As part of the redevelopment of Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cy.. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

It irritates me no end that the Council muck up Twitter like that – they use it just to duplicate a feed somewhere and they never care that their titles are too long for Twitter’s character limit. It means that the important word from that press release CYCLE or BIKE is totally missing from the tweet.

Still, that’s not where the success lies. I haven’t persuaded the media people to use Twitter correctly.

No, I retweeted their announcement, fixing it so that all the necessary words were included:

RT @NottinghamNews At Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cycle parking opens. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

And got an immediate query from a friend: how much does it cost? Is it free?

Good question. At the time of writing, the press statement on the Council website is silent on the issue. And because it talks of the investment and the cost – new facility, CCTV, solar powered LED lighting – it all invites you to think, ooh, expensive!

It seemed pretty likely to me that it would be free, so I phoned up an officer in Transport Strategy to check. Didn’t get the officer I know from committee, but the polite receptionist had exactly the same reaction as me – um, I expect it would be free, but I’d better check. She checked, phoned back. Yes. It is free.

So I phone the media department, and here it’s the same schtick: person answering phone needs to go away, but in a few minutes, the press officer who made the press release gets back to me. He agrees with my point. It is free. It would be a good idea to mention that in the press release. I’ll get onto that, councillor.

Hooray!

Five minutes and five phonecalls later this paragraph:

The facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

… becomes this paragraph:

The free facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

Can you spot the difference?

If I hadn’t had two copies of the statement open, I’d just have assumed I’d overlooked the word on the first time through. But that is not the case! Today, something good actually happened because of a suggestion I made.

*sigh*

In these Coalition days, you have to take your triumphs where you find them.

I don’t do barbecues that often, but when I do there’s a few things I always do. Today, I added in a few more things.

The one meaty thing I’ve been doing for ages is a chicken satay. Take mini-breast fillets¹ and marinate overnight in chopped ginger, garlic and chillies, with lime juice, sherry, oil and soy sauce helping out with liquid.

Now mostly in years past, I have just bought a pack of satay sauce and that is nice enough. But today my car wouldn’t start, so I couldn’t go to the big supermarket, and so I had to make it out of store cupboard ingredients. Chop a clove of garlic and a chilli and lightly fry. Add in about 6 tbsps chunky peanut butter and enough coconut milk to make it a barely-runny consistency.

Get the chicken out of the marinade, and run skewers through it, then cook on the barbecue until done, and pour the sauce over the top.

There were also burgers and sausages as per norm, without a great deal of thought in them. Just buy burgers, making your own decision about price vs quality and cook until cooked.

This time, I made all the bread: Dan Lepard’s onion hotdog rolls formed into long thin rolls for sausages; and a batch of burger buns made with 700grams breadflour, 350mls milk, yeast, oil, sugar, salt and beaten egg for glazing, based loosely on a recipe found here.

In all the heat, the two batches of bread dough didn’t so much as rise as collapse sideways off the edge of the baking tray, so the resultant cobs were a little on the flat side, and bigger than intended, but all tasted nice enough in the end.

In terms of sides, I made Manda’s delicious tepid salad of mushrooms, lentils and pearl barley in a balsamic reduction; a really sharp coleslaw of red cabbage, apple, carrot with a honey vinaigrette (which could have used more honey, to be honest); and one of our guests brought that day’s harvest of potatoes duly saladed.

But it was the dessert that was really good and definitely something I will do again: Grilled pineapple. After the meat was done and the barbecue was cooling, I took a fresh pineapple and cut it into 6, removing the tough core but leaving the skin and leaves on for decoration. A quick go on the barbecue is enough, cooking all sides until they get a visible griddle pattern, and a bit longer on the skin side, because that’s tough and can take it.

The warm pineapple is delicious enough by itself: all the huge flavour of ordinary fresh pineapple but with with slightly less chewing.

If your barbecue is the sort of affair where you sit around a table with knives and forks, you might like to serve up the bits of pineapple straight from the grill. However, by this point, we were all sitting on the floor in the “glade” bit of my garden² so I chopped the pineapple into chunks, put it in a bowl, and let people help themselves with skewers.

What really made it, though, was an aromatic sugar syrup I had made the night before: 300 grams of sugar in half a litre of water, boiled up with a chopped chilli, a branch of thyme and a finely sliced lime. This, poured over the pineapple bits, was just lush.

1. my friends don’t trust me to cook bone-in chicken safely on an open fire, and whilst they’ve all gone for gas barbecues, for me, it’s all about having a fire
2. I have a glade and a fountain. At least that’s what we call it – it’s not nearly so grand as I like to make it sound

I’m growing very slowly and gradually in the stuff I eat from hedgerows. I urge everyone to make their own elderflower cordial at around about this time each year. It’s really easy, the ingredients are easy to find, and elderflowers are everywhere in England at least. My recipe is here. This year I also have some elderflower gin which needs to steep in a darkened place for another few weeks yet, and which I will report on in the fullness of time. Loosely based on this recipe.

In years past I have made things with blackberries – I’ve only just finished a blackberry vodka made by steeping blackberries in a jar with vodka for a couple of days, then straining. Bramble jelly has been a favourite too, and a bramble / apple jelly also.

But beyond that, I have not been terribly adventurous when it comes to eating things that can be picked in the park for free.

A few weeks ago, that changed. Inspired by Alys Fowler’s Edible Garden TV series we made dandelion pancakes and nettle soup.

Picking the nettles was… interesting. There’s a huge patch around the corner from me, so I donned some of P’s cleaning gloves¹ and went to pick them. Standing in front of the nettles, even with protected hands, it was actually quite hard to summon up the courage to grasp the stems and pick them. Aversion to the sting is obviously very deeply ingrained from childhood.

Standing there in front of them, I was reminded of a story about an Australian friend of mine living and working in London, where he was unexposed to wildlife. When, however, he went on a choir tour the countryside, he returned with a very long face. “No-one told me about nettles!” he said. And I don’t suppose anyone did. English children learn very early on not to touch the nasty jagged-leaved hairy beasties and it would never have occurred to me that they are not common in Oz, home to nastier plants and nastier insects than almost anywhere else on the plant.²

Anyway. The vinyl gloves protected me from the stings. For the first four stems. On the fifth, the nettle won, and so I returned home and got the really sturdy gardening gloves before continuing. Before long, I had a half-carrier bag full of nettles and headed home to soup them.

I was basing my recipe loosely on this one from Wartime Housewife.

Because I think I got there a little bit late in the nettle season, I removed the leaves from the stalks and discarded the stems. If I’d gone out earlier in the year when the nettles are still acid green, the stems might have been thinner and less manky. But at this stage in the year, I kept the gloves on in the kitchen and pulled all the nettle leaves off before sluishing them through the colander, and adding them to a pretty standard soup base – stock, onions, garlic, carrot, the usual stuff.

The resulting soup was definitely a distinctive flavour. It was a very dark, evil-green. It was nice – I couldn’t finish a whole bowl, but my companions all did.

For the dessert of that meal, we made Alys Fowler’s dandelion head pancakes. For these, I’d just picked dandelion heads – flowers, obv, not clocks – and doused them in a light batter before shallow frying. They were edible, a novelty, but not particularly nice.

1. not that I don’t clean, hem hem, I just don’t mind plunging my unprotected hands into neat bleach
2. “It is true that of the 10 most poisonous arachnids on the planet, Australia has 9 of them. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that of the 9 most poisonous arachnids, Australia has all of them.” – Douglas Adams

The week I made the jellies we learned at short notice that more people would be there than initially planned. I had already cooked ahead and made four individual jellies, but that would be no good for the 6 people who would be there, so I took the jellies, but tried to whip up a quick cake to complement it.

I made this Lemon polenta cake and it was delicious, but very unhealthy. A whole pack of butter!

250g butter , softened
250g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g polenta
250g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
3 lemons (3 zested, 1 juiced)
4 tbsp limoncello
3 tbsp icing sugar

Heat the oven to 160C/fan 140C/gas 3. Butter and base line a 23cm springform tin. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy (use an electric hand whisk). Add the eggs one by one and beat between each addition. Fold in the polenta, almonds and baking powder. Mix in the lemon zest and juice.

Bake for about 50 minutes-1 hour until the cake is risen and golden (cover the top of the cake loosely with foil after 30 minutes to stop it browning too much).

Make the syrup by warming the limoncello with the icing sugar until the icing sugar has melted. Serve the cake warm cut in slices with a drizzle of limoncello syrup.

(I didn’t use the limoncello drizzle as I knew amongst the eaters would be teetotallers and drivers – I just made a syrup of 100grams sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons)

In recent weeks, I have been watching Cook Yourself Thin – despite the fact that my own diet is completely and utterly off track now. Lots of Gizzy Erskine’s recipes have looked really nice, including the chocolate cake below. However, some of them have really weird ingredients, and I’m not sure to what extent I want to try trawling Asian supermarkets for mirin and gochuchang. Nor would I want to buy a big tub of chilli paste if it ended up I didn’t like the recipe!

The format of the show is: meet fat person; hear what horrendous fatty calorie rich terrors they like to cook; suggest lighter alternatives. There’s three dishes per episode, and the focus is a bit on technique and interesting alternative ingredients as well as just the recipes.

Many of the recipes could not conceivably be called healthy or low calorie in their own right. But they are better than the alternatives being cooked by the show’s daily guest.

So far they have had two cakes based on boiling a citrus fruit, and blending it, and using that as the mainstay of the texture of the cake. There’s this Moroccan Lemon cake, which I haven’t tried, but will; and this chocolate orange cake, which I have tried and mucked up a fair bit:

Serves 12 (< — no! no it doesn’t!)
Preparation time 15 minutes
Cooking time 1 hour 50 minutes
Cooling time 2 hours
Icing time 10 minutes
Ingredients
1 whole orange
125g fruit sugar
200g 70% dark chocolate, melted
100g ground almonds
3 free range eggs, separated
½ tsp baking powder
For the icing
150g 70 per cent dark chocolate, melted
Zest of 1 orange
3 tbsp honey

1. Put the orange in a microwave-proof bowl. Add 250ml water, cover with cling film and microwave on high for 20 minutes, turning halfway through (or simmer for 1 hour in a small saucepan). Leave to cool, still covered.

2. Heat the oven to 180°C. Line a 20cm round spring-form tin with baking parchment. Cut the orange in half and remove the pips. Put in the food processor with 5 tbsp of the orangey liquid left in the pan and blitz to a smooth purée, scraping down the bowl a couple of times. Add the sugar, melted chocolate, almonds, egg yolks and baking powder, and whizz again to mix thoroughly. Tip into a large bowl.

3. Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not dry, and fold into the chocolate mixture. Spoon into the lined tin. Put the tin on a baking sheet, then in the oven. Bake for 50 minutes, covering with a piece of foil or baking parchment halfway through to stop the top burning. Cool in the tin.

4. To make the icing, mix the melted chocolate and orange zest It will start to seize so mix in the honey and it will go shiny again. Transfer the cake onto a plate or stand then simply ice the top.

I tried to make this in the middle of the night, and consequently was trying to make it quietly. Not so possible when you need to blitz the orange into a pulp and use the whisk to get the eggs to stiff peaks.

If it’s not garnished, it’s not finished.

My two major failings with this were: using the wrong sized tin – the cake mix barely touched the sides – and in the melting stage, allowing the chocolate / almond / orange mix to get too cool. Ideally, don’t microwave the chocolate, melt it au bain marie on the stove top. Then you make sure it’s still good and liquid. When I made it, the chocolate nearly solidified when added to the orange and dry ingredients. I then had to beat quite hard to mix it with the egg whites, nearly losing all the air and ending up with quite a heavy cake.

The final thing is a query about maybe whether the icing is just too heavy. Does the chocolate need lightening with cream rather than honey to get a ganache rather than, well, basically, a chocolate bar?

Previously on Pudding Club:

I got there on Saturday and found I was unopposed, so in the final count, neither effort was needed. Barring some sort of problem I will be one of the Lib Dem candidates fighting to retain our seats at the election in May next year.

But I did have in my diary a note to make a cake on Friday evening, so I knew I had promised to do so.

I have been waiting for an excuse to make this Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. I have his weekly recipe as an RSS feed, and about half of them look interesting enough to make.

This link was for a coffee and ginger flavoured cake with a lemon, cream cheese icing.

And me being me, I didn’t make it up as per the recipe spec.

I don’t have a 22cm tin (I never measure baking tins anyway, which, along with knackered scales, accounts for my hit and miss cakemaking), so I used a 2lb loaf tin. Putting THAT MUCH butter AND cream cheese in the icing seemed a huge amount of unnecessary fat, so I missed out the butter. I didn’t have any vegetable oil, so I used some hazelnut oil that is now, hem hem, three years out of date. The shop I went to for last minute ingredients didn’t have shelled pistachio nuts, so I just got chopped mixed.

But the cake I got out of it was… interesting. Don’t know if it was the lack of butter, but the frosting didn’t stay put and trickled down the sides in a sticky mucky way. The mix was a good fit for the loaf tin – it felt to me like it would have been not enough for a 22cm tin. But the flavour – I thought it didn’t feel terribly coffee-y or ginger-y. It was interesting, but a sort of muddy flavour. Not sure if I should make it again, but if I did, I think I would add more coffee and more ginger.

When I got to the meeting, it transpired the reason I was making a cake was for a “guess the weight of the cake” competition. We meet in a Methodist church hall, and the Methodists do not allow raffles or any game of chance, or alcohol as prizes on their premises. As we try and recoup the (very reasonable) room hire charges from those present, we have a game of skill instead.

I made things happen so that the prize from the guess the weight of the cake was not the cake itself, but half the kitty. I had not remembered to weight the cake before leaving home so we had to dispatch a kind member to the nearest Lib Dem home to weigh it, and it clocked in at 1lb 15 oz. Those members who’d spotted it was 2lb loaf-tin size were ultimately confounded by it being ever so slightly lighter than bread!

After the competition, we all ate a bit of it, and it was generally pronounced good. I even got a few pieces to take back home.

Bejeweled is a PopCap game and they are very good at making games. Worryingly good.

From their stable I have enjoyed Zuma, Zuma’s Revenge, various versions of Bejwelled, and Plants vs Zombies. Especially Plants vs Zombies. But I came to PopCap firstly through Peggle.

Once you move beyond Bejeweled, they have a curious “try before you buy” policy. You can download any of their games and play them for an hour on a free trial before you have to pay up to continue.

They know they can afford to do this, because they know their games are so good that you’ll play them for an hour, barely notice the time passing, and then feel seriously aggrieved when your time is up. So aggrieved, you’ll reach for your card and stump up the usually fairly reasonable sum of money just to carry on playing.

Each of their games starts really simply, so anyone can play them. They even run on an average specced machine. They ramp up the skill level fairly steeply, but train you as you go so that you keep pace. Plants vs Zombies, for example, teaches you a new plant and a new zombie each level, and it’s fun, cutely drawn, and the music is good. Before you know it, you’re battling with dozens of zombies in a wide variety of scenarios. Peggle was the same. Start with the simplest of levels, and build up gradually.

Many of the games are easy enough to complete, but even if you play every level and defeat the ultimate boss monsters, the game doesn’t end. You can replay every level with a higher win ratio. There are seemingly infinite challenges based on the basic game engine. And the reward for even little wins is pleasing enough to make you want to keep playing: every successful Peggle level end ends up with rainbows, unicorns and the Ode to Joy. Srsly. And despite how that sounds in words, it’s great! Here’s a review of PvZ – and I endorse everything in it.

Peggle, PvZ and Zuma have a basic level structure and a game you can complete. Bejeweled, Chuzzle and their ilk get increasingly more complex, but technically if you got good enough, they’re probably infinite. ¹ They even have normal modes, where you get hazards, and “zen” modes where you just have the fundamentals of the games without the pesky threat of dying. So you can keep playing for ever.

I’ve been more than happy to pay for several of these games multiple times over, so that I can play them on more than one computer. Then, when I got an iPod Touch, mainly for leafleting² I bought the games all over again through the iTunes store.

I have an ever so slightly addictive personality. If I like something, I get a bit obsessive about it. This usually manifests itself in reading all the books by an author, renting all the films with an actor and eating all the chocolate in the house.³ Heaven knows what would happen to me if I even started taking a little bit of drugs. But with videogames it manifests itself with unhelpful obsessive playing. I’ve had nights where I’ve played PvZ all night. 6 hours straight is not all that uncommon. I’ve definitely played each of the games for so long that they have caused me pain in the mousing hand. And when I’ve switched hands, they make the other hand hurt too.

But the worst game I’ve been playing lately from the Popcap stable is Bejeweled Twist. Like Bejeweled, you have to match gems into rows of 3, 4, 5 and 6, and when you do, they explode and new gems cascade down. The method of moving gems is different – you have a rotator cursor that takes four gems and moves them clockwise. If you can pop gems with every turn for a successive 10 levels – well over 100 consecutive mini-wins – you get a Fruit Gem. If you pop 4 gems, you get a Flame Gem; 5 gets you a Lightening Gem. If you fail, the game makes a heart-rending “disappointed ” noise at you. On the way, there are hazards like gems that are stuck and won’t rotate, bombs that tick down with each turn, and DOOM GEMS that tick down with each non-productive turn, but that can’t even be exploded!

Look at the screenshot. I’ve been playing this game for days. I’m on Level 57. There are fruit gems galore. I’ve over 9 million points. Somebody stop me!

Colleagues, if you value your free time and your wrists – and Will, this is especially applicable for you – DO NOT DOWNLOAD BEJEWELED TWIST.

And if you don’t want to download it – here’s a handy link

1. Much like Cybertron Mission, where after the first four levels, you just got the same levels again with nastier bad guys
2. and mainly because the UX of trying to get podcasts and music onto my Nokia N95 8GB – and still use it as a phone – is just too ghastly to do routinely
3. Unhelpfully, the addiction generally only manifests itself in unproductive ways. I have never been addicted to work. Or canvassing. Or leafletting

It didn’t go like that at all.

Questions didn’t go as planned because a number of people were missing – if either questionner or questionee is missing, the question is deferred and answered in writing, and that happened to two interesting ones. The Conservative chair of the Wilford and Clifton area committee wasn’t present to talk about his views of the A453 widening scheme threatened by government cuts; and a Labour councillor wasn’t present to ask a question that was essentially “Could the Labour leader please expand at length on how awful the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are?”

Cllr Collins’s material on that last topic wasn’t wasted, because at the last minute, we got an emergency report on cuts. The government has taken the extraordinary step of making in-year cuts to the council’s grant. Three quarters of local government finance comes from central government. Normally we get told good and early in the year how much to expect so we know how much to budget for, and what council tax to set to raise the remaining quarter. Once the figures have been set, they don’t change; normally government would tell us what to expect the following year. Telling us halfway through a year that we will not be getting as much as previously thought is an extremely unfriendly thing to do, and will have more serious consequences than letting us know that we will lose money for the next year’s budget.

The report we were sent sets out that we will lose about 1% of our budget – which doesn’t sound like much. It translates to about £4million pounds, which suddenly sounds a lot more.

So we debated that. The report itself has been drafted in neutral factual terms detailing what has been cut. The debate… well the debate was a good mix of factual explanation of the consequences, and political theatre making extreme points. I’m sure you will have heard pro-cuts / anti-cuts arguments in the public arena elsewhere so I shan’t rehearse them here again.

Then we moved onto petitions. Councils up and down the country have been told by the government how they should handle petitions in future. It’s a bit of a cheek that central government should tell local government how to represent local people, and Julia Goldsworthy once made a good joke about the irony of a government department that doesn’t accept petitions telling councils how to, um accept petitions. Anyway, the last Labour government made new rules on petitions that the Council just accepted, that generally will be a Good Thing. Now any petition in Nottingham getting over 5,000 signatures from people who live, work or study in Nottingham, will have to be debated by councillors in Full Council.

Finally, we moved onto my motion about blood donation. Happy coincidence meant that Full Council fell on World Blood Donor Day, so I tabled a motion celebrating that, urging as many people as possible to donate blood, and regretting that gay men can’t give blood.

Now I assumed that would be fairly uncontroversial within the Council. Perhaps I didn’t spend as long finessing the words of the motion. I assumed most people would be with me. The first few speeches went fine. Mine; then one from a Labour portfolio holder; then one from the Conservative leader, all making good points, all being supportive. So I settled back, took a few notes and got ready to make a summing up speech.

One of my group’s little habits with motions is it’s not enough to just have a motion saying X is a good thing – it has to get someone to do something. So we included in the final bullet point, an action that the Labour portfolio holder for Adult Services and Health¹ write a letter to the Blood Service saying the discrimination should end.

So I was expecting the Portfolio Holder to get to her feet, and talk to the motion. I was half expecting an amendment, as the Labour group are slightly control-freakie, and don’t like opposition motions to pass unamended.

But I wasn’t expecting the Labour party to delete the reference to discrimination against gay men. That came as a bit of a shock.

The Labour Portfolio Holder even used the infelicitous phrase “some of my friends are gay, but…”

The seconder of the Labour amendment carried on in the same theme. She drew heavily on this advice from Terrence Higgins Trust, who, in my view, are not on the side of the angels in this matter.

A third Labour speaker spoke to endorse their approach, saying our motion was flawed because of all the groups who are unfairly prevented from giving blood, we didn’t mention women who used to be sex workers but who had subsequently been given a clean bill of health.

My group leader got up to back me up and had an interesting extra nugget of information to add to the debate I didn’t know before we started – that his dad had once caught hepatitis from an infected blood donation. He underlined the importance of safety and screening of blood, and how our views about gay men should not undermine that.

Then it came back to me for my right of reply, and I had to give a speech I hadn’t prepared for one bit. It’s always a bit of a weakness that I don’t prepare for summing up speeches in the same way I get ready for introductory speeches. (And it was my weakness 20 years ago at school debate club, too). But even if I had prepared, I wouldn’t have had material for this.

Some of the points I made were these: my main point in putting the motion down was to celebrate blood donation generally. Getting into the gay debate was only one part of my plan. The main message to take away was that those who can give blood should do so, as often as they are asked to.

Then I picked up on a point made by the Conservative leader: that the health service discriminating in this way sent a signal to people with old fashioned views that it is OK still to discriminate. It reminded me of this post I read at JoeMyGod (adult ads and swearwords in the comments) where a lobbying group drew on the gay blood ban as “evidence” that it isn’t safe to let gay people serve in the military, which is presently a big hot topic in the US.

Then I drew a bit on personal experience. I’ve been tested. I can be more sure than many people that I am HIV negative. I take precautions. I also think that the aforementioned former sex workers are also more likely to have been tested for STIs and know they are clean, so they too should be able to draw on their personal experience and their personal knowledge when it comes to deciding whether they are safe to donate blood.

I also mentioned the thing that several NHS workers from doctors to have said to me – just lie. THT’s advice is that this is not a good idea, and I do agree with them on that.

The mood changed in the room, and it got a bit uncomfortable. This was perhaps a bit more personal than it usually is at Full Council.

Ultimately we got to the vote. One gay Labour councillor absented himself from the room shortly before the actual vote. And why is this? The Labour group in Nottingham is almost stalinist in the way they observe their whip. Labour councillors always vote together, en bloc. They discuss things privately in group, decide on a common line, and then stick to it rigidly. Things are different in the Liberal Democrats. We discuss things, come to a common line, and then normally vote that way. But if there are personal concerns, so long as they are raised in the group in advance, it’s not often a problem if people decide to vote their own way. This is to some extent a luxury of being in a small opposition group that may have to go by the wayside as and when we grow in numbers. But the point is, in Nottingham, the Labour whip is always rock solid.

But not this time. At the vote for the Labour amendment, at least five Labour councillors sat on their hands, and looked uncomfortable. Including three frontbenchers and a civic.

Good for them. Thanks.

The rest of them voted for the amendment, and it was enough to get it through.

The final motion as amended still encourages as many people as are able to donate blood. And that is still a good thing, and still something we were able to support. But it is a shame that our lines about discrimination against gay men did not make the final version.

MOTION IN THE NAME OF COUNCILLOR FOSTER:

“This Council…

1.Celebrates today’s World Blood Donor Day, which highlights the importance of blood donation.

2.Celebrates the work of phlebotomists across the UK, and everyone who keeps this vital life-saving service running.

3.Urges all those who are able to donate blood to do so regularly.

4.Regrets that the blood service in the UK discriminates unfairly against different groups in our society including gay men and bisexual men.

5.Pledges that the Portfolio Holder for Adult Support and Health will write to and lobby central government and the National Blood Service, urging them to scrap their discriminatory and outdated policy towards gay and bisexual men.”

Labour amendment:

“Points 4 and 5 to be amended to read:

4.Welcomes the Review started under the previous Government, to review criteria for the donation of blood through the Advisory Committee, SaBTO, which will ensure the criteria are clearly linked to the most current scientific evidence and international Best Practice.

5.Recommends the Portfolio Holder liaise with City MPs when the Review is published in the autumn, to ensure Recommendations are implemented, which will address concerns about discrimination in the current criteria.”

1. Adult Services is not as risqué as it sounds – the Government insisted that all councils that run social services make sure that education and schools are in the same department as child social services. That leaves adult social services separate in most places, and that becomes a department in itself

Today, I was weighing for elderflower cordial again and I noticed that the 1 kilo bag of sugar I’d bought clocked in at 1400 grams – like the citric acid, almost half again free!

Now I know that when it says “1 kg e” on the outside it means “more or less 1kg” – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. But how lucky I am that most of the time much of what I buy is so generous!

P was passing, so I called him in to share my excitement and he looked at me puzzled, and I realised it was one of those many times when he sees the world differently.

“Um.” he said. “Could it…?”

Could it just be the scales?

Ah. Yes. Yes indeed it could. And in fact it might explain a lot about my various successes and lack thereof, kitchen wise, in the last few years.

So, we devised a little bit of an experiment. A millilitre of water weighs a gram, a litre weighs a kilo. So 500mls of water should be 500gram.

And it wasn’t:

Bah.

Rhubarb would be an obvious one, I think. Both of us think we don’t like rhubarb, but it could just be we didn’t like it as children and haven’t properly revisited our opinion in adulthood. Then there’s the worry of the “poisonous” leaves – Wikipedia says it would take the average adult 5kg of disgusting bitter leaves to get a lethal dose.

Raspberry canes might be another? I think you’re supposed to cut them down at the end of the season, but I’m sure I remember some self-seeded ones in my grandfather’s garden that did nearly as well as the highly-attended-to ones in the fruit cage.

We do have an elder tree which yields lovely flowers for elderflower cordial around this sort of time each year. This year, I’m also planning to have a go at elderflower vodka as well for something tasty to last a little longer.

We’ve no room for any more trees, and we have far more shaded parts of our garden than sunny, because of all the trees around the edges.

We have a few seedlings that have been kindly donated this year, which is more than we have managed in the past. If we manage to get them past the highly dubious stage where the local slugs eat out all the growing shoots, that will be a minor miracle.