The Time Bubble

It seems I can't open a newspaper these days without finding yet another article about how bad sugar is. Yes, it seems that sugar is this year's public enemy number one. We just can't be left alone to enjoy our lives can we? It seems to be one thing after another. One minute we're a nation of binge drinkers. Next salt is the silent killer, oh and keep off the coffee too. Then the focus is on fats - good fats, bad fats, let's confuse the hell out of everyone. Now it's sugar - and great the paper is telling me there's 5 teaspoons of sugar in every banana - one of the few "healthy" things my children enthusiastically ask for. Thanks for ruining that for me. Then there's 23 spoons of sugar in a can of drink and 86 in a chocolate bar. OK I'm exaggerating now, but even so the amounts quoted seem ridiculous on some of the things. Does all this scaremongering do people any good? None whatsoever - all it does is confuse and annoy them and give t...

When I was about sixteen I used to go to friend's house parties. This was a time of great excitement for me. For a start I was at an all boys school so these parties tended to be full of females who were full of novelty value for me as I just didn't have that much interaction with them at the time. But I wanted to - wow, did I want to. Those hormones were running rampant at the time, I'm sure if you think back you'll remember what that was like - it was the same for all of us, wasn't it? Aside from girls, the other exciting thing at these parties, which was considerably easier to get my hands on was the booze. At that age we were too young for pubs and booze wasn't that easily accessible, so most consumption took place at these parties, which happened maybe once every month or two. Alcohol was new and illicit and exciting. And also dangerous. You could guarantee at every one of these parties there would be at least one attendee who would over do it and end up ...

So it's a new year, and it's time for me to put on my somewhat eccentric thinking cap and come up with some exciting new ideas for innovation in the sausage world! Since being chosen as Love Pork's official sausage taster last year, I've taken my responsibilities in this area very seriously. I mentioned in the last entry that I had some big ambitions for 2014, well one of these is to make it big in the world of bacon, ham and sausages. I've already been offered a feature in Pig & Poultry Marketing magazine, but for me the ultimate dream, and the culmination of my life's work would be to gain the legendary status of Hambassador with Love Pork. How can I achieve this? Well, as long as I keep writing and promoting all things pork product via this blog, who knows what might come of it. Hambassador aspirations apart, sausages aren't the only things that get awards in the Pork world, and if there is some bacon or some pork pies to be judged in the months a...

This New Year's Eve was quite unusual for me, because for the first time in eight years, I was not DJ'ing for the evening. This has always been a lucrative night for me. DJ's, like taxis, charge at least double, more in many cases, but this year I decided I would take a break from it. New Year's Eve assumes a special importance in our family, because it is also my wife's birthday. We have been together since 2006 and in all of that time she's had to traipse around after me wherever I happened too be working for the evening. That's OK if we are local, but that hasn't always been the case. Anyway, I decided it was about time that I treated Claire to a birthday night out so I rejected all offers of DJ'ing and thought about what we should do. Now I thought at first maybe we should do something really special, but then I thought perhaps we will put that on hold for another year. You see Claire was 29 this year and she has the big birthday coming up at...