Holy Toast
With the election of a new Pope, my slice of toast this morning was appropriate.
Holy Toast
Unfortunately, it is gluten-free toast, and as coeliacs these days, can’t be Catholic priests, I doubt the Pope would appreciate the subtle flavours and merits of this toast.
Sad really, as one of the most influemtial Catholic priests of recent years; Derek Warlock, was a coeliac.
A Liverpudlian Hotel
I’ve just come back from Liverpool, where I stayed in the Hope Street Hotel. It is one of my favourite city hotels and I would rate it as the best city hotel, I’ve stayed in, in the UK. It certainly magnitudes better than one famous London hotel, C and I stayed in, where we were constantly interrupted all night by the reception wanting someone, with the same name as myself.
What I like most about it, is that it is a real Liverpudlian hotel, where the staff reflect the true nature of the city, where they have a joke and a tale for everyone. So many luxurious city hotels, as the Hope Street Hotel is, are very anonymous and could be anywhere. In some, I’ve stayed in, you find no local staff at all.
It is also an excellent gluten-free hotel, that actually bakes all of its own bread, including the gluten free. How many hotels do that? On Thursday night, I ate in the restaurant and they’d also made their own ice cream. Also, as befits a coastal city, there is always plenty of fish on the menu.
C liked her baths and the bathroom in the room I had was spectacular.
A Spectacular Bathroom
She would have loved it, although despite several tries she never managed to book the hotel.
I have feeling that I got a room upgrade because I booked with a Platinum Amex card. It’s happened to me quite a few times in 4 and 5-star hotels, as often a lot more guests want the cheaper rooms, so those they know or have a decent card get the upgrade.
Every time I go, the hotel seems to get better. This time, they had fitted new televisions which gave access to all the Freeview channels and Sky Sports. So often C and I stayed in a hotel, where her favourite Radio 4 wasn’t available and most don’t have my favourite Radio 5 either. But Hope Street has both and also all of the odd ones like BBC3 and ITV4.
Full Freview Television
Note that the Hope Street Hotel scores 4.5 on Trip Advisor, as opposed to the Lowry in Manchester, which scores 4. Remember too, that the Hope Street Hotel is at the heart of the University and many attractions in the city. Most of the other places you want to go are just a walk down the hill and if you need one a taxi back.
Got A Migraine, Have Sex!
Research from the the University of Munster in Germany has shown that sex may be a better cure for migraine than painkillers. It’s all here in Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph.
I wonder what Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells thinks of this?
Incidentally, I used to get the odd migraine, until I was diagnosed as a coeliac and went gluten-free.
Mincepiration
What a lovely name for a cookery book featured in The Times yesterday. The recipes they showed were all gluten-free or could be made so by using gluten-free flour.
I may not buy the book, but I think I’ll try and find a copy and have a browse.
A year ago, I’d have just bought it on Amazon. But their tax antics and the offensive tee-shirts, they have sold recently, have put me off buying from them.
Microwaveable Bread
For lunch today, before I took the train to Ipswich to watch the football, I went into Carluccio’s in Spitalfields and had a cup of tea and Eggs Benedict.
The eggs were delicious, but they would be so much better with some toast.
It struck me at the time, that a food scientist should be able to come up with a bread in a packet, that after a couple of minutes in the microwave was perfectly acceptable to soak up the egg yolk and the Hollandaise sauce.
After all, there are some very good meals you just cook in the microwave. As I often do after the football, I’ve just had a delicious Marks and Spencer’s curry and rice.
Surely a method of making a couple of slices of decent bread must be possible?
Chains Of Indian Restaurants
As a coeliac, one of the safer places to eat is an Indian restaurant. Especially, if they are one that uses gram or chickpea flour, like most good ones do!
But what is surprising, is that we’ve had lots of restaurant chains with an Italian theme, but I’ve never really come across a nationwide chain of traditional Indian restaurants.
Years ago, I ate with C and a couple of friends at a restaurant in Doncaster, which was part of a small chain. I wasn’t sure of the name, but it was something like Aargh.
Yesterday, when thinking about eating in Manchester, I thought how easy it would be, if there was a well-known Indian chain, that could be searched. Using such things as Trip Advisor is always a bit hit-and-miss, but if you’ve eaten in one of the chain and know the standards are acceptable to you, you know you’re probably safe with another. It’s probably one of the reasons, I eat in Carluccio’s so much!
I did find the restaurant and it’s called Aagrah and according to their web site, they have twelve restaurants.
Was My Dinner Last Night What It Said On The Packet?
When I came back from Huddersfield last night, I was a bit peckish.
One of the problems had been that the only gluten-free sandwiches available in the Marks and Spencer in Piccadilly station was cheese and pickle.
Yuck! Only Cheese And Pickle!
I do eat quite a bit of cheese, but I generally only eat ones with the extra mould in them like Rochfort. And for some reason cheese and pickle sandwiches are not of my liking.
I did think about stopping off in Islington at either Carluccio’s or my favourite Indian restaurant, but as it was so cold, I decided to see what I could get in Marks and Spencer’s at the station and then get a bus home immediately. So I bought one of their roast pork dinners for the microwave, as that would mean I’d be able to cook it quickly.
Roast Pork With Cider Sauce
It is a favourite of mine, as I find that the sauce calms my throat well. It’s a bit sticky and I suspect like ginger cake, it absorbs the rhinitis and transfers it to the acids in my stomach.
Can I be sure I was eating pork, without a full DNA test?
It certainly tasted like pork and the meat was light and in slices, so the only other thing it could have been was perhaps a very plump bird.
So I doubt that it was anything but pork and I certainly don’t think it was horse.
But reading the ingredients, were the Apples Bramleys, the Cabbage Savoy or the Oil Rapeseed?
Surprisingly the mashed potato, which I’ll admit was nice contains double cream. The other surprising ingredient was the lemon juice in the roast pork.
It certainly didn’t contain any of the dreaded gluten.
Crazy Ticket Prices
Yesterday, I went to the football at Ipswich. I’ve always found evening matches difficult and expensive, as I’ve never really found a sensible gluten-free restaurant or cafe in the town and usually I have to pay through the nose, to come out of London in the rush hour. Yesterday though, I decided to come early on the four o’clock train and then go to Woodbridge to have a curry in the Royal Bengal by the station, before getting a train back to Ipswich for the match.
I’d expected to have to buy two return tickets, one for Liverpool Street to Ipswich and return and another for the short journey between Ipswich and Woodbridge. But I was sold a return from the Zone 6 Bounday to Woodbridge for just £20.95. This compares with the two tickets I bought on Saturday to get to Ipswich for a total of £18.25. So the extra journey to Woodbridge cost me £2.70. An Off Peak Senior Day Return would appear to cost £2.80 bought on the Internet.
So it would appear I got a bargain. There was also no problem using the effectively one ticket to do two journeys.
I also saved twenty pounds by not travelling in the rush hour, which was enough to pay for the meal.
It would be nice to have a decent gluten-free restaurant somewhere between Ipswich station and Portman Road.
A Good Gluten Free Party
Tonight, I went to the launch party for Celia lager at the Regent Pub in Islington.
The pub supplied some of their gluten-free pizzas and there was also a selection of savouries like quiches from the WAGFree Bakery in Brixton.
What more could a coeliac want?
Everybody seemed delighted with the beer and the accompanying food.
I’ve already virtually finished the twenty-four bottles of Celia lager I bought a couple of weeks ago from Deli Divine and ordered some more yesterday. So at least I’m voting with my wallet.
Am I Finally Solving My Childhood Health Problems?
I wasn’t the healthiest of children. We lived in a very cold part of London a few hundred metres from Oakwood station and to say our house was cold would be an understatement.
I seemed to spend at least one term of each school year off sick with a problem that my doctor had no idea about. I’m not particularly sure which term I had off, but I do know in my first year at Minchenden it was the Spring term, as no-one could understand why after a good first term, I deteriorated in the next.
Other memories of the time, are saucepans of cotton handkerchiefs boiling on the gas stove. As after all there weren’t any tissues in those days.
I can also remember panicking at times and having fights with my mother as she struggled to clean my ears out, as they were rather full of wax.
But it all seemed to disappear, when I was thirteen or so, and I can’t remember any problems after my first year at Minchenden. Perhaps that was after, my grandmother died and I got to have the big sunny room at the back of the house, which was much warmer. This death may be more significant than I think, as it finally gave my father control of the business and finances in the family were much better and we started to have longer and more holidays. Soon after we bought the house in Felixstowe, where of course the air was fresher and it wasn’t quite as cold.
Going to Liverpool was probably a good move, as it faces to the west and for a city in the 1960s, the air was probably pretty good.
I met C in 1966 and really since then I didn’t have too many health problems until after she died in 2007. When I was diagnosed with coeliac disease in 2003, i thought that would be the explanation of my my childhood health problems.
I should also say that I’ve always said that I liked being at altitude and seemed to feel better in places like Denver. I also flew light aircraft a lot and loved going up high.
But it wasn’t as after C died, the runny nose started to return and I put it down to hay fever. But tests have shown it is nothing of the case, but just rhinitis and a very runny nose.
So are there any other factors that might come into it.
My grandfather died of asthma and pneumonia in his forties and I suspect he carried the coeliac gene, like my father probably did. I have no proof of that except that none of the women in that line of my family have ever given birth and undiagnosed coeliac disease is a cause of failing to conceive. My father definitely had breathing problems and suffered badly from catarrh He was always taking menthol tablets and he used to give them to me, but they made little difference to my problems. So perhaps, what my father and I had were different, but the older I get, the more I think our problems were similar. But of course, he was never diagnosed with coeliac disease and he smoked a pipe.
When I met C I was just 19, so for forty years of my life I lived with her and it was if she warded off the rhinitis. That is really a silly idea to even think it. But last week my GP suggested I get a Sinus Rinse to wash the muck out of my nose.
It got me thinking. C was a great lover of deep hot baths and usually had one every day. To save hot water, she’d always leave it for me afterwards and I would get in and often wash my hair. Now she laid back into the water to wash hers, but I knelt and put my head forward under the water. Afer she dued one of my first actions was to put a proper shower into the bedroom.
So did this daily bath to keep my sinuses clear? And did the shower make it all worse?
I don’t know, but I have certainly felt a bit better since I’ve had a morning bath.
The bath seems to have helped another of my childhood problems that has returned. As a child I used to suffer badly from cramp, when I was asleep. I used to get out of bed and put my foot on the cold lino. This symptom started again, when I moved here.
This post is very much a ramble, but underneath everything there seems to be a pattern emerging.
But at least nothing seems to be life-threatening. And of course I grew out of it once.
The Anonymous Widower 