Or, rather, from pretend police.

If any of you are still labouring under the delusion that Britain is a free country, view this video:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/dec/15/police-terrorism

What we have here is a couple of Community Support Officers, a pair of arrogant jerks so self-deluded they think they’re are actually real police officers. These fuckers should be handed their P45s without delay.

I wonder if these cut-price coppers would have had the balls to tackle a couple of guys behind a camera? Anyone taking bets?

Photography, whether video or still, is a legitimate hobby, and has been for over a century, and its practitioners should not be held to account by tossers like these. Or at all.** Terrorists would NOT be filming potential targets in broad daylight, and only a retard would think this woman was doing anything other than what she said she was doing – filming for fun. That she wound up in a jail cell and, subsequently in court, beggars belief.

Civil liberties, in this country, have become a bad joke.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Again!

** Apparently, if you’re a tourist, in London, and elsewhere for all I know, using a small compact camera, you’ll be left alone (like terrorists wouldn’t have compact cameras!). Turn up with a serious D-SLR and a battery of lenses, as a serious photographer on holiday is likely to do, and there’s a very good chance you’ll be run in.

Welcome to Britain. . .

CFS patients in UK show no signs of suspect virus, is the headline to an article in the New Scientist, revealing that new research has shown that the XMRV retrovirus has no significance in ME/CFS.

As someone who has had ME/CFS for 25 years, I commented extensively on my blog about XMRV, advising caution while much of the ME community was grabbing XMRV with both hands and running with it.

That was never justified.

I did not believe, based on the then available evidence, that XMRV, in relation to ME/CFS, was indicative of anything very much, except as another line of enquiry that needed to be followed.

I simply hadn’t sufficient faith in XMRV to get my hopes up. And nor should anyone else who was actually paying attention at the time, instead of investing XMRV with a significance and an excess of optimism it did not warrant. Even the original researchers recommended caution – and were mostly ignored.

I understand the craving for answers, which are mostly lacking when it comes to ME, but that should not cause us to abandon our critical faculties.

This new research, like the original, used a test population (186 in this case), far too small to yield statistically significant results, so there is still scope, as I said originally, for more extensive research.

My original posts on the subject:-

http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/a-cure-for-mecfs-dont-rejoice-just-yet/

http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/more-thoughts-on-xmrv/

WPI response to the new study http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=236743968025 Pretty much as expected – not happy. Why Facebook, not a scientific publication? Buggered if I know.

I first wrote this post back in October – and forgot to publish it. So, as it’s not time-sensitive, for better or for worse, here it is, somewhat updated.

I love knives – kitchen knives, that is – arguably the most used implements in any kitchen and, 20-odd years ago, when I cooked a hell of a lot more than I’m able to these days, I treated myself to an 8” Sabatier chef’s knife, from Richardson’s of Sheffield, and it’s performed magnificently.

It’s a knife of considerable heft, from the heavy-backed, taper-ground blade with a vestigial bolster, to the traditional riveted black handle, and it’s tackled everything I’ve thrown at it over the years. It’s behaved impeccably and was  – always – kept very sharp.

Then I went and notched the blade.

I was washing up and, in the water was a small stainless steel corn-cob holder that I use as a spoon rest – it’s very basic, just stamped out of sheet steel – plus a plate with some plum jam dried onto it, and my knife, among much else, but those three items were the star players in the unfolding drama.

I am, as regular readers will know, pretty sick, and it happened that I had to leave the washing up and go and rest for a while. Then it got forgotten overnight.

Next day I emptied out the water, filled the bowl with fresh, and carried on. I lifted out the knife first – you don’t wash dishes with a sharp knife in the bowl – and the corn-cob dish came along with it, briefly, before dropping back into the suds. Then I noticed there was a notch in the knife blade, where none had been before. Neat, rectangular and exactly the dimensions of the corn-cob dish’s sheet steel – about a millimetre wide. And 3-4mm deep.

It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. The plum jam, melting in the water, acidified it slightly, and where the edge of the blade rested against the edge of the corn-cob dish, electrolysis had caused the latter to eat into the blade (I’m assuming that the reverse didn’t happen because the blade edge was very much thinner than the dish metal).

The notch was relatively tiny, but a real pain in the butt, as it would snag on anything remotely fibrous but, as the weeks went by, repeated sharpening smoothed out the edges, making it barely perceptible in use, and while I’d intended to replace it – the damage irritated me every time I used it – I kept putting it off, not least because knives of similar quality are pretty damned expensive these days.

Then I noticed the blade had another nick in it, this time right by the point. No idea why, as since it got damaged it’s always been washed separately as, indeed, it always was previously – just one lapse ruined it.

So I thought, sod it, and dug out my Nisbets catalogue to look for a new one. For some reason, I was afflicted by an attack of parsimony, and came very close to buying a bargain set of knives which would, I’m sure, have disappointed me profoundly. Odd, really, because if I can afford it, I never compromise of kitchen equipment.* The most affordable 8” Sabatier knife was from Deglon, at £35, which was a pretty good price, but I didn’t like the style. I don’t like knives with a very pronounced bolster, due to the manner in which I hold them – for this reason, the Lakeland range of knives are, for me, a no-no, though they are exceedingly well priced.

*Against my better judgement, I paid £2.99 for a bread-knife at Sainsbury’s, and it turned out to be excellent. The edge is ground just on one side, which makes it very easy to peel off precise slices. If you’re right-handed, that is.

I’d spotted the Victorinox (the Swiss Army knife people), knife ranges on another website, but Nisbets prices were lower. The Sabatier style were way too expensive, but they had a range of rosewood handled knives with Solingen* steel blades, without bolsters. An 8” chefs’ was £23, and turned out to be almost 9”.

*The numpty tendency online would have it that Solingen steel is simply any old steel made in the town of Solingen, which anyone with half a  brain would know is complete bollocks. It does define steel made there, but it’s steel made to a very high quality.

I had reservations – for something as intimate as a knife (intimate? absolutely – in use a good knife becomes an extension of the user), I’d really prefer to shop in person, and see how the thing felt in my hand, but that’s no longer feasible, so I took the plunge and ordered one (and in an attack of vanity, got the blade engraved with my initials).

As I’d half expected, the new knife certainly doesn’t have the heft of the old one, being 40g lighter (mainly the difference in handle material), with a somewhat thinner blade, but it is staggeringly sharp – sharp enough to shave with, in fact, as the bald spot on my arm testifies.

Sharp enough to be dangerous, too, and I very soon had a gash in my right index finger to show for it – well, a deep slice actually, which is just as well, or it would have needed stitches – and I didn’t even feel it. As it was I superglued the flap, once I’d stemmed the blood-bath – I’d nicked a tiny vein. or possibly an equally tiny artery – and it healed nicely. Superglue, by the way, was used in the Vietnam war, for gluing broken soldiers back together on the battlefield – which is why it’s so good at gluing your fingers together if you get careless.

The problem, it turned out, wasn’t that the blade was so sharp, it was that it was sharp right down to the heel (that’s the part of the edge nearest the handle), which, in my view, is downright foolish in a bolsterless blade (the bolster is there partly for balance and partly to keep fingers away from the edge). I’ve fixed the problem by blunting the first half-inch of the heel, a part of the blade that isn’t actually in use (not easy, the steel is very hard), rendering it safe as, when I hold a chefs’ knife, I tend to grip it where the blade joins the handle, so my fingers grasp the blade, and the heel of my hand is on the handle. No idea why, I always have – I just don’t feel I have full control holding the handle.

In use the knife behaved perfectly, the sharpness compensating for the lack of weight in the blade. It cuts meat and fish like a dream, and slips through veg almost without resistance. Most importantly, though, it feels right in the hand. It’s a dream to use, from skinning fish to splitting a swede in half. Though the latter is something my old knife will be kept for, as it’s more robust and the damage to the blade won’t matter.

So, if you want an excellent knife at a sensible price, check it out. Just remember – blunting the heel is probably a good idea. In use I’ve snagged my finger, harmlessly now, on the heel of the blade several times, so blunting it was certainly a good move.

I was, though, concerned about keeping the edge in as-new condition. True, I could keep it very sharp with the stone, but not as sharp as when it was new. so I began to look around for an alternative to the stone.

Knife sharpening devices range from the incredibly crap, where you’d be better just sharpening the knife on the back step (like the ironically-named World’s Best which visibly scrapes shards of metal from the blade, which is NOT a good thing – despite what people giving it glowing reviews seem to think; yes, that will sharpen your knife, but it will also shorten its life – using the MinoSharp just to touch-up a sharp knife removes a mere trace of metal – just enough to leave a mark on the stone), to the staggeringly expensive.

I eventually settled on the Japanese MinoSharp sharpener. This has several abrasive wheels, each with a v-shaped valley in the centre, running in a water bath, covered by a housing with slots for the knife blade. The most commonly available is the two-wheel version, with coarse and medium wheels, but I wanted the MinoSharp Plus 3, which has the addition of a fine wheel, which finishes the job the coarse and medium wheels start.

The instructions – draw the knife through each wheel 20 times or more(!) – were alarming, as life’s far too short to bugger about with that, but it soon became clear that this referred to a completely blunt knife (which, really, should be professionally re-ground). For maximising an already sharp edge, just a few strokes of the fine wheel are needed.

So, my new knife is back to as-new sharpness, and my old knives have had a touch-up too, and I have to say I’m impressed with the gadget. The water bath prevents the blade over-heating, and losing its temper (and for that reason you shouldn’t draw the blade through the stones to quickly, either), and it’s very easy to use.

I paid £29.99 for mine, from Amazon. It is, though, very easy to pay more, often a lot more (even at Amazon, who also have it for £39.99, from a different vendor), so take care. And I really wouldn’t recommend the two-wheel version. Yes, it’ll sharpen your knives, but it won’t sharpen them as well as the three-wheel one.

One last thought – as with using a stone, there is a technique to be learned, but it’s easier than using a stone and shouldn’t be a problem. Oh, and the instructions suggest you push and pull the knife, with a reciprocating action. I suggest you just pull the knife towards you – that way you have more control, it’s easier to keep it absolutely vertical, and to keep a consistent, but gentle, pressure on it.

Note:- The Chantry knife sharpener is a somewhat lower-tech solution that’s been around a long time and is, reportedly, very good. Costs about the same, though. Electric sharpeners are brilliant, but nobody actually needs one in a domestic kitchen, unless they can’t, or are too lazy to, learn a simple technique.

From my search-engine slush-pile, this touched a nerve “plum jam Poland”. Somebody, presumably, was looking for it. Me too, for years.

Where I live – can’t speak for anywhere else – it’s been unavailable for years. You can still get some items from the Krakus range, though not many, and the plum jam is history.

Sainsbury’s used to do an excellent, ruby-red plum jam, which I’ve written about elsewhere here, and which was absolutely brilliant in a PBJ sandwich, and that, I think was from Poland and, like Krakus, it’s been gone for over a decade.

You can get allegedly artisanal plum jams, which tend to be more brown than red, and lack the clarity of the Polish product. They’re OK, I suppose, but they just don’t ring my bell in the same way.

Anyway, I had a rummage on Google and if you’re in the UK, I found this website, http://www.wallysdeli.co.uk/shop/agora.cgi?&product=POLISH which stocks a range of Krakus and other Polish products, including a Krakus plum spread which may be worth a look. In the real world, Wallys Deli is in Royal Arcade, Cardiff.

Browsing the Dove’s Farm website, I was less than thrilled, because I use their flour to make my bread, to find this information in the FAQ section:-

Q: What is the Doves Farm position on mandatory fortification of Folic Acid to flour?

We would like to encourage the industry to fortify more foods with folic acid on a voluntary basis and increase the eductation of the population which are most susseptable.

This is our favoured option aw well as the favourite option for the Soil Association and the Institute of Biology.

With this option we can address a number of real concerns, not just folate deficiencies. Young women can be educated at to the dangers of folate deficiency and the complications that could arise through deficiency.

Apart from the unacceptable spelling errors – look, if you have a website or a blog, use the goddamned spell-checker, always! – I find their position on this absolutely appalling.

And it’s clear that whoever wrote that tripe cannot discriminate between forcible dietary supplementation and dietary education – the former is a universe away from the latter.

While I’m all in favour of educating women, young or otherwise, as to the requirements of their bodies, pregnant or not, there is no justification for force-feeding everybody folic acid – or anything else – when they don’t need it.

I take a lot of supplements, without which I would be unable to function – for my ME/CFS – but that’s my choice. Likewise, it’s a woman’s choice, if she’s planning to become pregnant, to supplement with folic acid – or not. There should not be an element of compulsion, for her, for me, or for you.

Flour currently has added to it, in accordance with The Bread & Flour Regulations 1998, Calcium carbonate, Iron, Thiamine (Vitamin B1) and Niacin. None of that is justified for everybody.

I am not remotely short of calcium, and I eat sufficient iron-bearing foods, so I don’t need them (excess, while not necessarily toxic, can cause problems), though I can live with Thiamine and Niacin, but whether I actually need either is debatable, but I will not, absolutely not, even if I have to mill my own flour, have folic acid foisted upon me.

Folic acid is normally touted, by those obsessed with inflicting it on the entire population, as about as harmful as water (but drinking too much water can kill you – it drowns your body on the cellular level), which is simply not true, as a canter around Google will demonstrate, and not just from lunatic fringe sources, who would mostly have you guzzling the stuff by the pound, but from reputable medical websites.

Folic acid side effects, at normal doses can include nausea, insomnia, decreased appetite, flatulence, abdominal distension, difficulty concentrating and a bitter taste in the mouth. None of which is fun, but in excess it can cause B12 deficiency – pernicious anaemia – which can be fatal.

Side-effects are, apparently, rare, but that is when just a small segment of the population is voluntarily taking the stuff. How will that pan out when everybody is forced to consume it in their food, and when there will be zero control over the dose ingested?

With tablets, you know exactly how much you’re taking, and an excess is pretty much your own fault, but if it’s added to flour, there’s no control at all, and flour pops up in a great many places, not just bread and cakes, but biscuits, crackers, confectionery, pies, pasties, quiche, pizza, even batter on fish – any damn thing at all in which flour is an ingredient, no matter how minor.

According to MedicineNet.com folic acid is used to treat or prevent certain anaemias caused by poor diet, pregnancy, alcoholism, liver disease, certain stomach/intestinal problems, kidney dialysis, or other conditions. It also helps to relieve symptoms such as unusual tiredness and diarrhoea that can occur with these types of anaemias.

Not to mention women who are pregnant or about to become pregnant – folic acid is believed to help reduce the incidence of neural tube birth defects (spina bifida). Note: Some sources say “helps” as a certainty, others go for “is believed to help” – a little unanimity might be nice if we’re all going to be force-fed this shit.

That’s a relatively select bunch of people, yet we will all be supplementing with a compound which, as a supplement,  provides no benefits for the vast majority of people and yet it will be dispensed in totally unknown quantities.

We all, of course, need folic acid (0.2mg per day for an adult, increasing to 0.4mg for women who are about to become pregnant) – source, the FSA, who also say:-

Unless you are pregnant or thinking of having a baby, you should be able to get all the folate you need by eating a varied and balanced diet.

If you’re taking folic acid supplements, it’s important not to take too much because this could be harmful.

Taking 1 mg (1000 micrograms) or less of folic acid supplements a day is unlikely to cause any harm.

OK, that’s my bold for emphasis (and folate = folic acid), and look how small the FSA’s maximum dose is – 1mg, FFS!

More that that, they readily admit, may cause harm, but exactly how much will we get in our diets if flour is fortified with folic acid? It’s totally impossible to say – it’s utterly unquantifiable. OK, there is an average figure for bread consumption, see below, but an average means that some people will eat very much more than that, just as some will eat very much less, but we’re not really concerned with them, and what about all the other sources where flour is used? Already, too, some breakfast cereals are “fortified” with folate, at 100% of the RDA in some cases.

Folic acid isn’t cumulative, your body takes what it needs and excretes the rest, as with vitamin C (and something as innocuous  as that can cause severe diarrhoea if taken in excess), so what is the long-term effect of way too much folate for way too long – where do we get to the point when it’s all too much of an insult for the body to sustain?

Bread accounts for the largest intake of flour, and average bread consumption for an adult male in the UK is 113g per day (various online sources), but what’s that it real terms that everyone can comprehend, like slices? I have no idea. One slice of my own bread, about as thick as a standard sliced loaf, is 40g, but my slice is about 70% the size of that from a commercial sliced loaf, which would give 57g per slice. Actually, that comparison isn’t going to work, as there is clearly far more air and water in commercial, Chorleywood Process, bread than there is in mine, as my figure would give a daily intake of 2 slices for 113g.

So let’s look at me, instead. I’ll probably eat maybe 200g of bread on an average day, almost double the average. The only conclusion that can be drawn from that, other than that commercial bread is crap, is that anyone making their own bread, or buying artisan-produced bread, would have a higher flour intake, and thus a higher folate intake, than someone eating mass-produced crappy white bread.

So while we’re improving our diets making and/or eating higher-quality, better-tasting bread, we’ll be putting our health on the line by hoovering up about twice the average intake of folate from bread than those eating Chorleywood bread (pumped up with air and freighted with water), never mind all the other sources.

How is that – in a sane world – possibly a good thing?

The bottom line is that nobody has any idea what the intake of folic acid from flour would be for any given person, though I can be certain mine will be higher than most, nor do they have any idea what the long-term effects of chronic excessive intake might be, because it doesn’t normally happen, except for the odd idiot who supplements to excess, but you can’t extrapolate from that and apply it to an entire population.

I can only draw one conclusion from this. and it’s that the attitude of Dove’s Farm, and anybody else that thinks forcibly medicating the entire population with unknown amounts of folate is a wizard wheeze, is utterly irresponsible.

The idea has no merit whatsoever.

That folate supplementation is good for some people is beyond doubt, fine, I don’t have a problem with that, but nobody, without a proven need, should be medicated and, except in very rare cases, nobody should ever be medicated against their will and with unknown quantities of a potentially dangerous substance.

Before leaving this subject, let’s look at some food sources of folic acid/folate. I cannot see, from the following list, why anybody eating an average diet should need to have folic acid forced on them by having it added to such a ubiquitous food item as flour. It’s insane.

Some Food Sources of Folate/Folic Acid

This list is from the US Office of Dietary Supplements, as I can find nothing comparable from a UK source. Note that foods marked * are fortified with folate in the US, so should be disregarded.

Note: DV equals Daily Value, the amount of folic acid required per day for pregnant women.

.

Happy New Year, folks!

2010 is going to be the year in which I get seriously into bread-making. OK, I can make pretty good bread already, but with having to work around the problems of my health, it can be difficult.

The first change is buying a mixer, which frees me from the problem of having a good day, healthwise, before I can bake. I was torn, as I’ve mentioned previously, between the Kenwood Chef Classic (white only),

and a fire-engine red KitchenAid Artisan. (The candy-apple red special edition is stunning.)

In the end, though, it was no contest. The…

Read the full version on my breadmaking blog here.

This is a tip mainly for bread-makers  like me, who have to contend with ME/CFS, as well as the vagaries of beating bread dough into submission (or anyone, really, who is physically weak/sick or otherwise impaired, and bakes).

For more years that I care to remember, I’ve used a Mason Cash earthenware bowl for mixing pastry, or bread dough. However, a few months ago I switched to a 5 litre stainless steel bowl (I may have mentioned this elsewhere).

Bigger than the Mason Cash bowl, it has the room to work the dough until it’s all incorporated – then it can be tipped out onto the work surface in a neat lump, for kneading.

Today, though, I’d carelessly put something else in my steel bowl, so I had to… Read more at my bread-making blog

I’ve mentioned before that we seem to be producing a nation of pussies – and it’s getting worse.

There’s a current TV ad featuring a young guy who hasn’t shaved for the entire weekend, so he has stubble (and let’s ignore the fact that the weekend is when most young people socialise, and the lazy bugger  should have shaved!).

The ad points out that shaving 3 days worth of stubble, before returning to work is, ooh, so painful, and he should use this wonderful new, and hideously expensive, electric shaver, which won’t hurt a bit.

Shaving is what guys do, except for a minority with full beards. Hell, I’ve been shaving since I was 13, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, that shaving does not hurt. It doesn’t matter whether you wet-shave, and lather-up with a shaving-brush, use poncy new gels (pre-shave, shave, post-shave – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg – WTF?), or use an electric shaver – it simply doesn’t hurt. At all. Ever. (And, Alan, you’re doing it wrong!)

Aftershave hurts, but it’s manly, innit! Actually, aftershave doesn’t really hurt, either – it only stings for a second, and the only person likely to be bothered by it is the sort of wimp who has just suffered agonies  shaving!

I’ve not been too well lately, and I hadn’t, until Monday, been out for a week, so I hadn’t bothered shaving and, guess what? Shaving a week’s stubble doesn’t hurt, either. In fact, you get a closer shave with a couple of day’s growth than you do when you shave every day – at least, you do if you wet shave. When I was in my twenties, I didn’t shave Saturday morning – I shaved just before I went out in the evening, because I got a closer shave that I would have by shaving twice.

So who was it, I wonder, in the bizarre, divorced-from-reality, coke-fuelled, wonderland that’s the average  advertising  agency, who got the idea of telling people shaving is painful, when every guy in the land knows it’s not? Or maybe it’s just ad-land tossers, who are such colossal jessies they don’t actually need to shave, and really believe it would hurt if they did?

As I said – pussies.

The email below speaks for itself – and is probably a phishing scam.

I don’t have an HSBC account, and I don’t know anyone called Sandra Hilton. And, as you can see, the link does NOT got to HSBC. If you get one of these, or something similar, bin it.

Well, not on a bank holiday afternoon, it isn’t.

This afternoon, BBC Radio 2 is recycling Tony Blackburn and Cilla Black, to front a sixties music show. I know bank holidays are often poor in terms of radio, and TV, content, but that’s just grim.

Yeah, well, good luck with that, BBC.

So, look, if you want sixties music, and seventies, too, without Blackburn and Black, tune in to Radio Caroline, Sky 0199 or online at http://radiocaroline.servemp3.com/ . Or, if you have iTunes installed, you’ll find it in the radio list there.

Makes way more sense that Radio 2’s offering.