples?"

Boy to me: "English apples? There's no such thing."

I to boy (puzzled): "No, I mean have you any ENGLISH apples?"

Boy to me: "There's various kinds of apples: Golden delicious, Braeburn, [something]-Reds. We don't have 'english apples'".

I to boy, in some desperation: "No I don't want any of those, I wanted some English ones."

Boy (puzzled) to man who runs stall: "What are English apples?"

Man to boy: "Means coxes. There's none left."

I to boy and man: "Oh". Walks away, wondering whether he means that England has run out of coxes, or that the stall had temporarily sold out for the day.

This stall was about an hour's distance from Kent, which was once an orchard as I recall, the "garden of England". The Golden Delicious were probably from France. The Braeburns probably six months old and from New Zealand. The Granny Smiths probably six months old and from S. Africa.

But this conversation is so sad, in so many ways, that you wonder whether there's any hope left. There was, in fact, no British produce on the stall at all, as far as I could see.

How to make your own semi-skimmed milk: method 2

Here's another method of making your own semi-skimmed milk, easily done if you're making something with hot milk.

Pour the milk into a milk pan and warm it over the heat. When it's hot, pour it off gently in such a way that it leaves the skin behind in the pan.

The rich creamy residue can be given to the cat, or washed away with the washing up water (though that's a tragic waste of resources, when there are hungry people who would be glad of it...). I believe that's how they make clotted cream so I suppose you could collect it and make a home made version of clotted cream that way.

NB you can't use precisely this method for microwave hot drinks and sauces, but you can do something similar by skimming the skin off afterwards from the finished product.

How to make your own semi-skimmed milk

If it's true that the semi-skimmed milk from the milkman is still homogenised (see discussion here) then the answer seems to be to buy natural full cream milk from the milkie and, if you prefer something skinnier for putting in your tea, make it yourself.

Here's one way (how my parents used to do it). You take the foil cap off the bottle without upending it or shaking it. You pour off the first inch or so, which is largely the cream, into a small cream jug, and leave the semi-skimmed milk in the bottle. You may need to use a teaspoon vel. sim. to scrape the cream out of the top of the bottle if it's well stuck.

Then you serve the creamy bit with porridge, or in your coffee, or with fruit salad or give it to the cat. The milk in the bottle is relatively low fat and can be used for whatever you want the low fat sort for.

This is technologically simple and requires no specialist equipment. If you don't have a small cream jug you can use an espresso cup or even an old fish-paste jar.

The disadvantage is that it's a bit inaccurate. Because of the rules of physics, some of the thinner stuff creeps out as you pour off the cream, so the creamy bit can turn out to be a little disappointing when you pour it on your porridge. What looked like a decent jug of cream turns out to be a thin layer of cream on a thick layer of watery milk. But there's not much problem with the thin stuff left in the bottle.