Frustrated Ramblings

Irritated! I had a post about Jesus' ascension ready to go (last Thursday being Ascension Day). Then, when it came to actually typing it ... all gone. Mind a total blank. Especially annoying because it's now a fortnight since my last post, and I had been doing quite well at getting them done weekly. When it's a habit it's so much easier.

Time for a ramble then - bits and pieces without necessarily any overall shape and destination. I've always felt the best way to get to know a new place is to go out and get lost there for a while. It's a lot of walking the first few times, but you soon build up a mental map which helps in the future. Rambling: purposeless wandering ... with a purpose ;-)

A few follow-ups to earlier posts would do the trick, I reckon.

My last post I said I was expecting to take a hit from overdoing things ... I did. It was still worth it.

There was an interesting opinion piece on the BBC website today about disabilities and quality of life: in most cases it is no worse, sometimes it can even be better. A challenge can lead to a re-evaluation of what is really important, and a focus on that. One point the article makes is the importance of context, particularly in terms of social environment and relationships: simplistically, people matter more than circumstances. The article is well worth reading.

Before that I wrote about Kristin Cashore's young adult fantasy, Fire, which I found engrossing and moving. I am now about halfway through the next book in the series, Bitterblue, which is equally stunning. Themes include confusion and disorientation, so getting into the book at the beginning is not as easy as in the earlier books. The initial situation in which the heroine finds herself  is confusing and disorienting, deliberately leaving the reader without much clue as to what is going on. It's very well written.

Whilst I felt that Fire has a subtext of what it is like to be a young woman growing up; Bitterblue seems to allude to being a young abuse survivor growing up - hence the disorientation and the focus on the slippery nature of truth and lies. I'm only half way through, so I don't know if she can keep this quality of writing up all the way through, but so far it is an amazing book.

Actually, I am finding Bitterblue a touch more confusing than it really should be, as I am having trouble getting my head around the cast of characters. It adds an extra challenge to reading books when you can't remember half of what went on before.

Which was a part of the source for my Easter post, Alzheimer's At Easter. But the main trigger for that was the question of what it is which defines a person's identity. Is it their memories and their patterns of life? If so then I guess it is true that dementia in general, and Alzheimer's in particular, strips the person away to leave a shell behind. But if there is more to identity than the surface stuff, if a person's essence is deeper and subtler than just memories and habits, then the loved one remains and is to be respected as a fellow human being.

As the BBC opinion piece I mentioned earlier points out, assumptions about quality of life in difficult situations can be wrong. The evidence seems to be that having company, someone to talk to them and sing to or with them, can be really helpful for people with dementia.

As a final follow-up, looking back two years, I have been thinking about a post I wrote about my plans to lose weight. As ever, life got in the way of those plans. For most the past two years I have been half a stone down on my starting point (against a target of a stone). The past couple of months I have stabilised at three or four pounds higher than that, as CFS has clamped down.

What has struck me though is a possible answer to the age-old question of why it is that some of us could eat what we liked as teenagers and still remain thin, yet in middle age the pounds pile on. I suspect that I was probably putting on weight back then too, that probably hasn't changed. What has changed is how long I have been doing it for.

If I have been putting on roughly a pound a year throughout, then as a skinny teenager I was not going to notice any effect over three or four years. But over thirty or forty years is a very different matter: forty years at around a pound a year is near enough three stone - enough to take me well into 'overweight' territory.

To round off, I am now a big fan of West Berkshire Brewery. My daughter got me a mixed case of their beers for my birthday: absolutely delicious!

The Gardeners' Arms Ongoing Saga

I'm surprised to see that I've never posted about the Gardeners' Arms on this blog. It's the nearest pub to where I live, by some distance, but in the three and a half years I've lived here it has gone through a long saga of closures and changes of management.

Three years ago, not long after I moved here, I arranged to meet a friend there one Friday night, walked over and all the lights were out and the door locked. The manager had just up and left. The next manager did really good food and beer for a short while, but wasn't getting enough customers to keep them going, so both declined badly. The following year they closed again. The daft thing is that there are loads of houses around the pub - it is off the main road, but right in the middle of a residential area. But somehow people didn't want to go out to their local pub.

Summer 2010 heralded another reopening under another new management - an experienced management team this time. They kept the pub ticking over nicely for a year, with a limited range of very well-kept real ale and excellent pizzas, along with a decent choice of other pub fare. But there were still not that many people coming, so when Greene King demanded a greater share of the profits, the management team decided that was an offer they could all too easily refuse and left.

So the Gardeners' Arms closed again and reopened again, then it closed for refurbishment. No signs outside, or on the website, to tell people what was happening, how long it was for, or anything. There wasn't even a useful indicator saying something like "nearest pub 5 minutes walk that way", which they could have done since that is also a Greene King pub.

Then they reopened. The main effect of the refurbishment seemed to be TV screens on every available wall, showing either Sky Sports or some sort of naff in-house music channel. The beer was very cheap and tasted awful, the food likewise, and the management weren't particularly friendly. I went back a couple of times (although not for food), as anyone can have initial teething problems, but it remained as bad. Although numbers there were probably as high as under the previous management's far better quality, but more expensive, regime. Which is a little sad, in its way.

That brings us to the latest change of management. At the time of the Six Nations rugby this year, I was walking past the Gardeners' and I saw they were doing a special price on Guinness during the matches. Expecting England to be tonked I thought I'd pop over and get depressed in company, only to find that the pub had just reopened under new management again.

The Guinness was a decent pint (for English Guinness), the new management were very friendly, there was live music on later that evening ... even England played a lot better than expected. The band doing the live music at the pub's special 'opening evening' were very good - if only I could persuade Facebook to list my 'likes' I would tell you their name - but pretty much drowned out by the large crowd of people drinking and enjoying themselves.

A couple of months, and several visits, down the line, the pub remains busy. The beer is fairly cheap - around £2.50 a pint for St Edmunds and Speckled Hen - but well looked after, and seems to be turning over fast enough to allow them to stock four different real ales. The food is also fairly cheap: standard chain pub fare, but decent quality and well-prepared. We particularly enjoyed their Thursday evening curries.

So, it looks like they may have found the secret of surviving in this part of Emmer Green. Keeping prices down whilst maintaining a decent quality, for the price, does seem to be paying off for them. Friendly and hard-working management helps a lot, of course. Long may they prosper.