pumpkinstrokemarrow

Pondering further on the caffeine content of tea I light upon http://www.teatalk.com/science/chemistry.htm which tells me that a 200ml cup of green tea contains 76mg of caffeine. Also that oolong tea is characterised by, amongst other things, the presence of the scary sounding dimeric proanthocyanidin. Try the same trick for coffee and find that roasted coffee beans are about 1.5% caffeine by weight. But making the comparison between tea and coffee looks like being more tricky. I learn along the way that Necafe has a very fancy web site, far stronger on image than content, befitting its status as market leader in the convenient coffee world.

But I keep trying and find http://www.diffen.com, which appears to be a poor relation of Wikipedia. It tells me that ordinary tea has maybe a third of the caffeine of coffee, with green tea a third of that again and oolong tea somewhere in between. I think whoever wrote it is of a tea=healthy and coffee=unhealthy bent. Amongst other things he talks of getting coffee jitters when whacking back too much of the stuff. Which I recognise: jitters does not seem quite the right word but drinking too much tea or coffee can make me feel a bit odd. Maybe the answer is to stop drinking tea by the pint. But not an answer to which Mr Benn would sign up to. I believe he drinks tea (conventional variety) by the pint, is teetotal, smokes a pipe and has made it to 85 or so in pretty good shape. Which means we might be stuck with his son for a good while yet. See previous post on the subject of my aversion to political families.

Another aversion is headlines in newspapers which ought to know better which scream about some awful decision taken in the health world - like closing down the only A&E facility for 100 miles or so - because of filthy lucre. Filthy bureaucrats who put money before lives. Odd, given the money driven world that we live in, that more people do not understand that money should be an important driver in the health world. Health is very expensive and if we do not allocate scarce resources in a cost sensitive way we are not going to be very healthy.

I now have to confess to some weakness on the Epsom Common front in that I did not attend the annual general meeting of the Epsom Common Association and attempt to make any impact on their chain-saw wielding cow-friendly policies. Which I abhor. Partly because I did not find the energy to tromp down to some village hall in the depths of a November evening. Partly because I suspected that I would just have got shrill and cross and not made the right sort of impact on this gathering of early retired ecos in woollies. Although I suppose it would have had the virtue of reminding those that run the association that we do not all like what they do. I wonder how long it will take them to catch up on the fact that gratuitous cow growing is not presently considered ecological - a far more serious concern than playing at farm. Maybe they should read their Guardians more closely.

Getting on well with Deutscher on Stalin, now maybe a quarter of the way through. Decidedly not shrill and comes across as very fair. And readable - quite a feat in itself for someone whose first language was not English. I share one snippet. England and France by backing the wrong side in 1918 or so made an already dreadful civil war drag on for longer than it would otherwise. Thus contributing to the subsequent transition to totalitarianism. If the revolution had been consolidated without so much blood being shed things might have turned out better. A lesson for today.