Food nostalgia (or, the strange things that cross your mind when you are old, ill, or both at once)

When you are ill, or old, or incapacitated in a way that leaves you with time on your hands and a need not to think too hard about the present, your thoughts begin to wander in unexpected directions. Memories suddenly appear unbidden: a surprising number of them are about food, perhaps because you no longer have much control over what you are being given to eat. I have had sudden cravings for things which I only occasionally ate before being ill; I have wanted to try both new things and things from the past which I haven't had for a long time (perhaps there's an element of a food bucket list in this!); I have longed for dishes I used to cook a lot but can no longer do, things which were not available in hospital and are not part of the repertoire of the rest of my family; I now look obsessively at food blogs and recipes and I still keep up my recipe notes in the hope that one day, perhaps, I will be able to do some of it again.

One memory which floated back was of my grandfather, who, becoming seriously ill with a degenerative disease in his 60s, badly wanted the tripe and onions of his childhood again. Bleurgh. (My grandmother couldn't locate any in the small southern English town they had moved to - he might have had a better chance in the various cities they had lived in). I have also read somewhere that, along with working more generally on memories with older people (particularly those with dementia), someone has had the idea of researching what food was popular in their childhood and giving them that.

You can't over-generalise, of course. Some people's memories, not just about food, are not good. Tread carefully! Asking an old lady about her deceased husband might produce a lovely romantic story, or it might draw out of her a tale of broken fingers and how he only saw the baby once and pushed off and was never seen again and left her destitute. As for food, if I am ever in a position where somebody thinks it would make my day to return to the cuisine of the 1960s and 1970s, I think I would like the chance to veto some of it!

On having a chronic cough (1: On the buses)

It is said that many of us have the power to make someone look up or look in our direction by focusing intently on the one whose attention we want to attract. I am quite good at it though I don't claim to have extraordinary powers of telepathy. Perhaps there is a latent instinct in us all which kicks in (how do we explain it otherwise?).

I have had a persistent and unlovely cough for over 8 years. It is an anti-social thing, tiring and unpleasant for me and not very nice for anyone around me. It is the most obvious symptom of one of my chronic conditions. One day, travelling to work on a Cardiff bus, I became aware that someone somewhere on the bus was doing the telepathic stare thing in my direction. Once you become aware of it it startles you into looking up, and in this case it felt full of malice and ill-will. Sure enough, there was a youngish man glaring at me with hatred in his eyes and heart, clutching a scarf across his mouth.

I have got so used to the cough by now that I forget that in the world of normality someone coughing on public transport means one thing and one thing only: an irresponsible person with an infectious condition has deliberately set out to pass it on to everyone else and make them all ill too. Every now and then people on social media shout out (presumably in lieu of actually shouting on their train or bus, or doing the glare thing) that people with coughs should STAY AT HOME and STAY AWAY FROM WORK.

Here, just for a bit of balance, is a list of some of the reasons why people might be coughing but are not a danger to you:

allergies
asthma
bronchiectasis
COPD
cystic fibrosis
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
lung cancer

They might also have a legacy cough from a previous illness such as flu, pneumonia, or a collapsed lung. This list is of course not complete.

You are not going to catch any of these, worriers on social media and the hater on the bus. I understand the anxiety, of course, but the concern of others, especially when it centres however politely on suggesting I should be out of sight and hearing of the rest of society, is quite stressful, and one does wish to delay being housebound, unemployed and socially isolated for as long as possible. A chronic cough is for life.

Get well soon!

I have in the past been as guilty as anyone else of sending people cards with this message without knowing whether it is appropriate or not. Obviously when someone first becomes ill they and their friends and family all hope that this is a temporary state of affairs. You go the doctor, or the hospital, you are treated, the nasty thing goes away and you are back where you were.

Chronic illness doesn't work like that, unfortunately. You are not going back to normal, although you might be one of the lucky ones whose disease has been found early enough for a bit of improvement, or at least for you not to get any worse in the near future, and for it to be managed successfully. That wouldn't have quite the same snappy impact as a greetings card offering, of course - "Don't get any worse" wouldn't get a lot of custom, I suspect.

As time goes on it may be more apparent that it is not the right message. A chronic illness is very often progressive, even with periods of remission and allowing that some of these conditions can keep you in their grip for a long time (years in some cases). After a while, the expectations of friends and family can be a bit oppressive, and the message, however well meant, can imply that it is up to you not to be ill - go on, get well! Behind this lies bafflement at coming to terms with the idea that this might not happen ("nonsense, they wouldn't let you out of hospital if you weren't getting better") and perhaps some confusion over the difference between having an incurable disease and having a terminal diagnosis (not necessarily the same thing - although this might seem a rather moot point).

There is also a bit of finger-pointing at the sick and the disabled in society at large which basically seems to suggest that our fate is entirely in our hands. Gaining weight? You are eating too much fat and sugar and not exercising enough. Losing weight? You are not eating properly/enough. There can be serious medical causes for both weight loss and gain which have nothing to do with diet and exercise, and this constant background noise of blame is unhelpful and can distract from addressing the actual causes, which may not be in our own hands at all. This is, of course, a scary thought for everyone.

A change of direction?

Dedicated followers will have noticed that things have been rather quiet here recently.  I have been preoccupied with health issues ("slowing down" might be a polite way of putting it!) and wondering whether I might turn in the direction of considering those. After all, the blog is called "Too much information", and readers might soon feel that that is what they are getting! So, due warning: this might become a bit more of a patient's blog, but only in a fairly nebulous way, as the intricacies of the rather complicated clinical picture would probably not be that helpful to others. There are some general points to be made about chronic illness which might be relevant to a wider group of people (and I certainly have plenty of time for reflection, after all).
Watch this space...

It's a brand name so you can't translate it (into Welsh)

Brand-name : “a trade or proprietory name” (OED); otherwise “a name which must not under any circumstances be translated into Welsh”.

“It can’t be translated because it is a brand name”: this is the all-too-familiar protest of those who have perhaps had a bright idea but haven’t included the fact that their business or presence is in Wales in their plans before launching the said idea on the public. Cue, questions as to where the Welsh identity of the “brand” is to be found; response, wriggling, occasionally leading to a reversal (which very often turns out to be quite painless, after all), but sometimes determined refusal to consider the Welsh language (more likely if the parent company is not based in Wales and orders, or not-so-bright ideas, have come from elsewhere).

Although I have mainly worked in the public sector I must put my hand up here and confess to a family background in PR and advertising, so although it is at one or even two removes I do know a little bit about what a brand name is supposed to be and some of the principles of successful marketing. The name must be memorable, easy to associate with the product, and fairly simple. Over time a good brand name will become well-known. An unsuccessful name might close doors (such as names which work in one language but not in another, for instance – the reason why we never saw that refreshing drink Pschitt! for sale on this side of La Manche, at least not under that name. “Pour vous, cher ange, Pschitt orange”, its early slogan, would have been a challenge to English marketing in translation …)

I am talking here in terms of business because that essentially is where terms like brand truly belong. A brand is not the same thing as the public image of a public sector operation, although business language, terms and ideology creep in there all the time. It certainly is not the correct term for a room with a functional name in a building. It is also not the correct term for an advertising slogan or campaign. A business is free not to translate its advertising (although it may be losing a trick by not doing so), but a government agency does have to provide Welsh language versions of its public information. Some slogans are easier to translate than others, and in some cases something may be lost or gained in translation (slogans are the product of a creative mind, after all) but there is no reason for not making the attempt. So, Cardiff Council’s brilliant “Tidy Text” can be and is translated into Welsh (but loses the joke in the process), whereas “Gwener y gwario gwirion” is a witty, and alliterative, improvement on “Black Friday”, although perhaps not quite conveying the meaning which businesses want!

Two examples of “brand name” oddity spring to mind at once.

The Royal Mint, formerly in the Tower of London but based in Llantrisant in Wales since 1968, would surely count as most people’s idea of a public body. It recently opened its doors to the public, and you can go there for the Royal Mint Experience, during which you can enjoy the Royal Tea Experience. In Welsh (once you have found the Welsh version of the website) you are invited to enjoy the “profiad y te brenhinol”, but it is part of something translated as “Profiad y Royal Mint” – a strange and distracting hybrid. (The Welsh name has slipped in in a few places, for further confusion). “Profiad y Royal Mint” appears on all the yellow directional road signs.  Next to the name “Royal Mint” a little ® appears, so it seems that this is now considered a “brand name” – yet the Welsh name “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” has existed for years, and is easily found elsewhere both on the Internet and in print. It’s not as if anyone would have to pay for a special creative translation, as the Welsh name is already known and established. If one really has to treat a name as a brand name (I’m not convinced, but so it seems to be), isn’t it possible to have two? It’s not as if anyone else can claim to be either “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” or “The Royal Mint”, after all! (the current penalty for counterfeiting money is 10 years’ imprisonment).

Another recent example, this one from the private sector and apparently unresolvable, involves Marks & Spencer, or M & S, which appears to have undergone a recent rebranding exercise. Out with the green, in with the black and white; out with the full name, too, in lots of places; more contentiously, in with the weird new coinage “foodhall” (one word), which indicates, if I have understood correctly, the smaller, mainly food outlets, which also sell such things as flowers, newspapers and magazines, and a small selection of kitchen and bathroom consumables, but no clothes or household items. This is problematic even without the Welsh question. Clearly the words “food hall”, which are more correct in English, could not be a “brand name” because, well, they are just words – in this case words which have been used for the same concept by other well-known stores for many years. Where there is a larger M & S, that is with the clothes and shoes and so on, the words “food hall” appear on the store guidance signs, and in Wales they are translated as “neuadd fwyd” along with the other names of different departments in the shop. However, it appears that a “foodhall” is not the same as a “food hall”, and that we are being asked to regard “foodhall” as a brand (let’s for the sake of argument think of these shops as M & S with no knickers). When M & S opened its new “foodhall” in Aberystwyth, the council objected to the lack of Welsh, but was told that “foodhall” was an untranslatable brand name. Several people pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere that the large shops do translate the two words. Ah, but the two words are not a brand name, you see. Clear? Well, no, obviously not, since once you get into having to explain the difference between two words (named department in a bigger store) and one word made out of two words run together (the no-knickers shops) you have obviously failed to get the concept across to the customers, and the name isn’t meeting the requirement of being simple and easily understood. It doesn’t work particularly well in English, because you either have to pronounce it as two words (in which case you have moved away from the brand name) or make something up – should it rhyme with Goodall? Should it have an Old Norse slant and become the Fuđhall?

I haven’t managed to come up with a creative solution, so perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t follow other family members into this field, but I can’t believe that there isn’t something which would work better than this, both for clarity, better English, and, of course with a Welsh version too: or, if the idea of a Welsh brand is unacceptable, another clearer name or word which would work for everyone, including in Aberystwyth where the % of people who speak Welsh is higher than those who do not. Many years ago my grandfather actually worked for Marks and Spencer in just this type of work. I wonder what he might have suggested?

Welsh has official status in Wales, which does not affect the status of English but does mean that Welsh should not be treated less favourably. The law is weak in the area of private enterprise, stronger in the case of public bodies (but in these days of semi-privatisation and arms-length agencies, what exactly counts as a public body?)

Private companies have more freedom to ignore the language, but might like to consider how excluding Welsh from their “brand” comes across to their potential Welsh customers. Basically, if you are saying that your “brand name” cannot or must not be in Welsh, you are really saying that you would rather people didn’t speak Welsh, and you perhaps cannot even comprehend that they might be thinking in Welsh.

Yr wylan deg: seagull nursery time

Gull, n.
Etymology: Perhaps < Welsh gŵylan, Cornish guilan = Breton goelann (whence French goëland), Old Irish foilenn (modern Irish faoileann) < Old Celtic *voilenno-; compare Breton goelaff to weep.
- OED


"Yr wylan deg ar lanw, dioer ..."




The poet Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote his famous poem to the seagull in the fourteenth century. It's really not about the seagull, of course, but about the lady to whom the gull is free to fly, whereas he is not. Centuries later, the gull is an all-too-familiar presence in Wales, including in inner Cardiff, and for a few weeks this summer we had the mixed pleasure of finding ourselves living in a seagull nursery, as after an absence of some years a gull pair decided that our street, with its high but unused Edwardian chimney pots, is an ideal place for the rearing of seagull young (it isn't).
The first high pitched cries of the young chick were heard at the beginning of June, and a tiny head could be seen sticking out on the roof of a neighbour's house. So far, so good: however, seagull chicks hatch apparently already able to walk, but unable to fly, and the tiny amount of space among the chimney pots is wholly inadequate for the next stage. Sure enough, very soon the small fluffy one had reached the ground (how? do they just float down somehow?) and was now in someone's back garden, with its parent still settled on the roof, about 30' higher up. In no time at all, it found its way out of the back garden (where it was safe from cars but not from cats) and eventually round to the busy street, where it took up residence, mainly sitting in the gutter, on the pavement, and in the road.
Having had an unsuccessful episode of seagull rearing in the street before, we knew more or less what to expect - but I had certainly forgotten aspects of human behaviour which gulls inspire (even small fluffy brown ones which look more like ducklings). At a rough guess, I would say that the country is divided absolutely and forever on the subject of seagulls, rather like Brexit. 48% of us seem to be able to co-exist with them, whereas the other 52% really hate them. The internet is full of rants about seagulls and suggestions for getting rid of them: firms offer (illegally) to exterminate chicks. The press regularly carries stories about gull-on-human attacks (I won't name names for likely newspapers, but let's just say there seems to be a common thread here: think, fear - whether of groups of "other" people, various, or wild birds or animals. Squirrels come in for quite a bit of negative attention too).
Seagulls are noisy, they make a mess on your laundry, head and car, and they will swoop at you if they perceive you as a threat, but they do not, in fact, usually actually attack you. They don't like small dogs, small children, or men in hard hats. The presence of a chick in the vicinity ups the likelihood of diving, and it seems that many people do not recognise the young for what they are and do not realise that the big white bird is angry because they are going too close to an apparently unrelated brown one. However much you might dislike wildlife in general, and this sort in particular, chicks and birds with young should be left well alone. They are protected by law, and you not liking them isn't a good enough reason for disturbing them. (There's more information about the legal position here). It's not easy to identify the young ones but after observing the adults I think ours are lesser black-backed gulls (so, not particularly endangered, but their numbers are falling).


Gwylaneg = Gullish
Not in the OED! but gulls definitely communicate with each other and have a number of different cries which, living right in the middle of them, we found we were getting to know. There's a quacking, which sometimes seems to be a gentle alert (e.g. from the parent to the chick, if I left the house - just to let him know that someone was coming, but not a full-on warning of danger); the cries with which they maintain contact with each other; the full head-thrown-back shout; the very high-pitched and insistent sound which the chicks make; and the quite different sounds the adults make when there is immediate danger or threat (partly distress and partly intimidation). We soon learned to recognise, and respond to, this one, as it is quite different from usual gull talk.
During the next few weeks we had our sleep disturbed late at night by the terrible cacophony of one of the adult birds as two men who were old enough to know better danced around in the road throwing sticks and stones at it and tried to catch it as it swooped - possibly unaware of the nearby chick, of course, but FFS! (as they say) - quite apart from unnecessary provocation, how about some consideration for people trying to get to sleep? On another evening the same noise turned out to be reaction to a boy of around 13 stalking the chick with a huge stick, also quite late at night. I spent some time talking to him and eventually, reluctantly, he gave up, insisting that "I'm not going to hurt it" (huh? what was the big stick for then?). Seagulls seem to settle down for the night at around 10 p.m., unless people are throwing things at them or threatening their young.
Not everyone hates seagulls, but those who don't can be a bit of a threat too, unintentionally: some people want to take the chicks away and "save" them, but even though one has to agree that a busy urban street is a bad place for a chick, removing it from its parent is not a good idea. (The parents tend to stay up on the rooftops and don't spend very much time down on the ground with the young, but if you are at close quarters with them you will know that the chick has not been abandoned. Feeding often takes place last thing at night or early in the morning). I ended up having a long chat with a nice lady with a lidded bucket who wanted to take the chick to a vet. "He is being attacked by the other seagulls", she said. (No, they are attacking you because you are trying to take their baby away in a bucket ...) Amazingly she accepted my point and the chick stayed put under the watchful eye of the parents.
About two weeks after arriving on the ground, the chick was joined by another, smaller chick. We guessed that they were from the same nest but not the same age. It was at this point that even the hardest anti-gull heart would begin to melt - surely? - because it became obvious that the two liked each other's company and that gull chicks are probably never meant to be on their own on the ground waiting to fledge. The bigger one looked to sentimental humans like a proud older brother showing his younger sibling his new school. They waddled around everywhere together, snuggled up to each other to sleep, and started doing sensible things like spending the night on doorsteps (instead of in the road).

Sadly, the big brother wasn't able to prevent the little one from wandering out under the wheels of a van pulling away from its parking spot a few days later. It was interesting, if distressing, to watch the reaction of the survivor, and its parent whom it summoned: again, while not wishing to be super-anthropomorphic about it and ascribing human emotions to birds of, presumably, very little brain, both birds displayed agitation and then what seemed like grief, bending their heads down so that their beaks were vertical to the ground and staying motionless like that for a short while.The adult flew off, low, but the chick wandered about with its head down for days, going back every now and then to look at the remains and even moving the dead one off the road.
Just a few days later, one morning we saw the chick sitting on a gatepost, having finally got off the ground (earlier attempts were funny to watch - jumping up and down on the spot flapping its wings), and a few days later still he was seen flying low over the road, as if it were the sea. In fact I wondered whether the gulls think of the road as a version of the sea, as the young one also tried several times to settle down right in the middle for the night. It had not yet had the chance to experience landing on water, yet its behaviour around the water put out for it to drink suggested that it wanted to get in. We did not put any food out for it, reckoning that it seemed to be growing without it and, however gross we found the regurgitative process by which the adult transfers food to its young, felt that they probably knew what they were doing.
The silence in the street on the Sunday morning after seeing the chick flying along the road was eerie and unnerving. Early in the morning we had heard a great deal of seagull vocalising, high up above the street rather than close at hand, but could see nothing. There was no sign of any of the group, and for several days it stayed like that (not wholly quiet, in fact: the magpies and crows which had been keeping a low profile soon started to reappear). This time, at least, there was no mangled feathery corpse anywhere to be seen. The absence of seagull noise made me realise how much their sounds had become the background to everything, and also how alert we had been made by them, looking out all the time for dangers, chasing the chick out of the road, and so on. We convinced ourselves that the chick had flown (although I did start to wonder about sparrowhawks, which have been seen in inner Cardiff preying on smaller birds). Nearly a week later, the family returned, parents back on their usual chimneypots and - yes - the fully fledged brown juvenile seagull up there on the roof with them. I felt as proud as if I had taught him to fly myself!
They are still visiting occasionally (especially on bin day) but seem to be spending most of their time elsewhere. The young one's cry is still the insistent high-pitched shriek of the young, and he is a bit clumsy landing on the roof, but he has otherwise mastered his beautiful brown wings and soars above the rooftops. While the adults do come down to the ground the young one hardly ever does. I wish the other little one could have joined him up there, having spotted a few other more complete family groups with young ones sociably sticking together, but at least he made it in spite of all the odds.

The numberplate game (trivia!)

Once upon a time, British registered cars produced hours of harmless fun on long car journeys. Anyone else remember the numberplate game?

As someone who can't read or write on a car or a bus (and that includes scrolling on a screen) without becoming a biohazard, long car journeys as a passenger, or even short trips on slow-moving buses, are tedious for me. I can't remember how we came across it but at some point in my childhood we discovered the numberplate game, which passed the time. British numberplates used to include the whole range of numbers from 1 to 999 and you had to spot them in numerical order (so you were not actually collecting numbers, as such, merely looking out for the next one and moving on: no writing involved!)

The old system was replaced in September 2001, a few months before my son was born, and my first thought was They Have Spoiled The Game! Surely it would soon become impossible to play, as older cars disappeared from the roads. Not only that, a few years later the government introduced a scrappage scheme intended to boost the sales of new cars by encouraging people to part with their old ones. I therefore didn't attempt to play the game with my own child. The new registration scheme doesn't lend itself to any very obvious equivalent, as although it has been in place for over 14 years there is quite a limited range of numbers (so far, only 02-15 and 51-65). The previous sequence with prefixes A-Y ran from 1983 to 2001, and before that there was a sequence with suffixes, from 1963 (ish) to 1982. Earlier than that there were also plates with up to three numbers.

On a longish walk down a busy road a few weeks ago for some reason the game popped into my head, and I noticed that many of the cars passing me had pre-2001 plates. I started wondering whether it would still be possible to play the game after all (surely not? How many people have cars that are over 14 years old? OK, I do, but surely it isn't typical?) I then had a little bet with myself, that if I should happen to see an old car with a number 1 I would start again and see how far I could get. Within ten minutes I had seen 1, 2, 3 and 4, in that order. Do not make bets with yourself.

I don't know that I am really obsessive enough to carry on with this all the way to 999, but observations over the past few weeks have led to some surprises. There really are lots of old cars still on the road. Why? Is it a Cardiff thing? Is it just that the economic recovery hasn't reached Cardiff? Do we have better car mechanics than other places? Is it that people may be in work, so have the money to run a car, but are not affluent enough to borrow money for new cars or to buy them outright? A stroll around my neighbourhood revealed over 100 pre-2001 registered cars, with a surprising number of those coming from the pre-1983 sequence. There are even a few which predate the A-Y suffixes, so these vehicles are over 50 years old. Some of them are the classic makes which clearly really do last, but others are not so obviously so (although it is not a bad guide to which manufacturers are good!) I am certainly not going to feel so self-conscious about my own old car in future. While there are, as you might expect, older cars in down-at-heel areas, you will also find them in some more comfortably-off districts, perhaps because there are elderly drivers there who are not quite ready to stop driving altogether but think it is not worthwhile to invest in a new car. In some streets you will pass a row of cars in which all or nearly all are over 14 years old. There are some exceptions (personalised numberplates, or people who have chosen to keep a favourite number from car to car, so the car is not as old as its registration makes it appear) but even so, it's obvious that many people do not change their car at anything like the rate which car manufacturers might hope for. How do they keep going at all, if Cardiff is typical?

The game is really just a harmless pastime, but it does have the side-effect of making you quite observant. Woe to anyone who commits a crime if their car happens to have a number close to one someone playing the game is looking for (although you might feel a bit silly confessing - "Yes, I'm sure the number was 121, I remember because I've been looking for 120 for days and it was annoying seeing the next one"). As far as I can remember, the rate of spotting numbers is not dissimilar to what it was back in the 1970s. More cars on the roads compensate for the new ones which don't count.

I haven't given up yet - a month-long wait for one number nearly made me forget the whole thing, but yesterday I saw the next two numbers within seconds of each other, so I might carry on for a bit longer, and marvel at what I've discovered about the car market in the meantime.