Smithy, the John Smith's No Nonsense racehorse – and me!!!

Here I am, yours truly, with Smithy, the John Smith's No Nonsense racehorse.
I was at the stables of Ginger and Donald McCain, both accomplished racehorse
trainers. Ginger, who turned 80 recently, trained the famous Red Rum. This shot
was taken on the first day of the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, which was rained off.
What a great-looking racehorse – and, come to think of it, I don't look too bad either!

Leprosy, lager and psychics

I appear to have the knack of attracting some extraordinary people whenever I’m out and about. Once, on a train to London from Manchester, I sat opposite a woman who was reading, not Elle or Cosmopolitan but Leprosy Review. With two cans of Stella inside of me, and nothing like a book or newspaper to occupy my time, (that’s why I bought the lager) I found myself in fits of laughter – as a lone traveller, it never looks good – as I considered asking her if I could borrow her copy. It was the whole idea of being that desperate for something to do on the train journey that I was prepared to resort to reading a magazine about leprosy.

The woman noticed my shoulders shaking uncontrollably and, looking distastefully at the two crushed cans of Stella on the table in front of me, she asked me what I found so funny. With great difficulty, I told her and she let me read her magazine. It turned out that she was a doctor, but no ordinary GP. She was – and probably still is – the foremost authority on leprosy in the United Kingdom.

This week, I was in Northampton, of all places, on business, and I decided to walk back to the station rather than order a taxi from the office block I had been sitting in for the past hour. The walk was uninspiring and, as it was lunchtime, I thought I would find a tearoom or restaurant for a bite to eat.

Near the station there is a pub called The Black Lion, which, as a blackboard outside announced, was under new management. Having been editor of Pub Food magazine for six years, I can sniff out ‘pub grub’ from 100 yards and this was the sort of place, I figured, with a menu based around frozen chips and bar snacks and where ham, egg and chips was considered a delicacy. I played safe and ordered a ham sandwich.

I ended up in the pub because of Bruce’s Coffee Shop next door, which I hadn’t associated with the boozer. They were, I discovered, one and the same, which, in itself, was slightly odd: a coffee shop, a kind of independent version of Starbuck’s or Caffe Nero, inside a pub.

I stopped for a cappuccino and then walked through to the pub where I stayed for a beer because I liked the licensee. He was a decent sort of chap, ex-services, had been in the first Gulf War and was now the pub’s licensee. My sandwich was fine and I considered ordering another, but the crisps and salad accompanying my order sufficed and I survived on three pints of St Austell Tribute, one of three real ales available, the others being Spitfire and London Pride.

A man walked in and ordered a pint of Guinness. I had been chatting to the licensee about this and that and it transpired that his girlfriend worked in the local hospital, which I assumed was something like ‘Northampton General’. The man with the Guinness made a deliberate noise of disgruntlement at hearing this, and it turned out that he had spent six months there being treated for serious brain damage. He had been thrown off a nearby railway bridge by a group of Asian men in what the licensee described as a racist attack. Had a passer-by not spotted the man, he would have died.

The man was now on medication as a result of the attack and was only permitted a maximum of two pints of Guinness by the licensee. He only stayed for one. Apparently, the unprovoked attack had stirred up ill feeling among local hard men and revenge attacks had taken place.

The pub had recently been re-opened and the licensee told me that it dated back hundreds of years and had close associations with the impressive St Peter’s church next door.

The three pints of Tribute inspired me to take a closer look at the church. Prior to leaving my rather comfortable position at the bar, where I had been quietly writing an article about the Wye Valley Brewery on my laptop, I had noticed a man talking to the licensee. When I reached the church, there he was again taking photographs.

“I’ve got over 600 photographs of churches on my computer,” he told me, proudly, as we stood together in the churchyard while he continued to snap away. He produced his business card and, to my surprise, he was a paranormal investigator doing a bit of footwork for a psychic and medium called Susan Mock.

That surname bothered me. Mock. Mock not, but he said she was good and told me about a forthcoming meeting somewhere in Northampton. I loitered around the church for a while, admiring its inner beauty before boarding a train back to London.

Birthday cake for my daughter, aged 11

I must take after my mum, a dab hand at making cakes ever since I can remember. Perhaps it's because I've stood in the kitchen watching her, waiting to lick the bowl, or it might be that I have the cake gene, which means I can always make a decent sponge or whatever. I should have been a baker.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My daughter was 11 on the 7th January 2010 and because I simply wasn't prepared to fork out loads of cash for a ready-made Waitrose cake, which, to be honest isn't the same as baking one at home, I decided to do just that. Here's the recipe:-

Matthew's Birthday Cake

Ingredients

8oz self raising flour

8oz butter or margarine

8oz sugar

4 eggs

Butter icing

4oz butter or margarine

8oz icing sugar

A drop of vanilla essence

Method:

1. Mix all of the ingredients together until a smooth mix is achieved and then spoon the mixture into two sponge tins, making sure that both tins are lined with grease-proof paper.

2. Bake in the oven for approximately 20 minutes until both sponges rise. You'll know when it's ready, but keep an eye on the oven.

3. When ready, leave to stand for around 30 minutes and then prepare the sponges to be joined together. This might mean slicing a piece off the top of one of the sponges to make it flat. Then spread jam over the flat surface of one of the sponges and butter icing over the other one. Sandwich them both together and hey presto, a sponge cake!

Tip: I sprinkled the top of my cake with icing sugar. Put a small amount into something like a tea strainer and then just tap gently over the surface of the cake.

Walking from Sanderstead to Caterham in the snow

Pix from the top: the top of Tithepit Shaw Lane, Warlingham; Sir William Jones park in Warlingham; the gates of Sir William Jones park; more shots of people sledging in Sir William Jones park; and a shot of Kenley airfield. All very bleak, but I enjoyed a nice pint or two in the Wattenden Arms.

"Don't venture out unless it's absolutely necessary!" And what did I do? I ventured out! In fact, I walked 12 miles from Sanderstead to Caterham and back to see David Foster and hand over some copy for a magazine entitled Club Report 2010. On Tithepit Shaw Lane, a very steep downward descent towards Whyteleafe from Warlingham, I slipped over twice, once in front of a couple of girls – how humiliating! Two hours later I reached my destination, had a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit and then headed home via Kenley and a pub called the Wattenden Arms where I met Geoff Althoff, the illustrious illustrator.

Tell us another one...

As gritters lay rock salt on our roads, Matthew Moggridge wonders whether the nation as a whole should be taking large pinches of the stuff whenever it reads the newspapers or listens to the politicians.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a psychic, I don’t have a third sense and I can’t see dead people. I am a normal person with, it has to be said, a rightly suspicious mind.

Way back at the beginning of 2003 when plans were afoot to invade Iraq, my brow was furrowed as I listened to media reports about resolution 1441, the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ – which WAS dodgy – and all that stuff about how we, the citizens of the UK, were just 45 minutes away from being blown to bits by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

I remember all the trips Hans Blix and a gaggle of IAEA inspectors made to Iraq to try and find nuclear weapons that simply weren’t there and, of course, I recall the very suspicious (and, in my opinion, still unresolved) David Kelly affair. In short, it didn’t add up, but the impression we, the public, were being given was that everybody was trying their level best to avoid military intervention. This, of course, was a huge lie.

I remember saying to people at the time when military action was first being mooted that it was a foregone conclusion. I just had a hunch that everything else was mere posturing to make it look as if we really tried our best to avoid an invasion of Iraq but in the end we simply had to go in to protect the UK. And then, to add insult to injury, to double-bluff the public, we heard afterwards that our intelligence services were simply not very intelligent and that was why we accidentally invaded sovereign territory. But, oh dear, it was too late to go back by then so we’d better get on with it.

I’m still amazed at how people actually believe it. I won’t mention names, but people very close to me have what can only be called blind faith in Government.

And now, of course, the truth is coming out, thanks to the Chilcott investigation, and we hear that Blair really was Bush’s poodle. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: Blair is not going to be punished in anyway for his role in what amounted to an illegal invasion of another country. If I recall correctly, Blair has been appointed Middle East Envoy. But hold on a minute, isn't that like giving Nick Griffin a job with the Commission for Racial Equality?

In fact, judging by the way things work in this country, he’ll probably be rewarded for his role in creating a climate of fear in the UK that had a knock-on effect elsewhere and, of course, lead to other people being given awards when, perhaps, they should have been overlooked. Cresida Dick, the woman in charge of the police investigation that led to an innocent Brazilian being mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead on Stockwell tube station was recently awarded the Queen’s Medal.

Sadly, the message here is that you simply cannot trust anybody in this world, certainly not the Government, whether it’s Labour, Conservative or Liberal. Never trust or believe in what you read in the newspapers or hear on the television and always bear in mind that somewhere there’s a hidden agenda – especially where the bigger, longer running stories are concerned. Invariably, somewhere along the line, you will find that your suspicions were, to some degree, right.

The reason I have decided to put pen to paper is a newspaper report on the so-called swine flu pandemic that, at one stage, was going to be infecting a ridiculously large number of people in the UK. I think it was supposed to be something like 100,000 people per day! I remember thinking that this would mean that I was definitely going to be infected at some stage. I bought zinc from my local health food shop, started eating loads of navel oranges and making a point of keeping well away from anybody with the slightest sniffle. I began envisaging days off work, Lemsips and everything else one associates with the flu – like the Jeremy Kyle Show – and, secretly, I hoped that if I was struck down I would not be one of those who died from the disease.

The Government was predicting 64,000 deaths. The climate of fear created and fuelled by the media had, to a degree, worked – until I started thinking, hold on, 100,000 people per day, surely I will know somebody with swine flu? Oddly, nobody I know has caught the disease – absolutely nobody.

The so-called ‘swine flu’ pandemic was great for the work shy. All they had to do was call a helpline and spell out, to an indifferent telephonist,a few symptoms and they would be sent some Tamiflu and signed off of work for a week – job done (or not in this case). Anybody could do it and nobody was going to ask any questions.

In the same way that the credit crunch gave businesses carte blanche to sack people without a decent reason, swine flu provided skivers with the equivalent of a Get Out of Jail Free card.

And now the truth might be floating to the surface. I use the word ‘might’ because the report I read this morning was in a tabloid newspaper, an area of the media where the phrase ‘economical with the truth’ is definitely an understatement – although hats off to the Sun for a great headline when swine flu was welcomed into the UK; it led with ‘Pig’s ‘ere’.

It is being claimed, not in the Sun, that the head of health at the Council of Europe, Mr Wolfgang Wodarg (there’s probably an anagram there somewhere) believes that the World Health Organisation’s swine flu pandemic was, in fact, completely false and driven by the drug companies who stood to make billions out of convincing us that it was for real. Surely not!

The Council of Europe has passed a resolution, proposed by Mr Wodarg, calling for an investigation into the role of the drug companies involved in the scandal and this at a time when it has emerged that the British government is trying to offload a huge consignment of Tamiflu that it ordered at the height of the scare. Not another case of faulty intelligence, surely?

But there is a big problem here. If we stormed into Iraq for no reason, if swine flu was a sham, then what about climate change? We’re all busy trying to reduce our carbon footprint while putting up with the fact that China and America are producing more greenhouse gasses than the lot of us put together – it all begs the question, what the hell is going on?

It’s all a matter of trust and I for one will continue to take everything I’m told with an extremely large bag of salt – even if it is true that the UK diet contains more salt than any other country in the world. Perhaps that’s not true either.

I wrote a novel in 30 days. Is it any good? I don't know.

Okay, it's nothing to be proud of, I've tried it before and either run out of time or just got plain bored, but this year, I went for it: November is always National Novel Writing Month, key that into Google and you'll be directed to a website where the deal is this: you sign up and commit to writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, starting November 1st and finishing by midnight on November 30th. As I said, I've tried this before and either lost time or lost interest.

The problem, of course, is if you miss a day, you've got to double your workload the following day, which can get stressful and, ultimately, lead to you abandoning the project; this happened to me a year or two ago. I was determined to finish this year. I did pretty well, writing something on most days of the month and then, as the event drew to a close I found myself dividing the number of days left with the number of words still to write and I always getting something like 2,500 words per day. It was fine.

I found that early in the morning was the best time to write, so I often got up at the crack of dawn, around 0530hrs to 0600hrs, to write the first 1,000 words and then polish off the final 1,500 at night while watching the television – or rather having the television on but not really watching it. One night I sat watching a scary movie, The Grudge, while writing the story and noticed afterwards how the chapter concerned turned out to be pretty spooky.

Is it any good? I don't know to be honest. It was a children's story based on characters I dreamt up for my daughter. The bedtime process for my daughter has always involved me making up stories about three characters. I decided to use the characters for National Novel Writing Month. I had no real plan or plot and basically just started writing, making it up as I went along. Not ideal, but there you have it. It's odd because I never knew what was going to happen or how the story was going to pan out at the end, it all happened as it happened.

I am glad it's over because I was getting to bed late and I did find myself pre-occupied with the whole venture during the day.

"Winning", if that's what completing the novel on the finish date means, is an odd affair. You log on to the National Novel Writing Month website and submit your finished document to the word-counter and then, that's it, you get told you've won, you get asked to donate some money and then you can, if you wish, download a certificate, in PDF form, stating that you completed the task – all a bit of an anti-climax, although later on, an email from the organiser informed me that I could get the story produced as a book and possibly get it on Amazon too. It needs a rewrite before I do that, but I've got until July 2010 so it's got to be done.

I doubt if I'll get a call from Hodder & Stoughton, although I do admit to having the odd fantasy about getting a £1.5 million four-book deal and moving to a house on the beach somewhere near Aldeburgh in Suffolk where I can indulge a horribly twee, Sunday supplement existence. It won't happen.

Now it's completed, of course, I have to spend time in the evening reading it to my daughter. There are 18 chapters in total including a kind of epilogue entitled Boxing Day. I didn't want a Chapter 19 as my father-in-law died on the 19th and I didn't want the book to have any kind of jinx attached to it.

Now that I'm considering doing a rewrite, who knows? I might be suitably impressed by the end result to submit it to a publisher – but then again, perhaps I won't be, I've never been very self-confident. I'll probably just read it to my daughter and then put it in the attic where, in many years to come, it might be unearthed, turned in a multi-million dollar movie and I won't be around to rake in or enjoy the cash.

There are four months in the year with 30 rather than 31 days and we all know them: April, June, September and November. Perhaps I'll write stories during those months, sequels to the one I've already written. Talk about practice makes perfect. Anyway, gotta go.

The OK Cafe, 77 Piccadilly, Manchester City Centre

"I know you're not going to do a runner," said the man behind the counter as I paid my £4.64 for cottage pie, boiled potatoes, greens and peas. The comment said a lot for the OK Café's clientele, most of whom, it had to be said, sported shell suits, tattoos and an unshaven complexion – and that was just the women!

I liked the idea that I didn't look like the sort of person that 'did a runner' although secretly it has been an ambition of mine for some time. A few years ago I used to be the editor of a magazine in the hotels and fine dining industry and I remember reading a review of one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in the Saturday Times magazine (penned by Giles Coren) where the bill for his meal was something like £383. Now that's a lot of money and I have often questioned whether such an amount is right, in an ethical and moral sense, when I consider that the OK Café would have cost me under a tenner for two. Alright, I'm sure that Restaurant Gordon Ramsay is not the sort of place that attracts those who like to do runners, but when a restaurant meal for two costs nearly £400 – the price of desirable 'consumer durables' like washing machines and DVD players – one has to question what kind of security measures are in place to prevent people from doing a runner.

It's been a while since I was the editor of that magazine, but I remember that Locanda Locatelli, an excellent restaurant run by an excellent chef (down-to-earth and not pretentious) was located inside a hotel. On one visit I asked where I might find the restrooms and I was directed through a door and found myself in the middle of a bustling hotel reception area. Had I finished my meal I could have just walked out of the hotel front entrance never to be seen again; and this got me thinking. Perhaps we should run a feature where we try to 'do runners' from expensive restaurants just to see how protected they are. The idea was, of course, ruled out by the publisher (far too exciting, far too good, far too controversial and we don't want people actually READING the magazine, do we?) but there were issues surrounding breaking the law that I hadn't really considered.

Having said that, my plan was to work out a 'winning point', a place where we could say we had successfully achieved 'doing a runner' from the restaurants in question. It might have been a distance of 500 yards from the table at which we had been sitting; there were various ideas on the table about that. Anyway, the plan was to reach the winning point and then return and pay the bill – assuming we hadn't already been stopped and carted off to the local nick.

I knew that I couldn't operate alone and would need an accomplice and chose as my partner in crime a PR girl, who will remain nameless. She was definitely keen and we worked out that we would need props – a fake mobile phone and a replica Fendi handbag, perhaps, to leave on the table and give the waiting staff the impression that we had to come back when, in reality, we had scarpered.

With meals costing so much, ie the price of a DVD player – the sort of thing burglars nick from houses – I felt, somewhere deep down that there was almost a moral obligation to have a go at 'doing a runner'. Food should never cost £400, that's plain greed on the part of the restaurateur, no matter what their excuse might be – food is never THAT good – and I should know as I have eaten in some of the best and most expensive restaurants in the UK and the world (but never paid for it, journalists tend not to). In fact if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't, in the same way that I would never buy a Bugatti Veyron, even if I had the money: at the end of the day it's only a car and I'm not going to pay the best part of a million quid just to pose and be poncy.

Anyway, back to doing a runner: it never happened. I even put the idea to the features editor of a well-known lads' mag – they think they're hard, or so I thought: they never returned my call, the cowards. So it never happened and probably never will. I did, however, case a few joints and can offer this advice to anybody who wants to have a go: hotel-based restaurants are the best bet, especially if they don't have their own dedicated entrance. Remember the fake mobile phone and the imitation Fendi bag, go there well turned out with a beautiful woman on your arm, order the lot: starter, main course, a good bottle of wine, dessert and then ask for directions to the restrooms. You can't both get up at the same time, that might arouse suspicions, but then I never got as far as actually organising a caper – just eating one!

Now that was an almighty digression, let's get back to the OK Café in Manchester – it was your typical caff – a mixture of Formica and plastic Gingham tablecloths, there were many copies of The Sun there for customers to read for free and the food was plain and honest. My cottage pie was one of the chef's specials and it only cost £4.65 with a mug of tea thrown in. As I left, leaving the change from a fiver as a tip, I started to wonder how desperate you would have to be to do a runner from the OK Café. According to the chef, it happens a lot.