Thursday, January 17, 2008
Charity
Expedition to Surbiton today. No particular reason but there turned out to be a good number of charity shops, from one of which I procured a very reasonable tweedy jacket for the grand sum of £5. Mostly wool with a Dunns like herring bone pattern, made in Hong Kong and not worn sufficiently for it to have been worth the previous owner unstitching the pockets. My first tweed jacket for a while, Dunns having expired and those, when they have them, from Lester Bowden, being far too dear for a pensioner.
Preceeded by lunch at a chipper staffed by young non-Brit Europeans of some sort. Friendly and quite a decent bit of haddock - not something one can rely on these days.
Succeeded by the first ox tail stew for a while - in fact I do not recall buying the stuff since I have been buying meat in Cheam. Not a cheap meal at something more than £10 for two packets of the stuff. And given that there was a good round of black pudding sandwiches for breakfast, a heavy calorie day. But good gear - not to mention the outing for the giant stew pan. Plus some more of the allotment Brussells sprouts. Being a bit loose makes them more bother to prepare than the Mr S variety, but it also makes them less chewy and less bitter. A differant sprout experience.
Amused on Monday by one of the quirks of the capitalist regime under which we labour. Now a number of the more serious problems we face are a consequence, in large part, from our consuming too much. Problems like global warming, the credit crisis, inter and intra country tensions arising from conspicuous inequality, filled up landfill sites, running out of oil and blah. But when we actually start consuming less and the big shops start moaning about only getting a half percent growth of sales on last Christmas, the business page of the DT goes into a nose dive. Deep dark recession is upon us!
And further amused by a recent factoid from the TLS. It seems that by cooking our food for the last 25,000 years or so we have given ourself a considerable competitive advantage. Cooking is a sort of pre-digestion which means we can carry a lot of energy around without having to carry a huge digestion apparatus with it and without spending a lot of time at it. It was then said to follow that we could therefore carry a lot more brain about and that we got into a virtuous spiral upwards. Perhaps one ought to verify this story by comparing the relative weights of the digestion apparatus of various animals. I can easily imagine that we have less than a cow - which eats grass and has a lot of apparatus - and large constricting snakes take a very long time about digesting their meals, but what about a lion that both chews and eats meat? Are their stomachs so much larger than ours? Do they spend days after a meal snoozing while the digestion works it off?
Preceeded by lunch at a chipper staffed by young non-Brit Europeans of some sort. Friendly and quite a decent bit of haddock - not something one can rely on these days.
Succeeded by the first ox tail stew for a while - in fact I do not recall buying the stuff since I have been buying meat in Cheam. Not a cheap meal at something more than £10 for two packets of the stuff. And given that there was a good round of black pudding sandwiches for breakfast, a heavy calorie day. But good gear - not to mention the outing for the giant stew pan. Plus some more of the allotment Brussells sprouts. Being a bit loose makes them more bother to prepare than the Mr S variety, but it also makes them less chewy and less bitter. A differant sprout experience.
Amused on Monday by one of the quirks of the capitalist regime under which we labour. Now a number of the more serious problems we face are a consequence, in large part, from our consuming too much. Problems like global warming, the credit crisis, inter and intra country tensions arising from conspicuous inequality, filled up landfill sites, running out of oil and blah. But when we actually start consuming less and the big shops start moaning about only getting a half percent growth of sales on last Christmas, the business page of the DT goes into a nose dive. Deep dark recession is upon us!
And further amused by a recent factoid from the TLS. It seems that by cooking our food for the last 25,000 years or so we have given ourself a considerable competitive advantage. Cooking is a sort of pre-digestion which means we can carry a lot of energy around without having to carry a huge digestion apparatus with it and without spending a lot of time at it. It was then said to follow that we could therefore carry a lot more brain about and that we got into a virtuous spiral upwards. Perhaps one ought to verify this story by comparing the relative weights of the digestion apparatus of various animals. I can easily imagine that we have less than a cow - which eats grass and has a lot of apparatus - and large constricting snakes take a very long time about digesting their meals, but what about a lion that both chews and eats meat? Are their stomachs so much larger than ours? Do they spend days after a meal snoozing while the digestion works it off?
# posted by Jim @ 11:07 AM 
