Four Calling Birds

If your beloved sent you four calling birds, how pissed off at them would you be? I mean, a partridge in a pear tree, well, pear tree can go in the garden, wouldn't notice the bird in it, two turtle doves, well, a bit soppy, but not too noisy, French hens, well, eggs I guess and you could eat them if you fancied it, but calling birds, now THAT would annoy me, and it just gets worse.....

Enough of that though. I made some horrid mince pies on Christmas Eve, wasn't feeling at all well, managed to make rock hard pastry, knew I only had a small jar of Sainsbury's finest mincemeat so put in too little, not nice even for those of us who like them.
But yesterday I made a new batch and they are lush. I had to make my own mincemeat to go in them and when you do that, you can put in just what you like and bind it together with the blend of alcohol of your choice. Heavenly.

Now I am really excited about the British Food Standards Agency's campaign to take on the advertising industry over the labelling of food. This is the stuff. David and Goliath. Some food manufacturers, especially those who produce breakfast cereal are worried that if people know the true level of unhealthy ingredients in their products, they won't buy them.
Well, first off, people know how unhealthy most of the shit they put into their bodies is and they still buy it by the ton, and secondly, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THEN!!! Don't just sit and whinge.
The National Health Service, we are told, is stretched to breaking point by the ill effects of diet, so it would be a pathetic country that wouldn't attempt to do something about that.

An article on NetDoctor caught my eye today. It seems that pet owners are in general unhealthier than those who don't own a pet. This seems counter-intuitive, in fact the researchers even say this.
But fear not, it turns out not to be the owning of the pet that causes the depressions, high blood pressure, sciatica, diabetes, ulcers and migraines, but rather the owning of a pet is indicative of other factors. Ah the Finns, they are full of surprises.

We had rented the movie 'The Da Vinci Code' before I went to England, but we hadn't managed to see it. I feared it might annoy me. Finally yesterday we watched it and we both enjoyed it.
I had read the book and found it hard to put down in spite of the awful writing that made my eyes water and the poor characterisation that made me wince. But the film managed, of course, to avoid both those pitfalls. I say of course, but there are bad screenplays, there is dialogue that makes you say ouch. Another writer whose books I can't put down because of the story tension is Michael Crichton, but his characters are barely even one dimensional. And one of the films of a book of his, I think it may have been Sphere, managed to maintain intact the lack of dimension in the characters.
Not so in Da Vinci. I was not really a Tom Hanks fan until 'The Road to Perdition', but I really liked him in this. I think his ordinariness lends a flexibility and range that many Hollywood stars don't have.
The only character that made me wish that Ron Howard hadn't been so true to the book was 'Sir Leigh Teabing'. True of course, Sir Ian McKellen made the character come to life. But in the book, he irritated the hell out of me. Firstly, the stupid name. No British aristocrat would be called Leigh for a kick-off. Sorry if you have beloved friends called Leigh, but this would be the equivalent of having a 'Sir Wayne' or a 'Sir Darren'.
Then Brown made a horrible ham-fisted attempt at an English stereotype who obsessed over tea as his ridiculous name suggests, but who kept using American vernacular. Grated like nails on a blackboard.
That apart, I found the film thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying.

As for those calling birds, I'd have succumbed to all the pet-owner's ailments by now and had to release them into the wild.