grumpyf1

It’s amazing the interesting characters you can meet when you stop for a cuppa on a long walk. Last Friday’s was particularly unusual... Whilst you were pondering why anyone would choose to write a newspaper column about their new phone, last Friday I was up bright and early for a 7 mile walk, and already a comfortable distance from home by the time I would normally have been arriving at work to an aura of impending doom emanating from my email InBox. 3 miles in, I decided to reward myself with a cappuccino at the local garden centre, and was first through the door for a rejuvenating cup of caffeine and frothy cow juice. So rapidly had I completed the first part of my journey that I had the pick of the seats, and opted for one outside. Having overdressed for the conditions as usual, a bit of cool, fresh, morning air seemed like a good idea – that and my paranoia at several staff all staring at me if I stayed inside. I had only been sat down long enough to realise that the sta...

If you are to survive the current times, occasionally you must get yourself a new mobile phone. It’s even better if you can work out how to use it. I can still remember one of my friends bringing his new-fangled mobile phone up the pub one night. I’d only ever seen them on the TV until that point, and it would be fair to say that ‘mobile’ was perhaps the wrong word to have used, as you needed to have spent several months in training beforehand to lift the massive telephonic brick. Attempting to put it in your trouser pocket would have resulted in severe injury or an arrest for indecent exposure. Come to think of it, ‘phone’ wasn’t a great choice for part of the name either, as the battery ran out in no time, and there was invariably no signal anyway. Even on the exceedingly rare occasion battery life and signal strength coincided, it was pretty unlikely that anyone would be calling you, as to do so would require them taking out a second mortgage or selling a kidney, and the...

If you suffer from a wheat/gluten intolerance, allergy or Coeliac Disease, you have a right to believe food marked as such and sold in reputable supermarkets is safe for you to eat. Unfortunately, a worrying story emerged this week that many of our main food retailers were recalling some of their Gluten Free (GF) products due to contamination by an ingredient used in the baking process. Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose all issued alerts for products ranging from pitta breads and pizza bases to naans, scones, crumpets and pancakes, leaving those put at risk by the error either hungry, or - far worse - potentially unwell. So how did so many own-brand products, seemingly unrelated, all wind up posing a potential risk? It would seem that ‘own-brand’ really just means ‘our label on someone else’s product’, as the various bread-based foodstuffs were all made by a bakery run by the ironically-named food company Genius. Whilst replacing “Geni” with “Dangerou” might se...

Or, if I’m going with the current trend, the title of this column should in fact be “Mature Scottish cheddar cheesed off, with West Country chives and a hint of sea salt”. You might have to strain your brain to remember this, but there was a time when the choice of the potato crisp fancier was beautifully simple. In the pub on a Saturday night (before the days when we all started staring at our phones rather than having a conversation) you could choose from Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion or Ready Salted. Maybe Prawn Cocktail, if you were in a particularly progressive establishment, with liberal views on thinly-sliced fried potato snack flavourings. Back then, the introduction of crisps with ridges seemed pretty radical, especially when you consider that we’d only just got used to the idea of not needing to hunt for a little blue packet of salt so we could season the crisps ourselves (I once got two of them in a packet, and was the most popular kid in school for a week). The...