How Zopa Beats The Stock Market
This article was trawled out of the Internet by Google. It’s well worth a detailed read.
The Silliest Legal Case In The World
The BBC is reporting that the Naked Rambler has been released from prison. He is now walking somewhere around Scotland in the nude.
It must be the silliest legal case because it’s been going on for years now. The article contains this comment.
John Scott QC, chair of the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland, says the bill to keep Gough in prison for so long must have reached hundreds of thousands of pounds. It costs about £40,000 a prisoner a year, rising when an inmate is separated from others, and when he is repeatedly discharged and readmitted.
It’s funny, but why was he not arrested in England, but is having so much trouble in Scotland?
Perhaps he could be persuaded to walk somewhere else like North Norway or the Sahara Desert. Now that would be a naked challenge!
Or could the Scots not deport him to England and ban him from going north of the border!
They’ve Got Blue Honey In France
This sounds a rather weird story and it’s all here on the BBC web site.
Perhaps the French bees have got the blues over Francois Hollande!
St. Pancras: Gem – Gare du Nord: Dump
The title is not my words, but those of the BBC’s respected correspondent, Hugh Schofield, in this piece, about the differences between Britain and France. This is a typical paragraph.
Now, I am not going to draw any too-facile comparison between France and Britain on the basis of a pair of 19th Century railway termini.
But I will say this – never in 16 years of living in France, and making pretty regular trips back and forth across the Channel, have I ever felt a greater disparity in national moods.
There’s a lot more in the same vein.
As ever with what Hugh Schofield writes, it is a good and thoughtful read.
The Lawyer Likes The New Bus For London
Lawyers get everywhere these days. They’ve even got an article in The Lawyer magazine about the New Bus for London.
Coeliacs With West African Roots
One of the big differences about London, after coming back to live after forty years, is that now everybody tends to talk to each other a lot more. A black lady and myself had a big laugh about it, after we’d walked up the road talking about our ailments and remarking that twenty years before we’d have been on opposite sides of the road.
One thing that has surprised me is the number of coeliacs, I’ve come across with West African roots. I have written about the chef in my local pub from Sierra Leone, who is a coeliac, but several times, I’ve been asked in the supermarket about the gluten-free food in my basket, by shop staff and others, who are coeliac and have some roots in West Africa.
If it was just once or twice, I’d put it down to a random chance, but it is more common than that! Remember though that gluten has little part in the traditional West African diet, which is based on sorghum.
Hopefully the diagnosis of Michael Obiora; the actor, who was born to Nigerian parents, with coeliac disease, will help spread awareness of the disease.
Hospital Food
I’ve had a bit of that in the last few years and as a coeliac, it’s general been rather poor.
But perhaps I was lucky compared to the lady with coeliac disease in this story. This is an extract.
When she was in hospital a few years ago, she was shocked by the food she was served.
“I was offered toast, but I can’t eat that. I need gluten-free bread. They didn’t have the porridge oats which I can eat, so I ended up with a boiled egg.”
And the subsequent meals did not improve either, despite the fact Kathleen had confirmed she was coeliac when she was first admitted.
“Lunch was fish fingers, which I couldn’t eat because of the breadcrumbs. They asked me why I couldn’t just pick them off.
“At dinner time they put gravy on my dinner and a Yorkshire pudding on the plate too. Because of the contamination risk, I couldn’t eat any of it.”
A friend, who used to work in a hospital always said that the most likely place to get ill, is a hospital.
The Anonymous Widower 