I cooked it and I tasted it

The question is did I love it ?

I've had the lamb shanks in Rosemary and Mint sauce and without trying to sound over the top they were awsome.

After much haggling over the frozen food counter today (which was ironic seeing as our fridge/freezer has gone wrong) we settled (after many arm punches and foot stamps - quite childish I know but I'm only 46) on the Pork shanks this time.

Put these suckers in a pan of hot water for 45 mins to boil in the bag, add to that the Aldi steam in the microwave veg (69p) and some new potatoes (popped in our steamer), we realized we had mad a massive mistake.

We didn't realise how much or how thick and rich the gravy was - a lesson we didn't remember from the lamb shanks, so steamed new potatoes were nowhere near absorbent enough, you need a big pile of fresh mash to soak this up.

The 69p steam in the microwave veg took only 6 mins to cook and they were spot on as well.

So ... the big question ? Did I love it ?

Top marks Aldi, melt in the mouth meat and plenty for one, but a big label is needed on the box to say "By law this must be eaten with a large pile of mash" (although I loved it with my steamed spuds).

10/10 for this one guys, I gotta hankering for some lamb shanks again (with mash !).

MMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Daft people shall reign

Funny how driving comes up so much as a topic of general ranting.

We were out locally and the main road our road joins onto is pretty busy including the fact it's a bus route so when people are parked its a bit of a zig zag drive to get down.
It's not made any easier by people who drive like loonies down it at break neck speeds.

Anyway, one end of this road has an almost 90 degree bend with no visibility from either direction, now you have to guess where one daft idiot of a woman decided to stop her lime green open top Nissan Micra ? you guessed it, right on the apex of the bend, to get past I had to go on the opposite side of the road but without knowing if anything was coming.

Fortunately nothing was but while I gave her the evil eye and a few choice words she didn't seem bothered.
A couple of seconds later a white van came past me and I could see in my mirror he had to stop quickly as it was obvious someone else was doing the same, with any luck the woman in the Micra is now off many peoples Xmas card lists.

On it's own that was amazing enough to see but later we came out of our road (which is at the other end of this main road and this has another bend of almost 90 degrees), now we've had people park opposite our road which although it's a traffic offence has so far not caused an accident but even I was amazed to see a woman in a Peugot 206 parked on the apex of this bend, passenger window down and having a chat with a woman who was pushing her push chair.

We squeezed past and just as before watched a van slam his brakes on as he got to the corner then realized he was 0.9 seconds from impact.

They say things come in threes, well we were wondering where the third one was but didn't have to wait too long as there was a three car pile up which closed a major A road only a stones throw from our house, our thoughts were another stupid woman must have parked up to sort her hair out or adjust her glasses thus causing the pile up - having watched the antics earlier I feel this is the most logical and scientific explanation.

Hopefully they didn't go home and use any dangerous appliances ?

Complete Crap

Many years ago when I used to travel around and fix computers (normally in the happy days before Windows) there was a town which was a bit tricky to drive through and had some blooming fiddly roads and messing about.

Someone then had a bright idea to sort a lot of problems in one go by carving a dual carriageway through it and making a new ring road as well, effectively forming a link from the M1 in Nottingham to the M6 and shaving a good hour off transit times through several villages etc etc blah blah.

So tonight I leave and drive down towards this town only to find one of the main reasons it really really really fucks me off more than any town I can think of.

Before you click the back button and start writing to the local clergy to have me exorcised for demons I will explain further.

Imagine for a moment the only way from the M1 to the M6 was either going right down to the M6 (at Junction 19), or if your a little further up, taking the M69 from Leicester (either way is fine depending on your point of origin and both motorway routes take you straight from the M1 onto the M6 with no problems at all). The other way is to go right up the M1 until you get to the M62, quite a busy junction and you then cross the Pennines which more than makes up for it on the scenic journey.

Now if your not a fan of country routes these were your options, if you want to go straight over then you were stuck with a tricky crossing through several towns depending on your route and I've known the journey to take 2 or 2.5 hours for the 30 odd miles it takes.

So now your up to speed and you've forgotten the naughty swear words above your perhaps wondering "What's crap?" - the answer is yet to come.

The route over the Pennines is not an easy or comfortable one if your finding this your only option so the A50 was built in its entirety and I quite often trampled muddy fields to service the computers of the engineers who built it.

I'm not even upset that they built the Dual carriageway from the worst material known to man i.e Concrete, if you could only imagine the horrors of the noise you get while driving on it and even worse the noise that any local residents must hear when cars are screaming down it - it really is amazingly bad.

The real issue is not even the A50 through to the final town itself, nope thats fine, it links onto the A500 which takes you either North or South to the M6 so thats fine, what then is my gripe?

It's simple and like all things it's the simple things that matter.

The conundrum is answered when you ask yourself, given that two motorways link by Dual carriageway and are therefore very very busy, and given that the final town is also busy anyway what one thing would you do that would seriously fuck up the road system ?

Amazingly the answer is so simple it's probably bypassed you, now tonight it took me an hour to drive no more than 4 miles through the Ring road of this town, the ring road should be moving at 50mph and normally it is, so to completely fuck this towns road system up some complete and utter twat has built a football stadium right next to the main junction between the A50 and A500.

The words Fucking Wanker don't seem to do my rant justice, I would dearly love him to come to this town and sit in the fucking traffic with the smell of burning clutch pedals around him, cars fighting to get into lanes and the whole road system completely fucked up.

Why am I not surprised ? Well this town used to make pottery, and obviously toilets are included in this list so to who ever put the football stadium next to Stoke On Trent's main roads your a shit and deserve to burn in the hell you made for yourself - I swear that no hell is worse than the one you made for everyone who was just going about their business and had to endure this on a regular basis.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest you and may your spirit never know peace but sit in a ghostly car for ever trapped in the fucking nightmare you created.

What a bastard !

It's a funny old world

Well lots has gone on in the last few weeks, the local council decided that despite more snow it would simply be easier to not bother putting any grit on the roads and let people take care of themselves in hedges and ditches.

Anyway we've then had the Chip and Pin credit card verification cracked (no surprise really, if people can crack Xbox and Play station protection then this must be a doddle), we've had the mad vicar Angus MacLeay preach that women should be silent in church (if questions can be answered by their husbands) and that they should submit to their partners in "everything".
Fortunately he's not within striking distance of my wife otherwise his next sermon would be delivered through a Stephen Hawkins style wheelchair computer with someone providing sign language subtitles for the deaf (and of course submissive women).

Randomly changing subject back to UK roads I noticed in the last month the massive number of people with broken headlights, I counted 1 in 20 the other night (yes it was a dull trip home), one chap had no side lights, no headlights and one fog light ..... mmmmm a song comes to mind ... "I can see clearly now ... ".
Even better through was the chap behind me yesterday in a Fiat Punto that was only 30 minutes away from the scrap heap, smashed head lights on both sides (nice touch) and only the passenger windscreen wiper working, it was amusing seeing him in the rain with only his empty passenger seat getting a good view.

That's the thing with the UK, the Police only seem to bother when they need to get their quota up and if anything you see more people than ever driving while on mobile phones or with cars that are on deaths door with defects and parts falling off.

I blame it clearly on the fact the police don't have guns, I'm sure life would be a lot simpler if they could shoot offenders then ask questions later.
Although this might be an issue for passing motorists etc in reality it would help in reducing over crowding in prisons.

On the positive side though, Nasa have just added a large window to the space station so as long as it doesn't blow out and suck the astronauts out then that will be fine and the UK is now home to the largest spider crab it's ever seen (in Birmingham Sea life).

It's not all doom and gloom so as long as we can keep sliding down the roads (in cars with clapped out brakes), drive with no lights, steering or windscreen wipers make sure you remember we've got a lovely big spider crab.

I see no ship....

Last night was a turning point in my life, I managed to emit a single tone fart which lasted for about 15 seconds, it was clearly the longest and possibly loudest fart I had ever done.

So loud was my fart it woke the wife up at 2am as she thought there was a timer alarm going off although in reality it was more akin to a ships horn in pitch and loudness.

This got me thinking that throughout life you need to gather feedback so I propose the PISS, the Partner Informative Scoring System.

With this you can provide honest and constructive feedback without fear of reprisals, in fact I believe it should be put into marriage contracts i.e "Do you promise to take the PISS whenever it is offered ?".

How would it work ? What use would it be ?

Well it consists of 3 simple scores, similar to the dancing programs on TV at the moment but not as shit.

Basically .....
Preparation - How well did the person prepare ?
Overall Content Delivery - How well was the item delivered or in the case of food, taste ?
Consideration for others - Quite often an important score.

Here's some examples.

Your going out and your in your best outfit, your wife pops on some jogging bottoms and dirty old white trainers, she asks "how do I look ?", normally your doomed if you answer anything to this but now you can answer "PISS 1,1,1", under the rules your wife can then ask for clarification to which you say "Preparation = 1 - you were ready in 2 minutes, Overall = 1, you clearly didn't think this through and look like shit, last but not least your likely to scare the living shit out of anyone looking like that".

Your child might put some hastily finished homework in front of you and ask "how's this ?", again you might say "PISS, 2,3,3" and advise a summary "Although you appear to have used paper and a pen it looks like a spider has drunkenly wandered over your work, you've clearly thought about others though as you've made notes from MSN in the margin".

Meal times is an area of considerable conflict to bringing PISS to the table should help.
Imagine you have just come home after a busy day at the office to find 3 burnt fish fingers, some lumpy packet mashed potato and the whole lot is swimming in green liquid from the tinned tepid peas inhabiting your plate.
Obviously you can shortcut any conversations i.e no need to wait until your asked, just shout "PISS 1, 1,1" - you may elaborate ... "Although I appreciate you have been at work too, taking 3 fish fingers out the freezer, charring them until they resemble charcoal and dumping them on a plate with globs of phlem and something resembling fish shit is hardly worthy of a score, may I recommend you return to the kitchen and attempt again a meal suitable for the master of the house ?"

I'm confident that if more people gave and took the PISS then marriages and relationships would be more stable, people can honestly and openly pass constructive comments without fear of reprisals or intimidation.

Review time ....

Just had a chance to watch District 9, some recent Sci-Fi films have been less than impressive - I'm a great fan of the original "Day the Earth Stood Still" but the recent remake was very wooden (Although I did like the "Your planet ?" bit), War of the Worlds was OK though and had some nice special effects, it's difficult to escape the "shoot em up" genre of some Sci-Fi films though.

District 9 was spot on, flawless special effects, documentary style film making (similar to cloverfield) and a cast of nobodies so you had no pre-determined expectation on the key characters.

Great touches like the aliens being called "Prawns", signs "Non-Humans banned" etc on shops and parks etc, alien weapons that won't work when held by humans and my favorite bit, the aliens obsession with cat foot (you can barter anything for cat food).

All I'll say is what a hell of a film, one or two moments of wooden acting (the Mercenary commander for example) but a top notch film - Hopefully they will make a sequel and the aliens will return and put humans in the slum camps ?

I found one !

After more than 3 weeks of snow and Ice I finally witnessed the rarest of breeds seen in the British isles, a gritter.
It plodded past me on it's lonely journey, oblivious to the fact that it's numbers are obviously dwindling and soon they will be an extinct species.
Amusingly the hill it gritted as I traveled home was virtually impassable the next morning so a cruel twist of fate if ever there was one.

True to form the local council then announce they only have enough salt for the next three days i.e until today and they have been putting less on the roads to conserve stocks - now anyone with a radio or TV will have seen plenty of notice about the snow and ice coming and plenty of notice that it was going to be here for quite a while but as usual these things always revolve one thing and one thing only - Money.

Fair enough, I don't expect my cul-de sac to be gritted (it never is) and once we were snowed in until all the residents dug the entire road out but you expect Main arterial roads to be usable.

Trundling down the main A38 was "lively" to say the least with more icy patches than a badly organized wedding anniversary, most people were being sensible and driving in the inside lane but as usual you get the loonies who think it's dry and sunny, you can see them sliding as they fight to control their vehicles but death it seems is not a deterrent for this part of the gene pool.

I got onto the Motorway which was better and was passed by Captain "I'd like to die soon" in his BMW at well over 100mph, now had he bothered to look through his tinted view on the world and actually realize the other objects moving near him were other motorists he would have seen that anything rear wheel drive was having serious issues in this weather.

So at the moment we have the local council not putting anywhere near as much grit as they would bother to, gritters nowhere to be seen anyway and the whole system creaking under strain. In the confusion and general fun and games it's nice to see the loonies don't care if it's gritted or not, they see such things as mere inconveniences anyway.

The perfect example of this was a part of the A38 that widens to 4 lanes (left lane turns left, 2 middle lanes are straight on and the right hand lane runs for about 250 yards then filters right).
Bear in mind the right hand lane had 4 inches of snow on it and only the left and middle lanes were clear enough to use I spotted a Zafira shoot out of the middle lane into the outside lane (people often use it to try and out run the traffic because they can't wait 10 seconds), he was about 200 yards in front of me and obviously wants pole position at the lights.
The lights changed and off he pops, all you could see was snow spraying from his wheels, his car slipping and sliding left and right violently and amusingly all the traffic undertook him, he then got to the limit of this lane and decided to try and swerve his car in front of me - Under normal circumstances he would receive a good dose of my car horn and hopefully lip read the word "Wanker" as he makes eye contact but in this case I decided it was better to let nature take it's course as I'm due a new car soon so if he smashes the right hand side up then it will just speed up the process.

Unfortunately Mr. Dim the driver of the Zafira noticed me just in time and in between his slipping and sliding managed to slip in a few cars later on.

I often think the real issue in this weather is these idiots, yes I like to drive fast but there is a fine line between placing the odds in your favor or against when it comes to obtaining fairy wings and a harp.

No amount of grit will get past these people, I'm sure they have an anti-grit mentality anyway, I've seen more cars in ditches than ever before and looking at the skid marks many of them were doing a fair whack.

So the freeze continues, Britain is running out of grit and the loonies are happy anyway, darting about the roads wondering what the problem is and smiling out their tinted windows as they look upon a world that one day they hope will conform to their way of thinking and abandon common sense in favor of all out stupidity.

People may think I'm being harsh but if your out in these twitchy and unpredictable conditions take a look at them as they zoom past you and smile as you know it's only a matter of time until they get enough points on their card to qualify for the celestial wings and harp.