The Anonymous Widower

I Was Kathleened At The Weekend

Saturday

At 0200 on Saturday morning, I couldn’t sleep.

So in the end, I got up, made myself a mug of tea and did Saturday’s puzzles in The Times.

I had no trouble doing them, so my brain function was normal.

But my left hand wasn’t working that well.

I had breakfast in Leon and had a bit of trouble with their sauce containers, but otherwise I was fine.

I did a bit of shopping in M & S on Moorgate and came home.

I wasn’t having any problems.

For the rest of the day, I watched television and listened to the radio.

Sunday

I got up late, as I was probably catching up the sleep from the night before.

I had lunch in Gordon Ramsey’s Street Burger about one.

My left hand wasn’t working that well and I was making a bit of a mess.

After, I got home, I watched television and listened to the radio.

Monday

I slept in late, but as my left hand wasn’t being very co-operative, I had a small bit of trouble dressing, due to an uncooperative left hand.

My INR was 2.0, so I took 5 mg. of Warfarin.

I had breakfast in Leon, where I made a mess with the sauce container.

I then went looking for a book, which I couldn’t find.

Tuesday

Everything seems better today.

My INR was 2.1, so I took 5 mg. of Warfarin.

I did my usual Monday morning trip, of  visit to Marks & Spencer for about three days of food and then had breakfast in Leon.

Conclusion

This seems to be a pattern.

  • A storm goes through, I can’t sleep and after some drinks of tea or zero alcohol beer, I feel a bit better.
  • My left hand often stops co-operating and won’t do simple things.
  • But it does seem to clear up, when the storm passes.

This is probably the third time, that it’s happened.

Note.

  1. My left humerus was broken by the school bully.
  2. I had a stroke in 2011, which affected my left arm.
  3. If I carry shopping in my left hand, the pulling action on my humerus seems to help.

Any ideas will be gratefully received.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Food, Health | , , | 2 Comments

ICE Report Shows Majority Open To Net Zero Changes

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Engineer.

This is the sub-heading.

A new report has found that a majority of the UK public is amenable to the behavioural changes needed to hit the country’s net zero targets.

These two paragraphs summarise the findings of the report.

Published by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Infrastructure (APPGI), the report was based on a survey of 1,000 respondents. It found that 57 per cent were open to change, with 23 per cent described as net zero enthusiasts who were likely to have already altered their behaviours, and 34 per cent wanting change, but feeling they needed further empowerment to achieve it.

However, there is far from universal agreement when it comes to behavioural change around climate action. The report found that 30 per cent of people were ‘reluctant followers’, largely acknowledging that the UK must act on emissions, but not feeling personal responsibility for that action. This segment will likely only change their behaviours if forced to do so or seeing a majority of others doing it first. Finally, 13 per cent of those surveyed were classed as ‘net zero resistors’, people who don’t believe action is necessary and have no intention of doing so.

Summing the figures up gives us.

  • Net-Zero Enthusiasts – 23 %
  • Wanting Change – 34 %
  • Reluctant Followers – 30 %
  • Net-Zero Resistors – 13 %

All politicians should be forced to read the full report.

What Would I Need To Do To Achieve a Personal Net-Zero?

My circumstances probably cover a lot of people.

  • I am a widow living alone.
  • My house is well-insulated with solar-panels on the roof, but heated by gas.
  • I don’t have or need a car.
  • I do nearly all my shopping by public transport and carry it home.
  • When I go away in the UK I use trains.
  • If I go to Europe, I either go or come back by train.
  • I am coeliac, which means I need to eat some meat to stay healthy.

My largest carbon-emitted is probably my house, but it would be unsuitable for most current solutions.

I would put myself in the Wanting Change group, but I could move to a Net-Zero Enthusiast, if the right technology came along.

  • I have seen one bolt-in electric replacement for by boiler and when the right one arrives, I’ll probably fit one.
  • An affordable battery to work to with my solar panels and also allow me to use Off Peak electricity would be nice.
  • As I’m coeliac, I tend to buy in the same food each week from Marks and Spencer to eat in. I might be able to cut my carbon footprint by getting Ocado to deliver. Especially, as some deliveries seem to be bike.
  • If TfL decarbonised the bus, that I use most days to and from Moorgate would that lower my carbon footprint?

I suspect the largest amount of carbon outside of my house’s heating, that I’ll emit, will be tomorrow, when I take a train to Newquay.

How Do We Convert The 13 % Net-Zero Resistors?

The recent protests by French and Belgian farmers indicate, that these farmers are probably in this group. And there are other forthright groups!

The only way, that they’ll be converted, is if technology allows them to earn the same amount of money and have the same outgoings, as they do now!

February 8, 2024 Posted by | Energy, World | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Biggest Strawberry In The World

I eat a lot of strawberries, either as fruit or as jam on a scone or bread.

  • I always have done since I left home to go to Liverpool University.
  • I do wonder, if it was a subconscious decision on my part, as my body reacted to all the alternatives like puddings with all their gluten.
  • Certainly, by the time, I was married, I know that I always annoyed my mother-in-law by never eating her gluten-rich puddings.
  • Strawberries were also my wife’s passion, when she was pregnant.

Have other coeliacs avoided gluten before diagnosis. I certainly did.

Today, I bought a punnet of strawberries in Marks & Spencer.

Note.

  1. They were Spanish strawberries.
  2. To say they were large would be an understatement.
  3. One weighed in at a massive 64 grammes.

But they all tasted fine with a good texture!

 

January 22, 2024 Posted by | Food | , , | Leave a comment

The Proof Of The Pudding

In A December Treat For £3.70, I talked about buying English strawberries in Marks & Spencer in December.

I said I’d post again, when I ate them.

This picture shows the pack on a plate.

And this a close-up of a single strawberry, which cost 37 pence.

I’m afraid the photos don’t do justice to their taste, as they were definitely some of the best strawberries, I’ve ever eaten.

I did buy another two punnets this morning, to see me through the weekend.

Dyson Farming has a web page, which describes how they produce the strawberries.

The page contains an explanatory video, which is well worth a watch.

Will developments like this be the future of farming?

December 14, 2023 Posted by | Food | , , , | Leave a comment

A December Treat For £3.70

T am not a great person for sugary treats. But I do like strawberries and regularly buy a punnet, when they are in season, cut the green off and eat them one after another.

But in my seventy-six years, I’ve never eaten English strawberries in England in December, although I must have eaten strawberries in December in warmer climes, like Australia, Gambia or South Africa

Until today, when I bought this punnet in Marks and Spencer on Moorgate in the City of London.

Note.

  1. The strawberries are from Dyson Farming in Lincolnshire.
  2. The strawberries are the fourth item in the bill in the first picture.
  3. The label says that they are grown by innovative methods for outstanding depth of flavour.
  4. They look as if they’ve been individually vacuumed.

I’ll post again when I’ve eaten them!

December 12, 2023 Posted by | Food | , , | 1 Comment

A Design Crime – Marks And Spencer’s New Paper Carrier Bag

This article on the BBC is entitled Marks & Spencer Scraps Plastic For Paper Bags.

This is the sub-heading.

Marks & Spencer is swapping plastic carrier bags for paper ones in all stores, in an expansion of a trial that began in 10 branches in January.

These two paragraphs give a few reasons.

It follows other High Street stores in swapping plastic bags to paper in a bid to cut plastics use.

Supermarkets Morrisons, Waitrose and Aldi all use paper bags for customers, though some stores offer plastic bags as an option.

But the proof of the bag is in the using.

This picture shows the new bag.

It’s main problem is unlike the plastic bags, it is a nightmare to fold.

I could also fold the plastic bags, so they went in the pocket of my Barbour jacket.

I have searched my house for some of the green plastic bags to use in the future.

Conclusion

Three out of ten!

October 7, 2023 Posted by | Design, World | , , , , | 1 Comment

Heat And The City

As I do on many Saturdays, I took the bus to Moorgate to have a late breakfast and do some food shopping in the Marks & Spencer department store.

To say it was hot would be an understatement and it must have been over thirty, so I retreated into an air-conditioned restaurant for my brunch, with my son and a friend.

I know that area well and although, I’m normally there on a weekday, I’ve never seen so much display of female flesh, with bare shoulders, cleavage and tummies everywhere. At least some were wearing white, which surely was prudent, but others were suffering in black and other darker colours.

After eating, I did my shopping.

I didn’t need much, but I did need some beer. As I’d miscalculated my consumption in the hot weather, it was a priority.

At home, I generally drink Adnams 0.5% alcohol Ghost Ship, which my body attests to be gluten-free. Normally, the store stocks it, but I couldn’t find any, so I asked an assistant, who was restocking the shelves. She said that they didn’t have any, but they did have the Adnams-brewed M & S own-brand, of which I’ve drunk dozens of bottles and my body also attests is gluten-free. So a couple of bottles, went into my shopping basket.

Interestingly, the assistant was rearranging shelves and it appeared, she was moving zero-alcohol bottles from the floor into the refrigerated end of a large display.

Could the heat be creating a high demand for customers needing to drink something to cool down? And many felt that zero-alcohol beer was acceptable in the heat of the City.

On Monday, I went back to take this picture of the display.

Note the Marks & Spencer own label brewed by Adnams in the middle!

And this was the price label for the beer.

No Alcohol – No Gluten – £1.90 a bottle – What more can a coeliac, who’s on Warfarin after a stroke need?

 

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Food, World | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Gluten-Free Afternoon Tea On Oxford Street

I spitted this sign outside Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street.

I wonder, if this is going to be offered in all the larger stores.

August 14, 2023 Posted by | Food | , , , | 4 Comments

Asbestos In M&S Killed My Wife — Gove’s Ruling Is A Disgrace

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Sunday Times.

It is in a section of the paper, which is entitled Act Now In Asbestos, where the paper has a campaign.

These are the first three paragraphs.

Janice Allen met and fell in love with her husband, Stuart, when they worked together at Marks & Spencer’s flagship store in London’s Marble Arch.

The shop would end up killing her.

Janice died of mesothelioma, a cancer she got from exposure to asbestos. The M&S store was constructed using the toxic building material and it was found in several locations where she worked. The department store would award her substantial damages before she died at a hospice in Kent in June 2018.

I have only worked with asbestos once.

This picture shows my father’s printing works in Station Road, Wood Green.

They were not the most salubrious of premises and my father was always making improvements.

My father was a very good practical carpenter and an accomplished painter and decorator.

The back wall of the building was covered on the inside with damp and mould, which even in the 1950s, he thought could be a health hazard, so he decided to do something about it.

  • Above a certain height he cleaned the wall and painted it with a standard magnolia paint.
  • About two metres above the ground, he fixed a two-by-two batten piece of wood to the wall.
  • He also fixed another one to the wall, perhaps halfway up.
  • To cover all the damp and mould, he then fixed corrugated asbestos cement sheeting to the two battens with galvanised roofing nails.
  • To finish it off he screwed a piece of slatting to the top batten, which he painted a fetching blue colour.

The damp and mould was now out of sight and out of mind.

I remember how this construction was done, as I was my father’s ten-year-old assistant.

Although we’d used asbestos cement sheeting, I don’t think either my father or myself inhaled any asbestos dust, although we weren’t wearing masks, as no-one did in those days.

ICI And Asbestos

My next encounter with asbestos was at ICI in the late 1960s.

  • A lot of chemical plants, built before the Second World War were riddled with it.
  • But ICI, knew of the problems, and I was given strong warnings about asbestos.
  • As I was only putting instruments on plants, with experienced plant fitters, I didn’t have an real encounters with it.

But why if ICI  were so anti, were builders still using it and otherwise sensible companies not removing it from their buildings?

This is the large paragraph in The Times article.

An M&S spokesman said: “Like many older buildings, Marble Arch dates back to the interwar era when asbestos was commonly used in construction, and sadly our former colleague Janice Allen worked in the store over 40 years ago, before the consequences of asbestos use were known. Today we rigorously manage asbestos where it is present and ensure the store is safe for every colleague and customer.”

If ICI were worried about asbestos in the late 1960s, why weren’t Marks & Spencer worried about asbestos in the late 1970s.

A Barn In Suffolk

In the 1980s, I put up a new barn, where we lived.

Often, in those days, asbestos was still used for roofing, but I was recommended to use a new British Steel product, where steel was covered in a coloured weatherproof coating.

I Sneeze A Lot

These days, I sneeze a lot, but I didn’t sneeze this much before I was diagnosed as coeliac and went gluten-free.

Could it be that my immune system is so much stronger and when there is something in the air, it is only giving it a good kicking?

I’ve been sneezing a lot for the past few days, as the Council removed a dead tree from outside my house.

But we do know, that Nottingham University have shown, coeliacs on a gluten-free diet have a 25 % lower cancer rate than the general population.

Could this be due to a stronger immune system?

My Coeliac Son Died From Cancer

I believe my youngest son was an undiagnosed coeliac and he lived the rock-n-roll lifestyle on a diet of ciggies, cannabis and Subways, as he was a sound engineer in the music business. He died virtually out of the blue of pancreatic cancer at just thirty-seven.

So on the one hand being a diagnosed coeliac on a gluten-free diet gives you a certain immunity to cancer and other diseases and on the other hand undiagnosed coeliacs are prey to all the nasties we have to live with.

To return to the tragic story in The Times, which gives Stuart’s age as 62, so that places him as being born around 1960 and his late wife; Janice looks about the same age.

I think it is true to say, that in the 1960s, medicine started to change dramatically.

  • Serious heart operations and kidney transplants became commonplace.
  • The first heart transplant was performed in 1967.
  • Drugs were improving.
  • Vaccination was stopping polio and other diseases.
  • The first test for coeliac disease in children was developed. Sadly, it wasn’t used on me.

But we had little inkling of the role of genes in diseases.

Incidentally, I didn’t come across my first coeliac, until 1972, when a neighbour had a coeliac baby son called Nicholas.

So was the poor lady in The Times story, in some ways a victim of her time?

  • Asbestos was wrongly ignored by Marks & Spencer.
  • Medicine hadn’t advanced enough to be able to identify, those susceptible to cancer.
  • I have heard so many stories of bad use of asbestos.

Sadly, the dangers of asbestos are still ignored by many companies and organisations today and that includes the NHS.

One of my colleagues at ICI in 1968 will be livid at how we are ignoring asbestos.

Is This A Possible Scenario?

Consider.

  • Someone is born coeliac and they are not diagnosed.
  • If they were born before 1960, there was no test for coeliac disease in children.
  • The simple genetic blood test came in around the turn of the century.
  • They work with asbestos in their twenties.
  • Their immune system is not good enough to protect them.

Just like my son, will they get a serious cancer?

Coeliac Disease And Covid-19

In Risk Of COVID-19 In Celiac Disease Patients, I look at a pier-reviewed paper from the University of Padua.

This sentence, sums up the study.

In this analysis we report a real life “snapshot” of a cohort of CeD patients during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Italy, all followed in one tertiary centre in a red area of Northern Italy. Our data show, in accordance with Emmi et al., the absolute absence of COVID-19 diagnosis in our population, although 18 subjects experienced flu-like symptoms with only one having undergone naso-pharyngeal swab.

There were 138 coeliac disease subjects in the study and they had been gluten-free for an average of 6.6 years.

The downside of this, is how many undiagnosed coeliacs, suffered a severe dose of Covid-19.

Conclusion

Given the pain coeliac disease has inflicted on my family over the years, I believe that all children should be tested for coeliac disease.

I would also recommend, that anybody thinking of working with asbestos or taking a job with a high cancer risk, should get themselves tested for coeliac disease.

Being found to suffer from  coeliac disease will not in itself kill you, and with the right diet, it might even prolong your life.

July 24, 2023 Posted by | Health | , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

St. Pancras To Heathrow By Elizabeth Line

I ate breakfast in Le Pain Quotidien in St.Pancras station this morning and afterwards I took the Elizabeth Line to Heathrow.

I took Thameslink for one stop to Farringdon station and got a Elizabeth Line train direct to Terminal 2 and 3 at the Airport.

Note.

  1. The train I took was going to Gravesend. I suspect it was because of engineering work.
  2. An empty train passed through, whilst I waited. I’ve never seen that before on Thameslink in St. Pancras station.
  3. I travelled in the front of the Thameslink train for the one stop.
  4. The change at Farringdon station was very quick, as it was just down in the lift and the Heathrow train was waiting.

These are some notes on a fast change using the lifts between Southbound Thameslink  and the Elizabeth Line at Farringdon station.

  • Get the first lift of the two that arrives, if like me, you can use escalators.
  • If it goes up, walk across the station at street level and get the two serial escalators down to the Elizabeth Line.
  • If it goes down, take the lift to the Elizabeth Line.

If you can’t manage escalators, you have to wait for a lift going down.

I have some observations.

Meeting And Greeting At St. Pancras Station

From my position in Le Pain Quotidien, I was able to watch passengers leaving and arriving at the Eurostar terminal opposite.

There were quite a few people, who were meeting and greeting others.

In Effects Of The ULEZ In West London, I said this about meeting and greeting at Heathrow.

But as it now so easy to get to the Airport using the Elizabeth Line will more people use the new line to meet and greet and say goodbye to loved ones or business associates. Since the Elizabeth Line opened, I’ve met a couple of friends at Heathrow, who were passing through.

Will the Elizabeth Line increase the number of trips to the airport, by making meeting and greeting easier?

If it does, then it will put more pressure on the services to Heathrow Airport.

Seats In St. Pancras Thameslink Station

These pictures show some of the large number of seats in St. Pancras Thameslink Station.

Should there be more seats along the platform at stations on the Elizabeth Line, where passengers change trains?

My Train To The Airport Was Crowded

Ten in the morning on a Sunday, is not the time I’d expect to be busy, but I estimated it was about ninety percent full, judging by the few empty seats.

There Were Eight Trains Per Hour (tph) To And From Heathrow

From Real Time Trains, it looks like the following trains were running.

  • Elizabeth Line – Abbey Wood and Terminal Four – 2 tph
  • Elizabeth Line – Abbey Wood and Terminal Five – 2 tph
  • Heathrow Express – Paddington and Terminal Five – 4 tph

My train to the Airport had been going to Terminal Four.

Is eight tph the maximum frequency, that can use the tunnel to the Airport?

Is The Elizabeth Line Diverting Passengers From Heathrow Express?

When I returned from the Airport, my Elizabeth Line train left about ten minutes after a Heathrow Express train.

  • The Heathrow Express train wasn’t very full.
  • The Elizabeth Line train was very full.
  • Passengers got out at all stations.
  • I got out at Tottenham Court Road.

It will be interesting to see the Heathrow Express passenger figures.

Which Is The Best Elizabeth Line Station For A Marks and Spencer?

Because their gluten-free food is so much better than other shops, this is important to me.

  • There are larger stores at Ealing Broadway, Tottenham Court Road (West), Liverpool Street (West), Stratford and Ilford.
  • There are food only stores at Heathrow, Paddington, Bond Street and Liverpool Street (East).

Today, I used the large store by the Western entrance at Tottenham Court Road station.

But, if you want to avoid walking, Stratford is probably the easiest.

 

 

April 16, 2023 Posted by | Design, Transport/Travel | , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments