Food science.

Some weeks ago, after running some distance, I opened the door of my flat. I entered, panting, and sat at the desk in my room.I took off my running shoes, checked my phone and stretched a little bit against the mantlepiece near the desk. This is a fairly regular occurrence. I had a shower, also a regular occurrence.
After the shower, my concern was nourishment. Running takes a lot out of me. I'm a hefty lump of Monaghan man, 15 stone most days, so I burn a serious amount of calories galloping around Edinburgh. I would make dinner, sure, but that could take half an hour. I needed something quicker than that. I've been in this situation before. I wanted protein and sugar, and I wanted them right then. I opened my cupboard.
Out of my cupboard I took rice cakes, peanut butter and squeezy jam. You don't need a diagram for what I had planned. I took three rice cakes from the packaging, arranged them in a Triforce pattern on the plate, smothered them in peanut butter with a knife and drew a circle on each one with squeezy jam.

Maybe you do need a diagram. This is the triforce, a symbol of immense power in the videogame series Zelda. Imagine the yellow triangles are rice cakes. IMAGINE IT.

I ate them quickly, sandwiching the second and third rice cake together for maximum efficiency. I put the plate and knife over by the sink. I opened my cupboard, put back the rice cakes, put back the squeezy jam and put back the... hmm. I looked at the jar of peanut butter and I wondered something.

"Wouldn't it be great if they made squeezy peanut butter?"

And then I put it back in the cupboard and checked my phone again. It was a fleeting thought. But later that evening I thought about it a little more.
Out there in the world somewhere, there's probably a man whose whole world is squeezy peanut butter. A food scientist who is working night and day to get peanut butter to that exact consistency and viscosity so that it will be easy to squeeze out of a bottle. His marriage is probably on the rocks. The wife took the kids to her sister's house last week and they haven't returned but he doesn't care. He doesn't have time to care. Rumour has it the Japanese got their peanut butter down to 90,000 centipoise. 90,000! Efficient Asian bastards. That's almost half the regular viscosity of peanut butter! They'll be squeezing the stuff in no time. It probably tastes terrible, though. That's his strength. His progress is slow, but he's kept the taste right. His next batch, SqPB211, will probably get below 100,000 and still taste like a dream. And a month or two later he'll get lower again. 2013 will be his year. He'll show the bigwigs what he's made of.
He's made of squeezy peanut butter.
They'll make millions. He'll get his bonus and he'll put a down payment on that new Mazda he's been looking at. The wife will come back. The kids will come back. His world will be right again. He can go back to the easy side of food science, whittling down the amount of chocolate in Yorkies without making them look less manly. And some man in Edinburgh will be able to make his post-run snack without the need for a knife.

Spare a thought for this poor girl.

This isn't a very topical post, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't recognise her at all. I'm sure she wouldn't mind too much either, she's a fictional character. But we'll pretend she's not, I've a post to write here.

This girl was featured in a television advert for Splenda some years ago. Splenda is an artificial sweetner. Splenda likes to think it's just like sugar, but it never will be. You could have your tongue surgically replaced with a strip of leather and you still wouldn't believe it's sugar.

This poor girl wanders into a diner, asks for a coffee with sugar and the waitress looks a her like she ordered a cheesecake made of laser beams. A family nearby sniggers and laughs at the girl. The waitress asks around the diner if anyone's heard of this crazy stuff and, after the entire diner shrugs its shoulders at the crazy lady looking for coffee, a nearby Morgan Freeman stunt double suggests she might actually be looking for Splenda.
Ah, yes, Splenda. The woman had obviously lost the run of herself for a minute, there. Maybe she had a mild stroke. Of course she was asking for Splenda. What the fuck is sugar anyway?

Light hearted, maybe, but if was the girl above, I would PANIC THE FUCK OUT. Sugar's sugar. I've been hoovering up the stuff for twenty six years. I remember putting heaps of it onto my Rice Krispies and ending up with entire tablespoons of the stuff at the bottom of the bowl which I was only too happy to crunch through. I melted it in a frying pan to try and make sugar glass like the have in the movies. Then I ate that too. Telling me sugar never existed would be like telling me there was never a James Bond Jr cartoon, or telling me that my oldest friend Niall never existed. My entire history would have been rewritten. I'd run home to look at old photos of birthday parties, trying to see if there was a bag of sugar in the background somewhere. I'd go online and type in 'sugar' and hope to high heaven I wouldn't only find stuff about the Apprentice.
I like to think of myself as a rational man but, if the entire world forgot about sugar tomorrow morning, I'd probably tattoo the word across my chest, run onto the stage at the X Factor final with no shirt on and blow myself up. I'd never know if my actions had any effect but surely, surely, somebody out there would see me, see 'sugar' and remember something.

Anyway, there you go. Oh, that ad? You don't remember it? Here you go. I should point out it's a work of fiction. It's not real. Sugar's real. Go eat a big spoon of it and thank fuck for that.

Something I already wrote on facebook, but it's long enough to warrant its own blog entry.

On my way home this evening I took a quick diversion into the Co-op to get something to eat. I'm in a little bit of a hurry this evening, going to see Skyfall again at seven so I went with the easy option. Pizza. You can't go wrong with pizza. Well, maybe you could put it in the oven upside down but if you're that kind of person I'm surprised you managed to make it onto facebook without putting your laptop in the shower.

It's cooking as I type.
I grabbed my disc of bready cheesiness and made my way to the checkouts. There, I was once again HARASSED by the sweets section. Recently, I've had a weakness for peanut M&Ms. I'm fooling myself by thinking the protein in the peanuts balances out the chocolate and sugar shells and makes them someway healthy.
So far, I'm totally fooled. Good job, me.
Anyway, I saw the label on the edge of the shelf "Peanut M&Ms 40p"
"Forty pee?", I thought to myself, careful not to say it out loud in case I sparked a riot, "That's wild cheap". (That's how I talk in my head.) So I grabbed a bag without another thought and approached the checkout with a big smug head on me.
Outside, I looked at the bag I'd bought and I was instantly disappointed. Downsizing had struck again. The bag, I now saw, was much smaller than what I'm used to, maybe two thirds the regular size. Groping it a bit led me to believe it was mostly air, a trick Nestle no doubt picked up from Walkers' Crisps. I opened the bag to see a pitiful amount of sugar coated peanuts staring back at me.
Maybe they were a promotional size, I'm not sure. I can only hope they go back to normal bags but, with Cadbury's taking 4g of chocolate off Dairy Milks in the past few weeks, I won't keep my hopes up.
M&Ms? Would've been more accurate just calling them "Ms"

All things nice.

There may be some of you out there that, when you saw I started a blog last year, thought I would approach this site with direction. That, oh, maybe I'd expose the seedy underworld of optometry, I'd review computer games or give you all blow by blow accounts of my lengthy runs in the evenings. And to you people I apologise.

As of today, I have no long game. I have no idea what I'll be writing about next week. Besides a few posts where I detailed my trip with my brother to Vegas, I'm very much winging this. This morning I didn't plan to write anything at all. But this evening changed that. This evening my world was turned upside down, then upside down again so it actually looks very similar to how it began. It's only about two degrees off where it was before, but still. At one point it was upside down.
Oh yes.
This evening, for dinner, I decided to make some chilli. Even though I'm not the herbivore I once was, I still only ever make my chilli vegetarian. Beans, chickpeas, chopped tomatoes and whatever spices take my fancy. I opened some cans, heated the pan and got started.
With the groundwork done, I looked to the flat's spice rack for inspiration. A bit like my blogging, seasoning a chilli is something I make up on the fly. I scanned the rack and reached for a jar.

Five spice. I'm not an idiot, I had no intentions of putting this in my chilli but I opened it and took a wee whiff anyway. It's a lovely smell and and ideal flavour to shake over potato wedges.

I put the five spice back on the shelf and browsed on. What I saw next shook me to my core:

 7 SPICE. Seven spice, people! Since when is this a thing? Was five not enough? Did someone in the spice factory get bored some day? Did their customers demand more? Fucking hell, spice folk, calm down. By this point I got curious. I wondered what limit there was on jarred spice mixes. Evidently five spice wasn't enough for some people, so what's to say seven will be? Surely it's only a matter of time before they rise up again and demand more spice?
How will we contain this? How can we satisfy these spice fiends? WHERE WILL IT ALL END?

Oh, right.


And that was my spice adventure this evening. If you hear of any advances in spice technology, let me know.

Except this. This is never to be mentioned again.

Showing my roots.

I sat at my laptop, staring at a blank blog entry page for a good ten or twelve minutes this evening. I've not written anything for a while and today I told myself that, before I put my head on my pillow tonight, I'd have written something new. I've had blogs, diaries and sketchbooks before. They all ended a month or two down the line. Not this one. Not six/six. This is too important. And not just for me. You, the reader, how are you supposed to know which variety of apple you'd be best sneaking into a nightclub, why I drink so much beetroot juice or what to do if Jehovah's Witnesses are chasing you down the street.

I swiveled around on my chair and looked around my room for inspiration. There wasn't much to inspire me. A wireless printer, a playstation, a few candles here and there. Shirts hanging off a chair. I'm not ironing them today. I've a blog to write! Bah. Nothing here to spark my imagination. I swung back around to my laptop but, mid swing, I stopped.
I smiled. I boiled the kettle, took two photos and took my laptop into the sitting room to write this while watching the Bake-Off.

There it is. That's my inspiration. Not the wardrobe, I should point out. I bought that wardrobe quite recently, for not very much from a Barnardos charity shop down Leith Walk. The wardrobe that was initially in my room was a godawful white laminate chipboard atrocity that was falling apart from the off. While it was probably designed to be rectangular, it spent its time in my room impersonating a parallelogram. It wobbled. It slanted to the left, it slanted to the right. The doors swung open unless held shut with a kettlebell (see above). Even though I had the opportunity to choose its successor, the brown one you see the bottom of in the picture isn't a whole lot better. It looks nice, yes, it has a full length mirror and plenty of shelves but it's BRUTAL quality. The sides are thin, half the dowels aren't in and won't go in properly and it came without a rail for hangars. I get the feeling that swearing loudly nearby would cause it to fall apart.
But my wardrobe isn't what inspired me. Look closer.
No, wait, actually, look somewhere else entirely.

There're the shirts I'm not ironing. But look at the shoes. They're my Kermit the Frog runners. I must've bought them eight years ago. Now look at the first picture. The slippers. Do you see?

I've only noticed this now, but my shoes are always left around my room in that arrangement. One before the other. And, to my knowledge, only one type of people do that.

Farmers.

There's a very specific way to take off your wellies when you come in for tea and sandwiches at 1.00. You use one the toe of one welly to hold down the heel of the other, swing around to do the other and, with both heels free, you step out of the wellies to go in and watch the news. As I grew up it was pretty much guaranteed that, at ten past one on any given afternoon, there'd be at least one pair of wellies outside the back door arranged in a straight line.

Have you seen Inglorious Basterds? Do you remember the scene where Michael Fassbender's character orders three drinks and blows his cover by holding up three fingers in the wrong way? Hold on, I'll go look.

There you go. Apparently in Germany, it's convention to extend your thumb and first two fingers to denote "3", as opposed to what Mike above is doing.

My slippers/runners made me think of that. I've not thrown silage to cattle in years now and my feet have long forgotten the feeling of wellies on them. But yet that's how I still take my shoes off. Heel to toe and leave them in a straight line.
It's how I do things.

And it's how I always will.

Brain damage.

I'd an interesting morning at work today.

I was sitting in my room this morning. The day had just started and I was clicking about on my computer, looking over people due to come in in the diary, checking my emails, making sure there was nothing in the day that would surprise me. Above me, a light fixture flickered. I clicked on. I scrolled down. The flickering kept going. After a while, it actually got worse. Above me was a recessed light fixture, stuck into the ceiling panels. Let me go get a picture off google.

Not a great picture. But it gives you the gist of it. A silver bowl recessed into the plasterboard ceiling tile with two CFL bulbs in it. The flickering had gotten worse because one bulb had blown altogether, leaving the remaining, flickering, one to annoy me without interference. I sighed, stood on my chair and got up to some old fashioned rooting.

I figured I'd enough light from other sources in the room to just take the bulb out altogether, I could source a replacement later in the day. With some tissue paper to insulate things, I took a firm hold of the base of the bulb, pushed it in towards its socket and twisted. Nothing. It didn't budge. Not a push-in, so. I twisted clockwise. Still no give. I twisted anti clockwise. Again, nothing.

This was a tough one. I went through my options again. Going anticlockwise a second time, I heard a faint noise. Quieter than a pin dropping, I hear a "tink".

Instantly, I panicked. I thought back to my youth. I thought back to someone giving out about CFL bulbs. That, while they're great for the rainforest and whales in that they use less 'leccy, they're filled with the most noxious substances known to man. I remembered a science teacher saying something about mercury being in them, and another science teacher tell me about mercury being, even in small doses, a fucking neurotoxin. I pictured men in HazMat suits. I think I was picturing Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak.

I'm making light of this now but, for five minutes today, I was shitting bricks. If I'd enough mercury in my system I'd be shitting out my kidneys soon after too. I was angry at the bulb. I finally got them out (a straightforward pulling motion took them right out of their sockets) and examined them closely.

One bulb was fine. Untouched. Grand. The other one, the one that tinked, had a crack near the base. As cracks go, you'd only see it if you went looking for it. There didn't even look to be any glass missing, no shards below me on the floor. This didn't calm me much. For all I knew, there was a dozen lethal doses of mercury coarsing through my bloodstream as I stood there. I put the bulbs in an A4 envelope. The envelope went into another envelope. All folded up, I put everything into a plastic bag and threw it into my bin. Monday morning, a binman will probably be writing something similar onto his own blog as he panics out.

I sat down and tried to take my mind off things. My shoulder felt sore. Forgetting that I'd been playing squash last night and swimming the night before, I instantly assumed the mercury was causing muscle spasms. I looked in the mirror, it looked like I'd dark shadows around my eyes. I made a typo while writing an email. I stopped typing and looked at my fingers. They were shaking. Fuck, now I'd brain damage. My right eyelid flickered a little bit.

Stroke. I was having a stroke.

All things I would do or experience on a regular day but, since cracking a lightbulb above me, I was convinced I had mercury poisoning.

I went to the toilet. There, I sat down, got my phone out and did a few quick searches.

"How much mercury is in a cfl bulb?"

"CFL bulb breakages and cleanup"

"writing a will in a hurry"

And the internet, the place that can convince you that something like 'not wanting to get out of bed' means you have AIDS, that hiccups means you've SARS, also known as the VERY LAST PLACE YOU EVER WANT TO GO if you have any form of a symptom, it... actually settled me right down.

A CFL bulb contains about 4 milligrams of mercury. That's about ten cans of tuna. And that's if I actually swallowed the whole bulb. I didn't swallow the bulb. I tinked it, double wrapped it and disposed of it.

I left the loo with a spring in my step. The people I work with probably thought I just had a really good pee.

 

I'm grand now. Making typos left, right and centre (really, this post has now taken almost an hour to write up) and my left shoulder's still sore. My eyes always look this way. I'm pushing 27 and I'm starting to show it.

But, for a very short while today, I was scared. Irrationally so, but definitely scared.

Anyway, that's my story for you. I'm away to Canterbury to see an old friend tomorrow evening. I'll probably get more brain damage down there than I'd get chewing twenty bastarding bulbs.

Bye, now.

To (0044)74144704374

Hi there. It's Noel. You've texted me a good few times now, and it's getting a little uncomfortable.

I appreciate that you care about me. I appreciate that you're concerned about recent accidents I may have had and payment protection insurance I may have been mis-sold. I appreciate that you want what's best for me which, according to you, was £2,800 last week but has now risen to £3,400. Pushing up that figure must've taken hours in court, sticking it to the man so that I can have a few hundred pounds extra in my pocket.

But there's a problem.

In my case, there is no man. I haven't had an accident. Check with the folk at my work, I haven't pulled a sickie in two and a half years. The worst I've done is stood on a plug beside my bed, and who can I sue for that? Bendix for making plugs that always sick upwards when not plugged in? Evolution for giving me such sensitive feet? I just don't think we have a case here, never mind a three grand case.
And, as for the PPI racket, I'm grand for that too. I've a credit card and a current account with Lloyds, and they've always taken good care of me. They phone me every six months to make sure I'm doing okay, and bumped up my interest rate on my ISA account without me even asking. I like to think I'm a savvy shopper, to be honest. There was that time about a week ago when I left a pack of Extra gum on the self scan till while I went away with my shopping. Do you think you could claim back my 59p?

If not, then I fear our relationship must come to an end, (0044)74144704374. It was... interesting while it lasted. It wasn't all bad. Each and every time you texted me I, for the duration it took me to take my phone from my pocket, felt special. I felt excited, like maybe a friend had texted me, like maybe someone out there wanted to tell me something, or maybe even wanted to hear my voice.. I'll never forget those moments. And I thank you for them.

But,
For now,
Fuck off.


Noel