Monthly Archives: April 2010

Tweets on 2010-04-13

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Congratulations to David Ford

Congratulations go from all at the Voice to David Ford, the leader of Alliance, the Northern Ireland sister party of the Liberal Democrats. The Northern Irish Assembly has voted David in as Justice Minister as other parties failed to find cross-community support.

The BBC reports

Before appointing a new minister, MLAs passed a vote to increase the number of devolved ministries at Stormont, to include the new Department of Justice.

Mr Ford will be in charge of the department with more than 4,000 employees and a budget of nearly £1.5bn.

He is the first Northern Ireland Justice minister since Westminster took policing powers away from the old Stormont government in 1972.

All best wishes for what could be a difficult but rewarding job!

Tweets on 2010-04-12

  • RT @Pe27ach: New stuff on http://www.etsy.com/shop/mariepeach << url works if you delete trailing full stop after peach 🙂 #
  • @ianvisits there's always some bottles that need burying / digging up in reply to ianvisits #
  • @thoroughlygood speak to @dietchef. http://bit.ly/bUwzqO in reply to thoroughlygood #
  • @thoroughlygood just calculated your BMI. You're 0.1 over the boundary. You've got a long way to go. Lose 1lb – fart – you'll be fine. in reply to thoroughlygood #
  • Good grief. If Sarah Brown didn't wear the sorts of shoes that do that to her feet, would the Mail be getting at her for being frumpy? #
  • @LloydieJL Are you switching allegiance from 30 Rock to American Dad? in reply to LloydieJL #
  • @nickjbarlow and if they have, is this the sort of thing we should be encouraging?! #
  • @NCCLols Hopefully (having seen an embargoed press release) it will be all about Clegg telling the world Labour has betrayed the North. in reply to NCCLols #
  • Still can't see the word "Embargoed" without thinking it's a small town in Wales. Somewhere between Betws-y-coed and Pontypridd. #
  • "I 'ad a lovely summer 'oliday in Embargoed. Not as good as Borth, mind you." #
  • Learning about current events from "Palace barracks" trending topics on twitter. 😦 I once rang the bells at Holywood http://bit.ly/cJUbCa #

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Here’s something you didn’t need to see

My foot

It’s my foot. It’s OK, as feet go – you’re not getting the worst of it in a photo, as it’s real downside is the smell, not what it looks like. It has a tough, tough toenail on my big toe that is increasingly difficult to cut through, even using my father’s cast-off, heavy-duty chiropody shears. They are not quite as blistered as perhaps they ought to be at this stage in a campaign in which I am foot-soldier. There’s something funky going on underneath my toes that leads to dead skin sloughing off periodically, and, as I said, they smell bad.

And you didn’t need to see them on my blog, and you didn’t need to read the description either.

Any more than you needed to read in the Daily Mail about the Prime Minister’s wife’s feet. I’m not linking the story because I don’t want to encourage them. The story is a disgrace – Sarah Brown went to a beautiful Hindu temple which required her to remove her shoes. The Daily Mail took a photo of her feet, then blew it up to enormous size and criticised the location of her little toe. Which no-one would have taken the slightest notice of if they hadn’t printed it in a big close up.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they then speculated on whether the Prime Minister’s missus’s toe problem is enough to give the Leader of the Opposition’s wife the edge.

[S]he unveiled a rather unsightly problem on her left foot – her little toe and fourth toe crossed over one another.

She has been placed in direct competition with David Cameron’s wife Samantha, and this will do little to boost her credential’s against ‘SamCam’.

In fact, it’s the kind of sight that will immediately put the Prime Minister’s wife into second place behind the Tory leader’s wife.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? What the hell do these people think general elections are about? This story is an absolute disgrace!

There are any number of reasons why the Prime Minister’s wife has a food that looks like that. She could have been born with it. She could have spent her life cramming her feet into the kind of stupid shoe that the Daily Mail thinks is what women ought to wear. She might have had some hideous foot accident that left her lucky to have what she has or she could have spent her childhood in painful surgery to get as far as having nothing worse than a slight overlapping toe issue.

In any case, IT’S NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.

IT’S NOT REMOTELY RELEVANT. TO ANYTHING.

NO-ONE WITH HALF A BRAIN SHOULD CARE.

IT HAS NO BEARING ON POLITICS, THE ELECTION, CURRENT AFFAIRS, WHO RUNS THE COUNTRY OR ANYTHING – ANYTHING -ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT SARAH BROWN CHOOSES TO PUT ON HER FEET.

AAAAARGH!

EDIT – Cllr Foster has had a slight aneurysm and has been removed to a place where he is not a danger to himself or others. He will be allowed back at the blog once the frothing at the mouth subsides.

Diet derailed

Of course, it had to happen. Get too happy about talking about the diet in public, mention a few successes, and you know you’re setting yourself up for a slightly more embarrassing post in a few weeks’ time when things have not gone quite so well.

A few days ago, I went to the doctor for a drug review on my repeat prescription, and got on the surgery scales while I was there. I could also ask for what my weight was last time the surgery recorded it. And for all I was feeling good about the loss, it turned out that all I had done was get back to more or less the weight I was the last time I hopped on the scales at the doctor’s.

And so yesterday I popped down to Boots to fill my prescription and hopped on their scales while I was there. I’m still not weighing myself at home because the temptation is too much to hop onto the scales every second hour to see how it’s going. So sporadically I go to the supermarket or the chemists and put 20p into a slot of a machine that will weigh me and provide a print out. The print outs give me something tangible to pin to my noticeboard.

Weight loss data

And yesterday’s weight was back up – by a whole kilo. 94.6kg went back to 95.7.

Now if it had been a week when I had been being “good” and sticking to the diet, this information would have been particularly upsetting, but it has been a week when I’ve been a long way away from the pared back approach to nutrition. It’s been Easter – I’ve resisted almost but not quite all the chocolate, and I have had a fair few days away from the diet over the bank holiday. The only hot cross buns I ate were the ones I made myself. And in the last week, I’ve also had quite a lot of beer, first at Lib Drinks then at a friend’s birthday. Those “caloires” (a typo I liked) from beer are quite considerable if you drink more than you planned. And once I had the weigh-in there was a little slip up in terms of popping round the supermarket after they’d reduced their ISB items. Almost as many calories from doughnuts as from beer this weekend! (Huh. Just done the maths. 9 pints of beer and 5 doughnuts have as many calories as I am supposed to eat in two days.)

So, to get the diet back on track, I need to return more closely to the plan. This we can do. Two pouches, a snack, a shake and a cereal. Fresh and frozen fruit and veg. And sugar free, calorie free, nutrient free jelly and fizzy drinks.

Tweets on 2010-04-11

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Tweets on 2010-04-10

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Tweets on 2010-04-09

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Tweets on 2010-04-08

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