Mixed Blessings

Two good things:

1. The children have stopped puking.  They did that astonishing thing children do.  They woke up looking like death’s door knocker, vomited for several hours, and then by 1.00 p.m. they were cantering round the kitchen with wet noses and glossy coats demanding sugar lumps and being disgustingly fine.  Frustrating but also brilliant.

2. The bloke from the water board came out and said: ‘That can’t be where your leak is mate or you would be knee deep in water and canoeing round the kitchen table by now.’  Jason said: ‘Ummmm. I thought it was a bit odd, but it was about 12.30 a.m. and I was somewhat jet lagged so I just took the professional plumber’s advice.’   They looked for the real source of the leak. It turns out that it is just the kitchen sink.  The reason why we thought it was leaking every time we turned on something else was because either a) someone was turning on the kitchen tap at the same time or b) the water from a previous tap turn on was still trickling around down under the kitchen cabinets.  Brilliant.  The bloke advised not using the sink for a week, letting it dry out and then buying some sealant stuff from B&Q.  I think getting a new sink will be easier.  But we are doing it the men’s way. Luckily I am still perfectly fine to use the dishwasher.  Huzzah!

The washing machine has been on full pelt and the house no longer smells of sick. I am a bit delighted.  Jason is a bit delighted because it meant that instead of helping me stem the tides of water and vomit he could go scamping.  He is currently disporting himself round a damp field in Derbyshire dressed as an elf.  He is happy. I am happy he doesn’t want me to go with him.  I am eating hot buttered toast and Hula Hoops so I am happier still.

Simple things.

As with all events in the Boo household the day did not go entirely to plan however.  I had a doctor’s appointment at 12.50 p.m.  The doctor I saw in Canada suggested that as lymph glands are ornery buggers, that I go and get a follow up appointment when I got home to the U.K. and have some blood tests to make sure it is just a lymph infection and not something else more sinister.  He wrote me a note explaining what he had done and what he had treated me for so that I could pass it on to my G.P.  It was thoughtful and practical, so I did as I was told.

This, as regular readers will know, is a bit of a turn up. I detest doctors and try not to go at all.

So today I got there and checked in on time.  Then I sat for an hour and a quarter while the doctor I was supposed to see ran later and later and later.  By the time I got to see her I was not in the best frame of mind, but I was polite. I promise you.

When I saw which doctor I had, my heart sank.  I have seen her before for something else and she was rude, thoughtless and completely unhelpful in every way.  If I had known I was going to see her I would have cancelled the appointment and made it for another time.  As it was I decided to give it a try given how much time I’d already invested.

She got my name wrong twice, which was a bit irritating. Then when she asked me what the problem was and I told her, she talked over me, started prodding me half way through the story and failed to listen to what I was actually saying.  She diagnosed neuralgia, which is one of those coverall words like virus generally.  At fancy doctor term for pain we don’t really know anything about.  She gave me a prescription for some pain medication. 

I asked her about the other doctor’s diagnosis of lymph infection which she flatly ignored and refused to even contemplate as an option, thus not allowing me to ask about any blood tests that might be necessary.  I tried three times to talk to her about it but she just said: ‘ I don’t feel any infection there so it can’t be that.’  I pointed out that it might be that and the reason she might not feel the infection was because I am day six of a ten day course of antibiotics.  Apparently this is rubbish.

I explained that the pain was a lot more manageable and that I was trying not to take pain killers at the moment because I had had some blood in my urine in the last few days and thought it might be related to how many pills I’ve had to take.  She ignored this too.  She didn’t offer to check my urine at all.

I had already offered her the other doctor’s letter several times which she ignored.  I finally asked her if she wanted to look at it at all.  She said: ‘What would I want to do that for? It’s from a foreign country.’  Amazing.  I explained that the other doctor had thought it might be useful for her to know what he had thought and how he had treated me.  She said: ‘Yes, yes. I’ll put it in your records.’

I expect that is the last I will see of it.

She has given me some pain medication they prescribe for epilepsy.  She did not entirely explain why this fitted my profile.  She gave me 84 tablets and told me to take one a day.  I asked her if she expected me to take the entire course without coming back to see her.  She said airily: ‘Oh come back in a few weeks if it isn’t any better.’  I asked her what would happen if I had more pain and had taken my one pill.  She said: ‘Oh you can take paracetamol and ibuprofen as well, and if the pain is bad then just up the dosage I’ve given you to four pills a day.’

At this point I realized that the woman was a bloody idiot and that trying to elicit any useful information was pointless. I took the prescription and went. 

I have just researched the drug which is called Tegretol. It is an antidepressant in the same family as diazepam etc.  It is used as an anti convulsant as well as a mood regulator.  It is also used for serious cases of trigeminal neuralgia.  Having looked this up I can kind of see why she suggested it.  The condition consists of agonising face pain without a root cause which seems to stem from the trigeminal nerve in the jaw, and which is really difficult to control. It is sometimes called The Suicide Disease apparently, which is nice.

I can also see why it does not fit.  The antibiotics do seem to be working, albeit slowly.  But then given the fact that I had been being treated for a pinched nerve for a week before I went to the doctor I am unsurprised they are working slowly as the infection would have had a long time to take hold.  The fact that it is an infection and not a relatively unknown neurological disorder is suggeseted by the fact that it is actually improving as long as I keep up the antibiotics.  I did not go for pain management, I went to see if I could find out if there were any underlying causes for such an infection to suddenly flare up.  It is so depressing just to be offered pills and told to go away.

What really irks me is that reading the accompanying leaflet for the drugs it says quite clearly that there are question marks about taking this with antibiotics, and that it should not be combined with any paracetamol based drugs.  When I asked her about taking paracetamol and ibuprofen she said it would be fine.  And she did not allay my concerns about taking them with the antibiotics either.  The fact that she was wrong about the paracetamol makes me doubt everything.  I am not taking them.

I shall call the surgery on Tuesday, book another appointment with a competent doctor and go and see them.  I will also complain about this doctor.  I wonder what would have happened if I had taken her word for it and taken the tablets without reading the pamphlet and combined them with antibiotics and paracetamol.  It doesn’t bear thinking about really.

Disaster heaped upon Doom

I am tired and a wee bit hysterical.  Mostly tired.

So the emergency plumber, who was supposed to come out within an hour last night when Jason rang to find out that we were covered through our house insurance at seven p.m.?  Yes. That plumber.  He came at midnight.  I lasted until eleven when I kept falling asleep on the sofa and jerking awake every time the sirens went off on t.v. (Jason was watching Police Camera Action type programmes. No. I do not understand it either).  Jason was sick of my twitching so sent me to bed.  I passed out instantly and heard nothing of the ensuing palaver.

The leak is in the main pipe which connects the mains water to the house.  It is jammed under the sink cupboard. It may need the entire sink unit removing.  Jason said to the plumber: ‘Do it. Do it now.’  to which the plumber replied (sucking his teeth): ‘Can’t guv’nor.  You’re only covered for two hour emergencies and this is more than that. I’ve already used an hour.’  Jason said (on his knees) ‘Please, please, please don’t abandon us.  We are only small and we have jet lag and children and it is bank holiday weekend. You can’t leave us like this.’  The plumber was quite kind and said he could come out on Saturday for £200 but that he thought because it was so near the mains that the repairs were probably the responsibility of our local water board (Severn Trent) and they might do it for free if we rang them in the morning.  In the meantime he left us his big long metal key thingy for turning the water off at the mains outside the house and told us to turn all the water off before we went to bed to prevent excess leakage.  Not entirely hopeless.

Jason got into bed and went into a deep coma.  At half past two this morning Oscar woke up in floods of tears.  I comforted him and put him back to bed.  This went on until half past three at ten minute intervals.  I got into bed with him at one point, which nearly killed me, as my shoulder is still very sore.  I changed nappies.  I changed pyjamas. I provided water. I provided stories. I soothed. I bribed. I cajoled.  Then I lost my temper entirely.  Jason got up for a pee, told me off for not being sympathetic enough to small boys, and then we had a blazing row.

I went downstairs to make a hot water bottle for my aching shoulder and left them to it. I came back to  bed to find Jason in it with Oscar.  Jason said: ‘I didn’t think you wanted any more sleep.’  I just snarled.  There was no other civilized reply.  I fell into bed and we all went to sleep in a filthy mood.

This morning I got everyone up to start the school/nursery run.  Oscar woke up and said: ‘I don’t feel very well.’  Then he threw up all over my side of the bed.  What joy.

I went down to Tallulah and made sure she was all sorted for school.  She looked smart and beautiful and ready.  Then she threw up all over the bathroom.  We cleared up.  We got downstairs.  She threw up downstairs. 

Jason turned the water back on.  We had no choice.  Now the washing was really stinky.

We have stuffed the cavity under the sink with towels while we do laundry and scrub children and bathrooms.  We are waiting for the water board. It is their responsibility apparently.  They may turn up today.  They may not.

I’m so glad I came home.

Tilly is the only one who slept all night and didn’t wake up covered in puke. She has gone to Wales for the weekend with granny and grandad.  I don’t blame her.

Home, home on the pond

We have been home since about half three this afternoon.  We are all clean.  We are unpacked. Things are put away and we are waiting for the emergency plumber.

Yes. This is what we like to do after five weeks of holiday and twenty four hours of light travelling.  We like to find out after much ripping out of kick boards and the like, that a major water pipe into the property has a leak.  Because it is a major pipe it is also nice to know that no matter which tap in the house we turn on the kitchen floor will still flood.  Thank god for the fact that Jason had paid extra on the insurance for such things, or we would be really screwed.  It is bank holiday weekend.  Chances of getting a plumber who hasn’t been forced at knifepoint to come out to you? Nil.

Luckily we had all had showers by the time we found out about the pipe.  Unluckily I hadn’t got any washing done.  And again I thank my lucky stars that we had a property with a washer and a dryer.  There is only a small amount of stinky washing assaulting my nose.

In other news, I cannot blog about any of the other things I had written about because all my photos are on the other p.c. and I have not had time to transfer them across.  The lawn is knee high in grass and dandelions.  It looks pretty but it will be a bugger to mow.  We have shut the curtains.  It’s the only way.

Our journey was uneventful until we got to Sea-Tac.  Our cases were all slightly over the limit weight wise and we had to go into a corner and do some judicious weight redistribution.  This was after the lady on the desk offered Jason an upgrade for silly money. He said: ‘Business Class?’ she said: ‘Yes’.  He snapped her hand off and then she booked him into World Traveller something or other, which is about half a step up from economy and not worth all the fuss.  She did it twice by mistake, at which point he got quite annoyed and said: ‘Just put us back in economy please’, when she confessed that it would be the usual big moolah to go to business class.  When she tried to book us into our old seats they had been taken.  Then she had to go and rearrange everything so we could all sit together.  This took a long time.  Then came the overweight luggage saga.

In the end, because the children were about to mutiny and I wasn’t feeling too chipper myself, the lady who had caused all the delays came to help us and found a cunning way for us not to pay any excess baggage at all.  I decided not to stab her with a hat pin after all.

Then.  Then.

We finally got on the plane to find that the girls and I were sharing a row of seats with a woman who was either dead drunk or dead mental or both.  She laughed and shouted in a Tourettish kind of way, and flapped her hands and crunkled her water bottle until we were all rather alarmed.  I think she was drunk, because as the flight wore on she got progressively less flappy and shouty.  This was a huge relief as I had resorted to sitting on top of the children to save them in case she was a terrorist, and Jason kept leaning over the seat backs and glaring at her.

The flight was a night flight in which we were encouraged to sleep, in much the same way they do in hospitals, by waking you up every forty five minutes to shine bright lights in your face and ask you to eat noxious substances which invariably make you ill.  The family in front of me reclined their seats fully leaving us about a micro millimetre of room and with the television screens touching our noses.  The girl in the seat in front of me was a hefty teenager who flounced somewhat and was prone to bouncing.  I kicked the back of the seat a few times when she nearly had my eye out.  Paddington Bear hard stares were passed around on arrival at Heathrow.

The girls did doze, but the baby in the adjoining row didn’t.  It howled, shrieked, threw things and generally had the biggest paddy of its entire life.  That and the woman next to us shouting ‘Stupid’ into the ether and wringing her hands meant that I got approximately nil by sleep.  I did get to watch some terrible romantic bollocks with Meryl Streep and Alex Baldwin.  I love rom coms. I like their mindlessness. I also like Meryl as an actress.  Unfortunately I have developed a deep loating for Alex Baldwin and decided that Meryl had clearly only signed up for that film because a particularly large gas bill had plonked on her door mat the same day the script did.  I also watched the excellent Andy Serkis being the excellent Ian Dury in the excellent Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.  I think Meryl would have done better to sign up for that one on balance.

Anyway. It is all done now.  The holiday has been put in a drawer and will be dusted off by me for the purposes of blogging and the act of remembering that I did actually go on holiday for quite a long time, and have not, as it seems right now, just been here all along, hacking at the coal face of life.

Nasty Bathrooms Part Two

I promised further shots of the bathrooms in this house.  The bathrooms which let down what is a perfectly nice house in all other respects.  Here is the tub in the en suite bathroom:

It is not too terrible in the grand scheme of things.  There is, as in the other bathrooms a great deal of wood panelling I could live without, and the virulent spider plant gives me the itch.  I also cannot get used to the fact that you are allowed to have plug sockets, power outlets and all manner of electrical equipment lying about in bathrooms with gay abandon.  The nine inch portable television suspended on a bracket with wires swooping down towards the large expanse of water, and the hand held remote control on the shelf next to the bath all fill me with a tearing dread and memories of all those thrillers where the killer chucks a three bar electric fire into the bath while the victim lies in a pool of Radox induced froth dreaming of the day she will be able to afford Diptyque candles, shortly before she ends up smelling like a pine scented barbecue.

The worst offender in the matter of bathrooms has to be the children’s bathroom, which has this:

Which is what I refer to as the Buck Rogers bath, tastefully rendered in moulded plastic, with emphasis on the mould.  It is so alarming the girls have refused to go in it.  Oscar and Jason have used it once. I think there was some sort of wager involved.  It was not a spectacular success and we have avoided it ever since.

Hopefully this will be the final part of Nasty Bathrooms of the world.  It is unlikely.  I have in fact seen several more hideous bathrooms on my travels, but as we were doing Open House viewings at the time, and I had to pretend to be a multi millionaire prospective buyer, and not in fact, a nosey little twerp from Glenfield, I could hardly whip out my camera and take pictures of pink frosted swans dancing across acres of glass shower screens.  Sad but true.

And now I must retire.  It is 12.45 a.m.  I have to get up in six hours.  I am wide awake, but I will not feel this alert and refreshed at seven in the morning.  We have to be at the ferry port at eight fifteen.  The ferry leaves at nine, but we have to be there forty five minutes early, even though we have pre-booked, and pre-paid.  Go figure.

There will be no more blogging until I am in Blighty.

Chocks away.

The rudeness of food continueth

Two new items.  One rude, one disgusting:

Item the first:

For your health conscious pot head with the munchies.

This rude food malarkey has made me think about the UK.  There seems to be tons of inappropriately named foods out here in Canada.  Is it just because I am looking at things with the eyes of a bleedin’ foreigner that I notice them do you think?  What if I go home and inspect the shelves of Glenfield Co-op thoroughly?  Am I going to find lots of rude food I just never noticed because it was familiar to me and I mentally deleted it?  I hope so.  I am going shopping with fresh eyes next week and I will take my camera just in case.

Then there is the disgusting thing.  To whit:

This is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like, tomato juice with added, pureed clams.  Urgh! Bork! Glah! Euwwwww! is what we say.  I was explaining this in the supermarket this afternoon as I was taking this picture.  As I walked away a lady rushed up to me, pointed to a bottle of this very same stuff which was stubbornly residing in the bottom of her trolley and said with a winsome smile: ‘It’s not that bad!’

Clearly she worked for the Clamato Marketing Board.

The scepticism on my face must have shone through, for she followed it up with the words: ‘We drink it with vodka’.  Like that was going to recommend it (yes. The only way this drink is palatable is if you get thoroughly shit faced.  After the fourteenth double you will love it, and then spend the next week vomiting up sour fish guts).  I canned this thought and smiled, saying: ‘Yes. I know. Like a Bloody Mary, right?’ to which she eagerly nodded assent.  Then I added: ‘But with extra fish.’  And looked highly disapproving.  She then said: ‘Well. You can’t really taste the fish.’

At this point I smiled and walked away thinking: ‘Well. What’s the fucking point of buying tomato juice with added clams if you can’t really taste the clams you pea brained half witted woman?  Save yourself the extra three bucks a jar and just buy tomato juice. DUUUUUHHHHHHH!’

I am glad that I maintained my serenity and didn’t voice my thoughts.  I’d have hated to have had to have a fight with a woman who was younger than me, fitter than me, and chock full of nutritious squeezed clam juice.

Oscar’s New Song

Sung to a tuneless dirge with much Stevie Wonderesque head waving and finger pointing:

‘Ohhhhhhh

It’s hard to know what to do

When you have a Croc  O   Dile

Downyourpants’

Farewell, Adieu, Auf Wiedershein etc

It is our last day here.  And apart from the agonising neck pain I have had a wonderful time and will be very, very sorry to come home.  I shall not miss the uncomfortable beds and chairs in this house, and I am looking forward to seeing my family, but otherwise I would be quite happy to stay, and stay, and stay.

We did lots of our packing yesterday in order to spend as much of today as possible doing fun things.  It sort of worked.  No matter how much packing you do beforehand, there is still more to do.  I am currently waiting on the last load of laundry so that I can zip up some suitcases.  Thank God for holiday homes with laundry facilities though.  The thought of all the travelling we have to do, combined with acres of stinky laundry when we get home would be enough to drive a woman to drink.  As it is there will still be hideous journeying, but minimal stinky laundry.

There were a couple of times today where things nearly unravelled.  Like when we drove all the way over to Victoria to take Nana and Aunty Lindsey out to dinner this evening to say thank you for their hospitality, only to nearly drive into the back of Nana just outside the restaurant (not our fault, but still a little stressful), and then forgot to bring back all the DVD’s and DS games that Aunty Lindsey so kindly let us borrow.  This necessitated Nana and Lindsey travelling back with us forty five minutes to our house to furnish them with said items.  Oops!  And I packed the book I bought Lindsey as a present somewhere in the depths of a case and was unable to unearth it.  Eeek!

Then there was the fact that even though we went into Sidney this morning with a list that distinctly said: ‘Buy new kettle to replace melted one’, we came home without one.  We resigned ourselves to having to leave a handful of cash by the melted remains of the old one.  Then we realised that we had promised the children a last trip to Dairy Queen if they forsook pudding at the restaurant in favour of coming home to relinquish items into Lindsey’s care, and allowing daddy to book us in online so we could all sit together.  We dashed out to DQ and realised that Home Hardware was still open.  What’s more, it stays open until nine at night, and it stocks unmelted kettles.  Result.

We have also, in between the crises, managed to eat our last pancakes, swim our last swim (not me. I merely spectated) and swap out our last books.  We ended up with $40 of credit at my favourite, Beacon Books, and have got some juicy new reads to bring home.  Plus, the book shop cat, Rosabelle, who rules the establishment with a rod of iron, let me take her photograph:

And she is incredibly snooty, camera shy and hard to please, so I feel we had her blessing.

I solve a problem, not like Maria. More like Ray Mears

There is a downside to all this eco awareness stuff, apart from the fact that I seem to have upset some very nice people by making sweeping and erroneous generalisations for which I am still hanging my head in shame…

It is the flourishing wildlife.  My land lady, who as well as owning this lovely house, and several others, also runs a business making things out of pressed flowers, wages perennial war on the deer on her property, who are as keen on pansies as she is.  The poor woman is forever digging six foot deep fence post holes and running around making brisk shooing noises.

Yesterday we were reading the local newspaper in a cafe whilst eating lunch and there was a huge article about the fact that the University of Victoria has been overrun by wild rabbits.  UVIC as it is known hereabouts has a large, beautifully landscaped campus replete with frisking bunnies which are remarkably docile and who freely wander the campus day and night copulating and regenerating with alarming rapidity.  They do not so much as twitch a whisker as you drive by.  They care not.  Nobody is predating on them and they have safety in numbers.  Tallulah and Matilda went for a walk round there with Nana a few days ago and commented that they had counted 106 rabbits in under five minutes.  Having driven by there this weekend I can safely say that this was no childish exaggeration.

They are so placid, and in such big numbers that it is like watching those rabbits on Teletubbies, which I always think must have been given valium kibble in order to get them to sit still and not freak out when a giant purple monster with a cowskin handbag zips by.

UVIC Campus:

Teletubbies Land:

There is talk of allowing the rabbits to vote in the next election.  They should send some to the UK.  It might make more sense.

I had a cunning thought about this rabbit issue. 

I cast my mind back to my university days.  Days in which I was dirt poor, spent every red cent I had buying books and alcohol and using minimal skills to provide/purchase food.  For one term I lived off a horde of Pot Noodles:

and nearly got Beri Beri and died.

Here though people are ultra healthy.  They run, swim, canoe, hike, ski and generally have these backwoodsman’s genes to the fore.  They would die before resorting to the calorific wasteland of the Pot Noodle. 

So how about offering undergraduate courses in wild food, starting with: ’450 things to do with rabbit’?  It’s lean meat.  It’s toothsome, it can be prepared in thousands of different ways and you can use the skin to make blankets and toques and slippers and pencil cases for your studies.  It’s all good. I really can’t see the downside, and with all the outdoor living that goes on around here, surely someone will know how to lassoo a rabbit?

Sociability

Our attempts at being unBritish and therefore sociable at the weekend, were remarkably successful, or at least I think so anyway, and as we know, on my blog it’s the only view that counts.

It may be that they were only successful by my frankly paltry standards, or on the British Sociability Scale (TM), which is not much better:

1-5: I was a glittering success, people laughed, the band played all night, I had my photo taken without bits of spinach between my front teeth and despite coming home at 2.00 a.m. in my stockinged feet, all my friends and acquaintances still want to speak to me.

5.-10: I managed to keep all my clothes on (nearly), I did not attack sexually or aggressively anyone in a position of authority to me, I managed to spit all the things I didn’t like out into a napkin rather than onto the floor. I did not make anyone cry.  When I woke up I only felt a minor twinge of shame.  The photos on Facebook are not too incriminating. Shame about the hair.

10-15: I felt like a total success.  I know deep down I was witty, glamorous and enchanting, and I have the bar bill to prove it.  It is only the flashbacks that tell me different.  I do not know what happened to my knickers.  At one point they were in my pocket because I distinctly remember blowing my nose on them, after that, it’s anyone’s guess.  Who knew I would take such a violent dislike to caviar? Still, I never liked that woman anyway.  I must learn how to delete those Facebook photos before applying for a new job.  How was I to know that that woman had only just come from her aunt’s funeral?

15-20: I feel differently about the police now.  I don’t see why I should pay my taxes for them when they are so rude and aggressive.  I was only going to get my coat…

This is different from the British Wallflower Scale (TM) which is:

1-5:  I managed to make conversation with people, only because I was trapped  by the beer cooler and next to the coleslaw and most of them thought I worked for the caterers, but that was pretty good for me. 

5.10: I talked to the man at the party who everyone else was trying to avoid.

10-15: I talked in bat squeaks inaudible to the human ear.  At one point I might have cried, but I did it into my drink and hopefully nobody noticed.

15-20: I went in the front door, smiled, grimaced, did a half wave, walked around the room twice as if I was looking for something and exited  via the kitchen window.  Job done.

So things were good.  UE’s brother and wife are lovely people.  We have nothing in common with them except for the fact that I divorced his brother and we have heads.  I really do like them, but our lives are so very different.  He is a golf pro and she is a school teacher whose hobby is running marathons.  They are kind and funny and sweet and really lovely.  They are healthy and outdoorsy.  We are sullen ingrates who only go outdoors when forced with electric cattle prods.  We do little or nothing for the community and prefer to stay indoors with a good book.

It is a good job we have children.  The children thing is good. It is very bonding.  The kids thankfully got along with each other and were very impressed that they were cousins.  We spent a great deal of time at the park stopping them throwing each other off climbing frames and falling flat on their faces in the dirt. 

By the time we rocked up at Jim’s house I had lost a contact lens (it ripped half an hour before we were due to turn up, which was not long enough to go home and get another one) and was covered in bark and dirt.  The children were on their knees and we were mildly alarmed by the fact that I was half blind and the children were likely to throw a fit at any moment.  It was a bit like going to a bomb disposal unit get together.

And yet it worked.  The children all got along together and eventually went to the park again, because it’s not enough to spend all day there, apparently you have to spend all night there too.  The wine we chose (thank you UE’s brother) was acceptable and we did not disgrace ourselves too much.  The food was delicious.  As well as having the hands of a trained killer, Jim cooks like a ninja.  We had beautifully flavoured Indian rice and mouthwateringly prepared halibut (which is currently in season here) with coriander.  It was insanely good.  The company was great and if it weren’t for the fact that we had to leave at nine when Oscar’s face resembled the ghost of Christmas past, we would have probably outstayed our welcome.

Not bad for social pariah’s eh?

Daily Bread

I promised to bore you on the subject of bread.  If you prefer you can go and read other, more exciting posts, by other, more exciting people.  It’s what I would do.  Or possibly stick your head in the oven.  I don’t really mind.  I am writing this because I am tempted to stick my head in the oven, and have already read lots of other people’s posts, all of which are better than mine.

Bread is one of those endlessly divisive subjects.  It is a minefield let me tells ya.  Particularly if you are going to be an international, jet set, traveller type person.  There are thousands of different types of bread, many of which are regional or national specialities which are taken entirely for granted in their own, small part of the world, but which seem impossible to replicate successfully anywhere else.

My children are picky eaters.  They try new things, mainly because I force them to, with an electric cattle prod accompanied by harpy like shrieking, but their general consensus is; ‘I am not really keen’ on anything that isn’t a) covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried, b) as plain as Ann Widdecombe’s face or c) covered in chocolate (and possibly deep fried).

One of our fallbacks is sandwiches.

After all, how complicated can a sandwich be?

Ha!

Not only do you get four hundred choices per square inch of sandwich in this country as to what goes inside it, you get choices about what goes on your bread to stick the filling to it, and what kind of bread you want.  You are not in Glenfield anymore.  Oh no.  No Mother’s Pride, flabby white sliced loaf for you.

At home I make my children eat brown bread.  They tolerate it.  They do not tolerate it if it has ‘bits’ in it.  It has to be just brown, and that is all.  They like most types of French bread, as long as it is white, with crusts and has no ‘bits’ in it.  Otherwise they are just not really keen.  Tilly will eat bagels, but only if they are plain.  God help them if they have things on them.

In the supermarkets here you can buy hundreds of different types of bread.  Hundreds.

We have tried many of them with varying degrees of success.

All white, sliced bread is a big no no.  We were given some, somewhere, possibly at someone’s house.  It makes Mother’s Pride look positively nutritious.  It is very sweet (much sweeter than Mother’s Pride for example, and I think that is sweet too).  It has a weird woven texture, rather like candyfloss that has been somehow moulded into shape, and it sinks into a kind of sweet, stodgy mess that then sticks round your back molars until the crack of doom.  Lots of British processed bread does this too, although I think to a lesser degree.  Of course I could be wrong. I shall not check when I get home, because I dislike sliced, processed bread, so I will just have to let this little prejudice rest.

There is a great fondness for nuts and seeds in this country.  Much chocolate has nuts in it, many cakes have nuts/bran and/or seeds in, sometimes all of the above.  Lots of bread is liberally sprinkled within and without with a variety of health giving ‘bits’.  There is a type of bread called ‘Squirrelly bread’ for example.  It has about sixteen different types of nut/seed in it.  There is a whole brand of loaves which compete with each other to announce how many grains/seeds there are in them.  My children fear them all.

So, you see, I have spent a long time in supermarkets reading the labels on bread, and testing out various types of bread in order to find one that the children will tolerate.  It got down to me reading the ingredients like some crazed old lady, and lining things up in the aisles and muttering a lot.

We had noticed that quite a lot of the different breads we have tried have tasted sweeter than the bread we eat at home, even the children have commented on it.  We thought it was perhaps our tastebuds, but no. When I actually started to read the ingredient list I have found an astonishing thing.  A great many of the loaves have sugar in them.  Now I am familiar with the whole add a pinch of salt to a cake mix to bring out the sweetness etc and that maybe you can do that in reverse, and that a pinch of sugar helps yeast do its thang.  I presumed this was what was going on, but I am now thinking not.

I don’t know if it works this way over here, but at home, ingredients are listed with the most predominant thing first.  So for example, in a loaf of bread it would go something like: Flour, water, yeast, and then all the tiny trace things you put in like salt, or perhaps a pinch of sugar maybe.  What I found in the majority of the supermarket breads here, is that sugar is very high on the list of ingredients, much higher than I would expect. 

Once I started noticing it I went into a bit of a frenzy and started checking loaves all over.  What surprised me even more was that even in the low calorie slimming breads, sugar was present, and in the ‘healthy’ breads which promised wonders because they were chock full of seeds and nuts and omega three.  In fact, one of the raw seed wonder breads that I picked up actually had sucrose, fructose, glucose and honey in it.  That’s four different types of sugar.  Four! In one loaf of bread.

The only bread I could find that just had what I would expect bread to have in it, was German rye bread.  Now I don’t mind trying new things, as you know.  And I lived in Germany for a while at one point, so I am pretty hardened to the evil things that Germans do to bread.  I cannot eat the very dark German rye breads to save my life. I just do not like them.  I am sure if I thought about them in terms other than the fact that they are meant to be bread (i.e. as car inner tubes for example) that it would be fine, but they are unpleasant.  I don’t mind the lighter rye breads too much though, which is good, because this is our fall back.

We are currently munching our way through Deli World’s ‘Winnipeg Style’ Light Rye Bread.  It has flour, yeast, salt and that’s about it.  It has taken me four weeks to find this bread.  The children tolerate it, but at least it is not sweet.  It has made me wonder about the sugar content in our bread at home.  We buy bakery loaves, but next time I am in the Co-op I am going to look.  It makes me wonder whether sending the kids to school with a sandwich is any more healthy than sending them to school with a bar of Dairy Milk.  Where’s Jamie Oliver when you need him, eh?

As well as supermarkets we have been testing out bread from the bakery.  There is a local bakery about four miles away.  We have tried four or five types, but the results have been patchy.  I dare not ask about sugar.  We did find some lovely bread in a bakery in Cordova Bay.  It is a forty five minute drive away.  The loaf cost $6, which is about £2.50.  Willie’s bakery in Victoria also does excellent bread at about the same price and distance away.

If we were here longer I would have started to make my own bread, then I can be sure what goes in it, and that the children will eat it.  As it is we have done the great Canadian bread experiment, which has helped to pass the time.

As for me, I don’t like the sweeter breads, but am a huge fan of Sour Dough bread, which you can get in great abundance here, and which is rare at home, and when you can get it, costs about £2.50 a loaf, so I’m alright. Nobody else likes it but me, so I am filling my boots till Wednesday.