The Good-Ship-Gingerbread

Some of you will remember my efforts to come up with an idea for my Christmas gingerbread construction. Sadly events over Christmas left me without the time to bring an idea to fruition. However, I never give up on an idea and sometime in mid-January I set about the mighty gingerbread project. Inspiration proved illusive until walking through the flat I stood on one of the several small, push out and construct plastic aircraft the ringbearer got in his advent calender last year. I finally decided upon my gingerbread project! And somewhere to put those bloody toys. A Gingerbread Aircraft Carrier! Below is my delayed report on how to create your very own gingerbread navy.

Step 1. Carefully follow German Hexenhaus recipe, melting butter, sugar and honey together. All the while cursing the sticky hard to manoeuvre nature of honey.
Step 2. Add gooey warm mixture to dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, cocoa, sugar). Mix and then start to form into a ball Recall some hazy warnings from high school home economics teacher about handling hot molten sugar and burning off nerve endings. Decide lack of pain means that issue isn't relevant. Leave dough to cool in fridge.Step 3. Employ the assistance of the ring bearer (note in pictures he isn't wearing his ring on the grounds that he doesn't want to get gingerbread stuck in it). Get him to roll out the gingerbread.

Step 4. Measure rolled out gingerbread against cunningly developed battleship net. Realise you have too little gingerbread and get Ringbearer to roll it thinner whilst feverishly chopping down the template to make it fit. Bank very heavily on the gingerbread rising a bit to ensure the air craft carrier doesn't have a dangerously thin hull. (I know that no hull could really withstand a short range gingerbread torpedo, but that's no excuse.)
Step 5. Cut out net and arrange pieces of gingerbread on numerous baking sheets and bake. Realise that whilst manoeuvring pieces to the baking tray the gingerbread stretches under its own weight. Reform shapes on baking sheet. Watch in amusement as ringbearer becomes enthusiastic with remnants and starts to form gingerbread anchors and fish.
Step 6.Remove gingerbread from oven and worry about the slightly deformed shape of the hull. Resolve to plug any holes with excess icing. Plan for excess icing meets instant ringbearer approval.
Step 7. Liberally cheat and make royal icing from ready made powder and arm the syringey icing thing. After realising that the ship's hull will not hold together whilst icing sets brilliantly come up with the idea of using glasses as structural support during icing. Forget that lighting is poor on this side of the kitchen and ice most of the ship together with minimal lighting. However decide that this is probably the authentic feeling of welding aircraft carriers whilst under blackout conditions and embrace the darkness.
Step 8.Having completed the hull add the deck and the bridge. Congratulate oneself a great deal when the deck fits on the hull and doesn't break during manoeuvring.
Step 9.Break out the sweets for decoration. Agree to ringbearer's notion that pink shrimp sweets should surround the hull like barnacles. (Ignoring the fact that they are a completely different species to barnacles and would if kept to scale with the aircraft carrier, be incredibly scary giant killer shrimps).

Step 10. Try and apply dollymixtures as portholes, wrestling with the futility of icing one single dolly mixture and making a great deal of mess. Start a small discussion with the ringbearer about where the red and green dolly mixtures should go to represent the ship's navigation lights. Send ringbearer off for emergency google check (green for starboard btw). The ship might lack propulsion, have impossible killer shrimp attachments and technically dissolve in water, but my god she'll obey International Regulations For Preventing Collisions at Sea!
Step 11. Unsure of how to include the jelly worms in the aircraft masterpiece place them everywhere, deciding they are either landing strip lights or the ship represents a little known sea battle called 'Jelly Worms on an Aircraft Carrier'. Draw the line at trying to make a gingerbread Samuel L. Jackson. Decorate aircraft carrier with mini planes.

The Gingerbread Aircraft Carrier lasted about a week. Most of the sweets were picked of within a few days. Structural integrity was maintained even when large sections were torn off and the mighty good-ship-gingerbread looked a very proud and noble vessel as she withstood her slow demolition and consumption. Sadly tearing off a chunk meant showering the floor in icing bits which was annoying. Perhaps the good-ship-gingerbread's final revenge upon us, her creators and destroyers.

Need care? Give us your house!

In the UK a person is entitled to free NHS medical care. Should a person then require 'long term care' at home, in sheltered housing or in a nursing home a person must pay for their care (often between £600-£1000 a week for those needing nursing care) until their assets fall below £23000, when the council will help pay, (they won't actually pay for everything until you own less than £14000). In short you must sell all your assets (i.e your house unless a dependent is living in it) to pay for your long term care until nearly bankrupt. The local council will 'help' by only assessing you based on assets excluding home for the first 12 weeks of your care. After that, you had better have your house sold because they will charge you like you own it's value in ready cash. 12 weeks to sell a house. 12 weeks - would anyone get a good price for it? Of course if you were clever you'd have split your assets, changed the deeds to your house or moved your elderly sister in to avoid your full assets being assessed and allowing you to keep your home.

24 hr care costs about £600-£1000 a week (in a council supported residence). So with £103 nursing allowance, £70.35 attendance allowance and £95 pension a week, that leaves a pensioner with about £300-£700 to pay a week. How many private pensions cover that? And that's not accounting for if the pensioner should maybe want some *nice* food, to go out, a birthday present for the grandkids, new clothes or anything to make their lives more fun. The joint savings of couples can be decimated by paying for the long-term care of just one. leaving two victims of circumstance and unexpected disability. Pensioners who paid taxes all their working lives expect to be cared for. And they are, until that care takes longer than a month or so.

I understand why this is happening. The population is aging and the younger generations cannot carry the tax burden of caring for the older ones. Part of me thinks this is fair, if you can pay...you should, put the money back into the economy now and forget leaving a tidy nest egg for the kids. But the other part of me can't make the leap between paying for NHS care and not paying for long term care. Dementia or disability are not certainities or life-style choices, why should caring for them be any different to caring for people who have traffic accidents, diseases or cancer? Why should the taxpayer pay for people who have sufficient money to merely get old naturally? Probably for the same reason that the taxpayer pays for these same people with sufficient money to have midwives and ante-natal care.

At the moment the system essentially penalises people who have saved or bought their house (that's the middle classes then); so nearly all political parties have sat up and taken notice offering a variety of options to the country. The main problem revolves around the problem that there is no money for care *now*. The government's suggestions (which completely forgot about accomodation costs) are below.

1. A partnership approach, which proposes that the government and the individual who needs care share the costs, with the government paying between a quarter and a third or more for people on a low income.

Seems a lot like what they're doing already except with local authorities

2. An optional insurance-based model, which would also see the government paying between a quarter and a third of the costs, but would allow individuals to pay £20,000 to £25,000 to cover themselves against the remaining costs of care.

So that would be private health insurance then?

3. A compulsory state insurance scheme under which everyone who can afford it pays between £17,000 and £20,000 – and receives free care in return.

Hmm. Just peachy if you're rich. Destruction of your hard earned retirement nest egg in an unexpected tax if you're not.

Personally I don't like any of them, but I suspect there is no easy way out of this mess. I think perhaps the money should come from an income tax, hence the risk of paying for long term care is spread out amongst the entire population at an affordable cost. Where have I heard it before though? Oh yes, funding the NHS - who should have been paying for long term care all along. But hindsight is a wonderful thing and an answer needs to be found for the situation now. And that is why I rage. I rage at the lack of an easy answer.

Historic toilets

Apologies for the absence, yet again my Christmas period was complicated with relatives going into hospital. Never fear though the mighty gingerbread project is not forgotten! It'll just have to be a pre-wedding-anniversary gingerbread extravaganza.

But onto important matters. Loos. The John Ryland library loos to be precise, which are AWESOME. Victorian in extremis. It's like walking into the past for a wee. Clearly other people feel the same sense of awe at the loos and there are signs up reminding them not to take photographs. However here is one from the Manchesterzedder's blog.

Of course the John Ryland Library is worth a vist anyday of the week. It is stunning and when I rule the world I shall live in it, happily polishing all the wood pannelling, reading books on cunning lecturns and naming all the gargoyles. Everything is beautiful in the church-like library building, built by the possibly gold-digging 3rd Mrs Ryland (She was a lot younger than her millionaire husband). Gold digging or not she was pretty smart insisting that her books be stored under electric lighting instead of gas whilst also being very picky about the doors and railings. In honour of the beauty of this place the modern extension is even tasteful. All libraries should look like this. All books should be stored like this. All loos should make you want to take a photograph.

Gingerbread architecture

Image from cutmesomeflack.wordpress.com
Yes, I have been very quiet - also very busy. A stream of visitors forced the ringbearer to ban any cakey inventions. Apparently not everyone likes finding gummys in their chocolate brownies. However, I have been experimenting with my lebkuchen recipe and now I have a star stamp, I shall be manufacturing zimtsterne like I was the big bang.

However, I have another grand plan. No, not marshamllows in mince pies[1] but a gingerbread construct. Gingerbread houses are dull, so what to try instead? A castle? A post apocalyptic nightmare? Confuse the Christmas message with a Gingerbread mosque? A tank? A ship? Or should I keep it simple and depict some sort of naughtiness in the house? Ideas in the comments! Come on, the odder the better.

[1] Not a bad idea actually.....

Penguin pool!

(Photo taken from Spiegel online)

Just how cool is this? You can swim in the pool next to a pool of penguins! I'm getting on a plane right now.

Penguin political correctness goes AWOL

(Picture from Spiegel online)

From the Spiegel weekly news quiz:

Yes Sandy the penguin became smitten with her keeper Peter Vollbracht. But the fickle creature lost interest when Vollbracht was off sick and hunted out another lover. Once Tom, a real penguin, died the slippery little trollop made a beeline again for the keeper.

Slippery little trollop! Some lonely, recently widowed penguin who after a long period of loving monogamy has returned her affections to the man she used to do charity work with is a 'slippery little trollop' for flirting with something she can never mate with? Would Der Spiegel have used such language for a male penguin? I think not. Maybe she should have thrown herself onto her penguin husband's burial pyre or lived as an outcast like Nepali widows?

Most likely this is one of Der Spiegel's very rare, yet quite funny little cultural mistranslations. Still, I'm appalled.

The mosquito must go!

Technically, as a nearly 30 year old I shouldn't have been able to hear the 17.7 Hz noise outside a corner shop in Timperley, but I could. It was like a knife through my brain, I actually felt nauseous and my hearing an head felt odd for at least an hour afterwards. I had heard of the Mosquito device, but had never come across one until yesterday. Designed to continuously emit a noise at a level only the under 25s can hear, it supposedly causes enough discomfort and annoyance that they will go elsewhere. The Mosquito is considered one of the most effective methods of preventing teenagers from gathering in a certain place.

This device is a form of ageist assault. I appreciate the horrors and intimidation of ASBO worthy youth in pack form and the right of ordinary shop owners and citizens to carry on with their normal lives. But this device doesn't segregate according to behaviour it segregates according to age. It says in one loud, painful tone that *everyone* under the age of 25 is a thug. Treat them like that and that is exactly what the vast majority of law abiding decent children will become. The device doesn't even make that much sense as a teenager deterrent - sure, they'll move on... to where? Another place that needs a mosquito and then another, soon teenagers and children won't be able to shamble or skip along a single street without being in discomfort.

The Mosquito and it's use is unregulated. It can be used whenever the owner likes and as it doesn't bother *them* it can be left on permanently. The one in Timperley was on at 10am on a weekday - surely not a prime time for teenage intimidation. The Mosquito can be boosted to levels unacceptable under health and safety laws and most adults are none the wiser. There is NO evidence of the effect of exposure on children's ears, all tests relating to adults only, which seems like an insane omission. However, this oversight is deemed to be acceptable as teenagers can surely walk away from the horrible noise. But small children with their parents can't 'walk away' and young people must still walk on pavements and cycle on roads near Mosquitos on a regular basis. These Mosquitos aren't limited to the privately owned shop forecourt, they can stretch up to 25m into public areas and yet no warning signs are required; so adults can wheel their baby/toddler right beneath it and stand and chat for 30 minutes in complete ignorance of the discomfort of their child. How are young people with learning disabilities supposed to cope with this unexpected onslaught?

The Mosquito device, it's installation and usage should be regulated. If there was a device that caused discomfort to everyone over the age of 50, it would be instantly banned. If someone played music at a deeply disturbing volume outside your local post office, so that anyone passing was caused discomfort, the police would be around. The only reason the mosquito is legal and unregulated is because the majority of its victims can't vote.

If you want to find out if you can hear the device, go here. You need good speakers for it to work properly, although the ringbearer says it might damage them.