Snacks of the Month - choccy goosegogs and chin chin

Two snacks this month. First, another random snack from Lidl: chocolate covered  gooseberries. 

Cathy spotted them while we were having a mooch round one of the stores. I expect they were part of one of the themed weeks that Lidl do - in this case Polish week.

Gooseberries aren't massively popular berries. I like them in desserts and as jam - mainly because my mum had a very productive gooseberry bush in her previous back garden and both gooseberry jam and goosegog crumble featured in her home cooking. 

There's also a story about how some bitey creepy-crawley that lived in the productive gooseberry bush bit Mum and a little while later the infected bite hospitalised her... in the USA. But that's another story.

These goosegogs are creepy-crawley free and are coated in a rich dark chocolate. They're about the size of Maltesers.

I was able to remove the chocolate coating and leave the gooseberry intact. It was brown and didn't look appetising. Instead here's a cross section with the chocolate still on.

Cathy reckons she wouldn't recognise the taste as gooseberry but to me they had all the tangy sharpness I'd expect. The dark chocolate works well to complement the sharpness of the fruit. 

They taste very rich, though. I wouldn't be able to scoff a pack in one sitting (and I know I shouldn't anyway). But for an occasional burst of tart sweetness these are pretty good.

My second snack this month is Africa's Finest chin chin, which I found in Asda. Despite claiming to be Africa's Finest it's actually made in the UK.

One reason I bought this was because of a funny thing I remember when I was a kid. A few years after my family came back to the UK from Africa we were invited to a wedding. The groom's family were from Nigeria and his relatives had brought some African food to the reception.

My brother and I ignored the normal British style buffet and went straight for the African food, much to the amusement of the groom's female relatives who were surprised to see little white boys so keen to try their cooking. One of the things they had was a massive sack of chin chin. 

Chin chin is a crunchy biscuit produced in small square chunks and fried rather than baked. Sometimes flavourings are added, sometimes not. There usually isn't much sugar in it, just a tiny amount to give it a slight sweetness.

In contrast to the home made stuff I remember with heavily nostalgic bias, this commercially produced and packed chin chin wasn't as good. It had a great crunch. It tasted fine. 

But, honestly it was never going to live up to the chin chin I had at that wedding. 

January 2022 - end of month review

Cathy and I kicked off the New Year with a Lego build that took us most of New Year's Eve and was completed on New Year's Day. It will fit in  nicely with our other large Lego vehicles.

I had a few days off at the start of the month and we put away the Christmas decorations before I started back at work after the seasonal break. The Christmas cards came down around about the same time and I embarked on the annual audit (results posted here!).

Halfway through Januray I had an exciting weekend, which included the first community litterpick that I had been on for ages, and the first local football match as restrictions eased. I made it to three games in January - the game at Cardiff Draconians I blogged about, a dismal defeat for Barry up at Cardiff Metropolitan, and at the end of the month, a trip to Gloucester to watch Longlevens play Bishop's Cleeve.

I went to that game because Cathy's cousin's stepson, Luke, plays in goal for Bishop's Cleeve. He wasn't called on to do much in the game, but he made a couple of very good saves and it was nice to see him keep a clean sheet in a 2-0 win. In the picture below, he's the tall goalie wearing a purple kit. He looks small in this photo because he's further away than any of the other players.

This was a rare month of matchgoing, because I went with different people to each game. Steve joined me at Cardiff Dracs. I somehow persuaded my friend Callum to come to Cardiff Met, and we picked up Paul, the other member of the Barry Town West Cardiff Massive, on the way. And then I watched the Bishop's Cleeve game with Cathy's uncle Steve, and her cousin Adam. 

For the first time ever I had a personal stake in the Africa Cup of Nations, supporting Gambia who were appearing there for the first time. They did well in their group games and won the first knock-out game before losing in the quarter-finals. It was enjoyable sharing updates on the Gambia team's progress with my mum and brother. None of us could really believe how well they were doing. 

Unlike last year, this year we were able to celebrate my Mum's birthday with her. We spent her birthday weekend in Shrewsbury. On her actual birthday we had a jaunt to Oswestry, which meant we could meet up with some friends we hadn't seen since before the pandemic started. We also had a Sunday lunch out, with some of my cousins coming over. We hadn't seen them for almost 3 years, which is just another reminder of how long the world has been pandemified.  

The big TV event this month has been the weekly release of episodes of The Book of Boba Fett on Disney Plus. This started strongly, but hasn't really gone where I expected it to. I am holding off until the season finale on the 9th of February before giving it a proper review. Suffice to say, I have thoughts! 

Celebrating my Mum’s 70th birthday

I was asked to give a speech at my Mum’s 70th birthday party. Here it is. There were a couple of ad libs as well, but I can’t remember them. The asides (in brackets) were scripted.

Honestly, Mum loved it!

This birthday is a bit different to last year – Mum had planned a quiet celebration but then I had some unexpected difficult news and so Mum and Dad came suddenly to Cardiff to see us. Sorry for causing you such an unusual birthday last year, Mum. I hope this year’s makes up for it.

As we prepared for today, my wife Cathy trawled through photo albums and CDs of photos to create a photo exhibit. There are some very funny photos in there. But along with the best-forgotten fashions, and one or two outfits that still look really good, the one constant in so many of the photos are family, friends, people and celebration. We had photos from many previous birthdays and it’s obvious that as a family we mark milestones.

Cathy's hard work

There’s also a photo in there of Mum teaching me when we lived in the Gambia. Mum taught me to read and it wasn’t long before I was reading anything I could get my hands on – including medical journals someone gave me as a joke. [Mum reminded me afterwards that the only word I got stuck on was hypernatremia. For reference, I was 5.]

That shared love of reading and of books has always been something that has brought Mum and me together. When we were very little we had a very wet holiday in the Lake District (I don’t think there’s any other kind!) and we spent a lot of time in the car driving to various places where the rain didn’t matter. Along the way Mum read us chapter after chapter of The Lord of the Rings – and I’m sure my fondness for that book relates to hearing it in Mum’s voice first.

[Actually, Mum told me afterwards that she thinks that was a holiday we had travelling round the South of England, but hey, it’s still true that she read all 1,061 pages to us. And who’s making the speech here, anyway?]

As a teenager I started reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and it wasn’t long before Mum was also fully conversant with the misadventures of Rincewind the wizard and the streetwise cynicism of Captain Sam Vimes. So whether it was the mines of Moria or the streets of Ankh-Morpork, we always had those shared worlds to discuss.

It’s funny the things you learn from your Mum, and what you take with you into adult life. This year I will have been involved in Fair Do’s, the fair trade shop in Cardiff, for 20 years. But I was involved in Shrewsbury Fair Trade first, thanks to Mum.

In fact, I’ve often said the fair trade movement in Britain was built on the back of coerced teenage labour. I lugged a lot of boxes on her behalf – the trade-off was after I dropped her off I could keep the car for a couple of hours. Mum’s car was a Vauxhall Cavalier (the classic 80’s design with the boxy front end). It became my first car in the end until it sadly died of rust and over-use. But ask Mum and she will tell you it was a good car and we both loved it.

So we have memories and milestones, but even on the cusp of 70 my Mum is full of surprises. Just after Christmas we went as a family to see the new Star Wars film. Afterwards, as we left the cinema, Mum said: “Oh that was so much better than those prequel films. The fight scenes were so much more realistic!” (If you think that’s surprising, you should hear her talk about how much she likes Die Hard!)

So, from Middle Earth to a galaxy far, far away, thank you Mum for being there with us. That’s something worth celebrating.

Happy Birthday, Mum!

Arachnophobe

When I was a kid, my parents decided to follow their starry-eyed evangelical dreams and become missionaries, which is how I ended up in Sibanor, a little town in the Gambia. While out there we were told in no uncertain terms never to touch creepy-crawlies, never to climb trees, and never to put our hands into holes in the ground.

The prescription on tree-climbing was to prevent the most common form of snake bite - when a climbing kid put his hand on a dozing venemous snake and startled it. When I returned to this country I discovered I have no upper body strength to speak of, and I've never been able to climb trees, or for that matter ropes in the school gym.

But the worst bit of my African childhood conditioning was the fear it instilled in me about bugs and other creepy crawlies, particularly spiders. To this day I freeze involuntarily when something scuttles out from behind a cupboard, or from under a rock in the garden. I'm getting better at dealing with smaller bug-type things. I doubt I'd be trapped in my home office now by a spider in the doorway (that happened once!). But I still get a reaction when an unexpected critter suddenly makes itself known.

This evening we came home from a shopping trip and I went into the bathroom to take my contacts out. I noticed the window had been left open, so I leaned over the sink to shut it. Except that in the sink was the largest spider I have seen in years. It was easily a good three inches across if you count the legs (and I do!).

Like a big pansy, I screamed and then my conditioning took over and I just had to get out of the room. Fortunately Cathy and Abby were home, so they could deal with it. I felt a bit better listening to them from the safety of the kitchen as they agreed that actually it was quite a big spider and I wasn't a total wuss. Meanwhile I had a severe case of the heebie-jeebies and even felt like I was going to throw up.

I know being scared of spiders is illogical. But when I see one, with no warning, and it's bigger than usual, I revert to being the little kid who knows the back yard contains real nasties (like scorpions, fire ants and snakes). And it scares all the logic out of me.

On the bright side, my illogical fear does have a rational cause. At Greenbelt I met someone who was phobic about buttons. Yes, buttons. I have no idea what causes that kind of phobia.