Blogging block

There are loads of articles out there telling you how to get & keep readers for your blog, but they all assume one thing. that you have something meaningful to write.

Since I lasr wrote I have done nothing., well nothing apart from walk into town to hand in a prescription & to buy some ibuprofen. The rest of the time I have been curled up on the sofa in pain, In piain despite taking the strongest painkillers my GP can prescribe.

So should I blog about that, about pain that feels like a cross between a chinese burn &someone raking a cheese grater over my hip? Not pleasant reading.

Talking of books I have done a lot of reading recently, more than usual, anyway & I'm a fairly prolific reader. I have been reading the Warlord series by Bernard Cornwell. I was inttoduced to this by the BBC series The Last Kingdom. the books tell of Uhtred son of Uhtred as his life gets entangled with that of King Alfred ( of the burned caked fame) and his struggle to keep Wessex Saxon when it seems all is lost. Like most historical fiction Bernard plays free & loose with dates in order to create a smoother storyline but most of the battle he described did actually take place and were recorder in Bishop Asser's life of Alfred. The books are more detailed than the series, but the series was fa less violent than the books. I'm finding the books are . incredibly readable & I can't wait to see the next series

A tale of three restaurants

Last week I I was lucky enough to eat out three times, each in a different type of place. On Tuesday we went out with the in-laws to The George at Backwell as this is my father-in-laws current favourite. I suppose this would be best described as a gastropub. On the whole the food is consistently good but there is an occasional dud. On this occasion the dud was my pizza. Although the pizza was cooked in a pizza oven you could not taste it due to the sheer amount of cheese, I've had pizza here in the past without this so this may well be a one off, everyone else loved theirs. One thing you will notice about The George is the sheer amount of smoked meat on offer, this is because they have their own smoker, nicknamed Jerimiah. 

On Friday we went wit my Dad to the Harvester in Cosmeston, by far the cheapest of the three, and it showed. The best I can describe it is OK. The ribs were nice & succulent but our chicken a bit dry. The bowls for the salad were hot & none of the dressings were labelled. as far as my husband was concerned their worst fault was that they had no real ales on, if you don't want mainstream keg then you have a choice of not so good bottled beers, which seemed to be very expensive. I wouldn't eat here again out of choice.

Then on saturday we went out with a group to The Huntsman in Dinas Powys for my father's 70t birthday. As we were a group they asked us too prebook our meals. Due to the size of the restaurant the menu is quite small but has something for everyone, In this case no-one had any complaints about their food which was very good & hearty. Portions were the right size for a three course meal. 


It would be hard to choose a favourite between The George & The Huntsman , they were in the same price bracket but the style of food completely different.

Same but different.

For Christmas I was given 2 bars of dark chocolate. One was Divine  dark chocolate with orange & ginger, the other Montezuma's dark chocolate with orange and geranium.

Both are dark & orange flavour but they couldn't have been more different. The Divine one had tiny pieces of chewy ginger in it & despite being 75%  it was not bitter and easy to munch on. I had never had geranium as a flavouring before and the nearest thing I could think of was orange flower water. the orange was quite strong but the slightly perfumy taste of the geranium was dominant but not too strong and it lasted for while after I had finished. This also had the bitterness associated with strong dark chocolate which I think was essential or the overall affect would have been cloying.

So although these bars had things in common they could not have tasted anymore different from each other. I enjoyed them both but the Divine one was more of an everyday bar whilst the Montezuma one was an occasional treat.

Welcome 2016

A new year, a new start. Although I'm only in my 50s I have a couple of health problems that affect my life. Firstly I have osteoarthritis in  my hip which limits the amount of activity I can do & secondly I have type 2 diabetes which is best treated by diet & exercise.

Diet is the easy option, although the NHS advises the so called "healthy eating plate" there is growing evidence that this is far from healthy especially for type 2 diabetics. Essentially this diet floods your system with sugar. The high amounts of carbs suggested break down during digestion into sugar which means your pancreas needs to produce large amounts of insulin to counteract it which our bodies can't do properly.

I'm lucky in that I'm at the lower end of the diabetic scale so just reducing the carbs seems to work for me, hing like no potatoes or rice with meals, no fruit & replacing bread with crispbreads keeps by BS within acceptable limits.

However exercise is the problem, having arthritis in my hip seriously reduces my ability to exercise properly but I need to do it not just for my diabetes but for my arthritis too as keeping mobile stops the joint from seizing up.

So what is going to be new for 2016? I'll keep to the lower carb diet & hopefully continue to lose weight on it & I'll try to exercise every day even if it's only walking up stairs without holding on to the banisters.

Wish me luck