At first, I was grumpy and felt a bit run down, but I adjusted quickly and it’s made a big impact: I’ve lost fat and my energy levels are a lot better. One advantage of this diet is that it restricts you from snacking: there are just too many opportunities to eat badly at work: cakes abound, and I love crisps. Cutting out those unhealthy foods is undoubtedly part of the secret to the success of this nutrition plan.

We experimented with making healthier crisps of our own, using a popular recipe for vegetable chips made from cabbage. They’re absolutely delicious and they fill that crisp-shaped hole in my life.

Ingredients

• Big handfuls of savoy cabbage (kale is also good) – washed, pat dried and chopped into equal sized chips.
• Sea Salt and fresh cracked pepper
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 1 tablespoon of lime juice

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 150c
2. Melt the butter in a bowl
3. Toss the cabbage with the melted butter
4. Season with the salt, pepper and lime juice
5. Mix well
6. Place the coated cabbage onto a baking tray and spread out so that nothing is overlapping
7. Bake for 35 minutes

I’d heard about the AeroPress before: there’s quite the buzz about it on various forums on the web, with many people saying it’s the best coffee they’ve had. The testimonials on the box were also pretty hyperbolic.

Left to Right: Drip filter, Moka pot, Aeropress

So one sunny Sunday morning, we decided to compare the coffee brewed with the AeroPress against 0ur other brewing methods: the Moka pot and drip filter. The coffee we used was our usual favourite from Monmouth Coffee: a rich, full-bodied caramel roast from Brazil, which lends itself well to brewing with a filter.

The AeroPress box contains everything you need to get brewing (apart from the coffee itself, of course). The box itself is pretty amusing, with plaudits from coffee experts I’ve never heard of as well as customers in Wisconsin, New Jersey and Milton Keynes!

Contents of the AeroPress box, clockwise from top left: Filter paper holder, Filter papers, the plunger itself, funnel, measuring spoon, stirrer, instruction manual, filter grille

Using the Aeropress is pretty straightforward, if a little fiddly. Grind your coffee so that it’s very fine. Load a “microfilter” into the Aeropress (supplied in the box – refills available). Fill with coffee and hot water and stir:

Filter loaded into the Aeropress, coffee ready to go in.

Make sure you’ve put the Aeropress on a sturdy mug first – it will slowly drip coffee into the mug, and you’ll need a sturdy mug for the next bit, the press itself:

Plunging the coffee

The Minnie Mouse mug is the sturdiest mug I have. I bought a pair of Mickey and Minnie mouse mugs whilst on a work trip to Disneyworld. They’re pretty much bomb-proof. It’s just as well, because you need to apply quite a bit of force to get the plunger down on the coffee, keeping a constant pressure over about 30 seconds.

The result is a pretty good cup of coffee. No grounds got through the filter or around the sides of the filter, as I initially feared they might. There was a good bite to the coffee as well, but it felt as though some of the body of the coffee was gone. One huge plus for me was that the coffee came out pretty strong and quite cool as well.

Strength
I’m talking caffeine payload here. The winner  is the Moka pot: the water boiling up through the Moka comes through slowly and at pressure. The filter comes second, with a very strong, jitter inducing dose. A close third is the AeroPress: it

Taste
A very subjective thing this, but on balance the filter does it for me as a black coffee drinker. The roast we drink lends itself well to drinking black. For white coffee drinkers, you may like to know that our resident white coffee drinker ranked the Moka and the Aeropress jointly second. The Aeropress gives a very smooth brew. It’s also worth noting that the Moka doesn’t trap the oils from the coffee, so you get all that oily goodness with the Moka.

Simplicity of use
The filter wins here. Very simple to use and to clean. The Aeropress is a little more fiddly to use and clean, but, like the ceramic filter, it’s also usable in a scenario where there’s no stove available. The Moka is the loser here: there’s quite a bit of work to do in comparison to the other two methods, and it’s a bit more work to clean.

Speed
The clear winner is the Aeropress. You can pretty quickly get a cup of coffee squeezed out and ready to chug in under a minute, as opposed to the five to eight minutes for the Moka, and three minutes for the filter.

I’m going to keep experimenting with the Aeropress. I’ll be messing around with grounds quantity, brew time and plunge speed to see what works best. The Aeropress definitely complements my other coffee preparation methods, delivering a nice shot of strong coffee very quickly. For mornings where I want to have a sociable couple of cups of coffee with R,we’ll be sticking to the Moka for now.

Inigo Richards – Entrance to Harrow (1770)

Another feature on the Hill has been the scaffold on the High Street, which stood in front of the King’s Head hotel for about 230 years until the hotel was redeveloped into flats. This part of the world was significant in the days of coach and horse transportation: Harrow used to be a stopping point for travellers north out of London. The scaffold was a well-known landmark, and is now one of only 10 gantry signs left in the UK. The local conservation trust resolved to restore it.  Take a look at their website for more information about the project.

A great mixture of people on the Hill – some turned out in Tudor dress

On May 5th, the community on the Hill celebrated the May bank holiday with a street party and big unveiling of a new gantry, along with a good excuse for food and festivities. I headed up to the party with some neighbours and snapped some photos. Too late for the morris dancing, we got to see a speech from the project manager who had installed the new gantry, and also the mayor before a star guest turned up for the unveiling ceremony:

Henry VIII unveils his portrait along with the Mayor

This version of Henry VIII seemed to be a Scouser, but this didn’t take away from our suspension of disbelief.

People made a real effort to dress for the occasion, many in Tudor costumes. Local shops did a roaring trade and my local boozer was packed.

Children all dressed up to meet Henry VIII

I started off training at the rather excellent Riverside Gym in Hampton Court. The owner, Myles, has achieved great things with people at his gym, and he put me on a good programme. But pretty soon, I was off to University and lost momentum and focus. Although I’ve trained on and off ever since, it was usually self-directed and lacking focus.

I’m now seeing a personal trainer, who is a rugby player turned powerlifter, and is studying sports rehab at University. The latter part is fortunate because I’ve picked up a lot of injuries over the years, especially as a result of the overly macho training methods we used at Karate.

At the start of the programme, the emphasis was on building up core strength and mobility: it’s surprising how seized up we get from sitting at our desks all day. A few months ago, we moved on to big lifts: squats and deadlifts.

The video above is actually a partial deadlift (with 160kg). The reason my trainer had me doing these is that he noticed I was struggling at the top part of the deadlift movement and wanted to strengthen that part of the lift. I’m glad we worked on all the core stuff first, and learned to do the lifts with proper technique. There’s a lot of work to do in locking the muscles on the back so that the spine isn’t arched. Failing to do this properly will likely result in serious injury. You might be able to notice that I’m resetting the back with every repetition. I haven’t had a single injury from any of the lifts I’ve done on this programme.

I thought bees were supposed to be busy!

The guy I sat next to was clearly exhausted: nodding off on the job. He was also scratching himself a lot, so I wasn’t sure if he was itchy in the suit or had some kind of skin disease.

My friends and I got a few photos with him and his colleagues before they started to get antsy (sorry).

He and his fellow activists were from Friends of the Earth, and were promoting the Bee Cause.

Rebecca’s church choir recently hosted a visiting choir from the Netherlands, so the challenge was on to feed about 100 people. I typed up my recipe from memory and had the recipe handed out to some volunteers. In all, we cooked up about 20 kilos of ingredients to make the biggest batch of chilli I’ve seen.

The visitors, presumably used to being fed cucumber sandwiches, proclaimed it was the nicest meal they’d been served on tour. I hope you enjoy it too!

The remains of 10kg of chilli (plus a veggie version bottom-right)

Ingredients

• 1kg lean beef mince
• 2 onions, chopped
• 4 hot chillies, chopped (Ideally two peach habaneros and two finger chillies)
• 2 400g cans chopped tomatoes
• 2 400g cans kidney beans, drained
• 25g fresh ginger root, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• Worcester sauce
• 1 tube tomato puree
• 2 OXO vegetable stock cubes, crushed
• 2 tablespoons mixed herbs
• Fresh cracked black pepper
• 1 level teaspoon salt
• 1 heaped tablespoon sugar
• 1 glug of red wine
• Grated cheese
• Sour cream

Method

1. In a large pot, fry the onions, garlic and ginger and chillies until softened. Try not to breathe, and make sure you wash your hands thoroughly after handling the chillies!
2. Add the beef mince and fry until browned, making sure to break up the mince as much as possible.
3. Add the chopped tomatoes, kidney beans, tomato puree, Worcester sauce, stock cubes, pepper, sugar, salt and herbs.
4. Simmer with the lid on for about an hour, stirring occasionally to prevent the chilli sticking.
5. Chuck the wine in, and simmer a little longer.
6. Serve with rice, grated cheese and sour cream

I’m now working in central London, just around the corner from the campus, so I pounced on the opportunity to attend a public lecture and listen to some great speakers give their opinions on Obama’s win only a few days after the election.

(L-R) Justin Webb, Michael Cox, Anne Applebaum, Craig Calhoun, Gideon Rachman

The session was introduced by Justin Webb, formerly chief Washington correspondent with the BBC, and now co-presenter on the Today Programme. Justin introduced himself by saying, “I work for the BBC. We ask tough questions of our bosses…”, he said, which drew a laugh. “We used to ask others but not any more.”, which drew less of a laugh: perhaps a lot of people share the opinion that the whole Saville/ McAlpine affair has de-fanged the BBC a little.

The actual lecture part kicked off with each of the panel giving their opinions, variously on the causes of Obama’s win, the domestic effects and the foreign policy implications.

I made a cardinal error of not taking my notebook along with me, so ended up tapping my notes into my smartphone. At some stage, I decided to give up and just enjoy the ride, although this was mainly during the Q&A stage.

In any case, I caught a few of the salient points:

Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum described herself as a “lapsed Republican” – presumably because she is clearly well-read and smart. She noted that not only did the Republicans talk about much else other than the economy (more on Super-PACs later), whilst the Democrats were able to wheel out the big, scary social issues and paint the Republicans as wanting to turn the clock back to the 1950s.

Applebaum also noted that Romney was the wrong man for the race, admitting also that the Republican Party didn’t have any decent challengers to choose from. One glaring reason he was the wrong man for the race was because in a time of bank bailouts, here was another plutocrat on the ticket. For this man, the middle class was the working rich, whilst most of the electorate identified as middle class, but were probably working class. A lot of the panel joked that no Americans consider themselves working class, just lower-, middle-, and upper middle class.

Justin Webb picked up on this sense of being out of touch and related that Romney still owes him money. In a queue for a sandwich at a convention, Romney had to ask Justin Webb to buy him a sandwich because he only had $100 notes in his wallet.

LSE Director Craig Calhoun dismissed the idea that hurricane Sandy had a decisive effect on the election outcome. Evidence for this is that polls had consistently predicted an Obama win for about a year. Moreover, as the campaign wore on, a lot of people were getting themselves in position for the 2016 election. Chris Christie being an example.

Calhoun observed that the Republican Party could have taken a lot of the decisive Latino vote with its social conservativism, but alienated these votes with its far right anti immigration nonsense. He remarked that the party needs to widen its appeal beyond old white men, and isn’t sure that it can do this without fracturing.

Michael Cox, founding director of LSE IDEAS, thought that Obama’s win was delivered through excellent local organisation, learned from the Republican party (but not deployed by them so well in this election). He observed that there was little difference between the candidates on foreign policy. It was as if foreign policy was making a “guest appearance” as not all that important, but, “Let’s talk about Israel and see who can bash China the best?”

Obama, he continued, has had a relatively easy four years. The next four will be particularly hard, with a “perfect storm” in the world economy looming as the tactic of Quantitative Easing starts to run out of steam. The relationship with China is getting tougher, and the Iran question has been postponed. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said, “but it’s the headlights of a train coming towards us”

The fourth member of the panel was Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times. In the election, he surmised that the killing of Osama bin Laden had made the President fireproof. As he said this, I remember thinking that this didn’t stop the Republicans trying to make capital from the attack on the US mission in Benghazi. He also noted that the US is no more popular in the Middle East now than it was under Bush, despite the hopes of Obama being a great reconciler of the West and the Islamic world.

It was clear that the pivot towards Asia is key: Rachman foresees tensions rising between the US and China, especially given China’s rough and ready diplomacy with its neighbours as well as the fact that it has surpassed the USA as the biggest trading partner of many of America’s allies in the region. It was telling that neither Europe nor the Special Relationship were mentioned in the debates.

At this point, I realised that I was better off concentrating on the speakers and just enjoying the ride, so my notes petered out, but this segment mostly opened out to pre-vetted questions from the audience. Some of the insights included:

• The panel agreed that the Republican party would be shooting itself in the foot if it continued to obstruct Obama in the house. John Boehner probably knows this, but will struggle to bring the party with him.
• The Tea Party is not dead!
• The 2012 election result signifies a decline in power of the religious right.
• The future looks to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. One panelist hoped the Republican party would go back to this approach, joking that Clinton was the best Republican president of recent times.
• The Super PACs may well have had the effect of muddying the waters. Since they can’t officially synchronise with the candidate’s election messaging strategy, they might have been counter-productive in some cases. In other cases, the flood of messages over the airwaves may well have turned people off listening to messages blaring at them through their TV sets.
• On the subject of who from the Republican party will run in 2016, the panel offered Marco Rubio, Condoleezza Rice, Susana Martinez and, surprisingly, Paul Ryan. Whilst Applebaum thought Ryan was well liked and might rehabilitate the Republican Party away from its crazy positions, Cox dismissed him by saying, “Paul Ryan should spend less time in the gym and more time in the library”.

All in all, a great session. If my rather weak summary of the event has you interested, you can listen to the full thing here: America and the World – After the Election.

Anybody who knows anything about how a church functions will be aware that it basically can’t without volunteers, and a great many of these are women. Since they’re expected to give at least equally, shouldn’t they be able to participate equally too?

Why should any church be exempted from the decent rules and mores of the society its in? And why should we listen to it for moral guidance?

It’s clear the argument that the Church provides a moral compass to society is bunk: society provides the compass for the Church. Evidence of this is that the Church has changed doctrine over the years from supporting, and participating in, slavery, to not supporting or participating slavery. From opposing women’s suffrage, to accepting it (but not allowing full participation in its own halls). From opposing contraception, to accepting it.

I accept that some parts of the church were part of the abolitionist movement, but this is an organisation based on the divinely-inspired word of God: if you accept that as truth, then that compass needle should be pointing due North at all times, lest it be accused of the very moral relativism it decries in others. If it doesn’t, as Stephen Fry says here about the Catholic Church, what’s the point?

I know this is a pretty intractable problem for the Church of England, and I hope to see it survive the turmoil. Despite my reservations about the undue structural influence it has in politics (its representation in the House of Lords), nowadays it’s a pretty moderate actor in our society, usually moving with the times, and having little relevance when it digs its heels in (see these statistics).  The alternative could be a lot worse: a schism or a decision to go with the hard-liners resulting in the horrendous distortions we see in American politics.

Ahead of me was a 24 hour flight from Rarotonga to London, via Los Angeles. Thankfully, my flight was late in the evening, so I had a full day to relax at the guest house, and also had the advantage that y body clock would let me get some sleep on the flight to LA.

Papa Jake Numanga

The busker who greeted us as we arrived in Rarotonga was there to sing us a farewell song. In the intervening week, I’d learned a bit about him. His name is Papa Jake Numanga, and he was originally a worker at the airport, who would dart back into the terminal to welcome the arriving tourists. Jake Numanga has been at it for thirty years, and has, barring sickness, greeted or said farewell to every international flight into and out of Rarotonga.

Jake Numanga was honoured at a tourism awards dinner in 2011 with an award for “Most Outstanding Contribution to Tourism”. He was called to the front to receive his award but it transpired he wasn’t there, having ducked out during the dinner to meet another flight. Such is the man’s dedication to what he does!

So it was with a song to lift my spirits that I left the Cook Islands, stopping off after an eleven hour flight in LA for a few hours. LAX is a horrendous airport, so the prospect of sitting there for five hours filled me with more dread than sitting in a tube for eleven. It was made pleasant by a good conversation with some newlyweds who were on their way to Italy on honeymoon.

Flight over the Arctic Circle

The next flight was another eleven hour slog to London, via the Arctic Circle. At this stage, I was actually really excited to be going back to see friends and family. I was also looking forward to seeing England again in the height of summer: after my trip, being in England seemed to be quite exotic.

The Thames, Tower Bridge and the Shard – London

There were certainly more clouds in the sky than I could remember seeing in the past few months. Whatever else, I knew I’d be getting used to clouds again.

And that’s it! Fifty-Eight days to go around the world in twenty-four flights through eight countries. The result is a metric tonne of happy memories and new friends. This trip was as much about fulfilling a long-held wish as it was about getting the travel bug “out of my system”. I fear I may have achieved the opposite – I now have dreams about travelling through South America from tip to tip, and then onto Antarctica. What’s life without dreams, eh?

The inevitable question I’ve been asked on my return is, “What’s your favourite country?”. I don’t have a straight answer to that, but I can definitely see myself going back to Japan to “finish” seeing it: I really only scratched the surface of that fascinating country. I would dearly love to revisit the Cook Islands for the pure pleasure of being in the Cook Islands.

One thing I learned to treasure during my travels was curiosity, a quality so easily lost in the slurry of work and commuting. I can now see what Chesterton was getting at:

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

For now, beneath London’s clouds, it’s time for a new set of adventures.

All was to change over dinner one evening. My host served up some beer from an old plastic bottle. The beer was from the local brewery down the road, the Matutu Brewery Company, and my host explained that he had taken a bottle to the brewery and had it freshly filled up from the barrel.

Matutu Kiva (a Pale Ale) with dinner.

It was a delicious pale ale, and I was surprised it had taken me so long to find a sample of the local brew. I vowed to visit the brewery the next day.

Matutu Brewery Company Manager James Puati

I found the brewery a few miles clockwise from my place, down a side road. I made myself known to the manager, James Puati, who showed me around the place, and offered me a sample fresh from the barrel, where a worker was frantically (as frantic as I’ve ever seen on “Island Time“) bottling to meet an order that was being loaded in the front of the brewery.

Pouring out my sample half pint of Kiva

As I sipped the Kiva, which was delicious, I asked James why I hadn’t seen his product in any of the bars on Rarotonga or Aitutaki. Bluntly, I hadn’t been going to the right bars, but also Matutu is fighting a hard battle against imported beers. The shocking truth is that despite brewing locally, beers produced in New Zealand can still compete on price with Matutu, even after being shipped to the middle of the South Pacific!

Packing up an order

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the brewery doesn’t have the economies of scale that the industrial brewers have. Matutu only produces around 3500 litres a month. The second issue is the scarcity of raw materials. Water has to be sourced and purified on the island, whilst the hops and barley have to be freighted in from New Zealand. Another issue is power: the brewery relies on electricity, which is very expensive on Rarotonga. The island is powered by a 20 megawatt power station run on diesel, which also has to be imported. This alone puts the brewery at a slight price disadvantage.

Matutu’s beer is delivered fresh every day: James likened it to having the milk delivered. Whilst this is an advantage for the local beer, it can be a disadvantage in the warm climate of the Cook Islands. Bars and restaurants, used to be supplied infrequently, often favour imported beers that keep for longer without refrigeration. Matutu recommends that their beer is kept in the fridge, just like the milk. In a place where power is at a premium, this can be a disadvantage.

Delivering the milk, uh, beer

The beer was delicious, so I had a huge bottle filled up for ten bucks, before hopping onto the scooter to hurry back to my fridge at home.