It’s been a while since any new rat stories cropped up, but the original article I wrote about giant rats remains popular. So this latest item on the BBC website made me smile.
It talks of a race of super-rats which once lived in the Caribbean…
…some of which grew to the size of cats.
I think they must have forgotten about the ones in Bradford, which were – according to the natives – the size of a Fiat 500. The Caribbean ones were mere mice by comparison.
You have to hear this to believe it. Some dolt in Essex actually called 999 to summon an ambulance to a “hit and run” involving a squirrel.
This guy making the call from Epping Forest is the new front-runner for the 2015 Darwin Awards.
Sitting in the car all day can be bad for your health. Apart from the more obvious risks like lack of exercise, the matter of dehydration is easily overlooked.
Although I never had anything like it as a child, these days I get early season hay fever symptoms (it’s the tree blossom). Nothing too serious, but itchy eyes and a tickly throat – the latter of which always seems to be worse when the air is dry, and which I can also trigger if I have the aircon on for too long. To try and do something about it I recently started drinking water during the day. Now anyone who does a job like this will know that you normally try to avoid drinking too much of anything so that you don’t end up having to take a leak every five minutes, and that was me to a “T”. I would often start work at 10am and finish at 8pm, sneaking in a couple of McDonalds’ white coffees along the way, and apart from the inevitable need to offload these at some point, I’d wait until I got home before drinking a load of tea.
It seems fairly obvious looking back, but when you’re only drinking things that make you wee even more, and especially in the warmer weather, dehydration is likely to be an issue. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear that my tickly throat cleared up completely almost immediately I began drinking water. It should come as even less of a surprise to hear me point out that after the first half litre water is boring.
A quick Google revealed myriad rehydration drinks. What I was after was a make-your-own flavouring I could buy in bulk, and since I was expelling minerals as well as fluids every time I took a whiz, replacing them using isotonic drinks made sense. What didn’t make sense were the prices – the typical cost of 500g of isotonic powder (ten servings) is around £10 – and although I found one particular brand at about a quarter of the price (and with 20% extra for free), it turned out this was a special offer. With every Spandex Boy in the country on to the case, they’d sold out when I tried to get some more.
So, long story short, I decided to make my own. After some research (and trial and error), here’s a recipe for an isotonic rehydration drink (it makes 400g, one 40g serving is dissolved in 500mls of water):
| Maltodextrin | 80g |
| Glucose | 199g |
| Fructose | 100g |
| Citric Acid | 5g |
| Malic Acid | 1.5g |
| Sodium Citrate | 2g |
| Sodium Chloride | 5.36g |
| Potassium Chloride | 1.15g |
| Flavouring | 6g |
Making it is simple: just put all the ingredients in a food processor and make sure it is fully mixed. Then store it in an airtight jar and use as required. I also add a pinch of food colouring powder during mixing, but the amount used is too small to quantify.
Based on the prices I paid for all the ingredients, this mixture costs £4 per kg (25 servings). Compare that to at least £15 per kg (unless you can get it on short-lived special offer) for commercial mixes.
I bought the sugars from Bulk Powders (you need to buy the 5kg pack to get the lowest price).
I obtained Citric Acid, Malic Acid, Sodium Citrate, and Potassium Chloride from various sellers on eBay and Amazon (make sure you get food grade material). I’ve got tons of fine sea salt (sodium chloride) at home, but you can get that from just about anywhere. And the concentrated flavourings (by far the most expensive ingredient in terms of contribution to overall cost) can also be had from various online sellers. Remember that the larger pack size you choose, the lower the cost.
Ordinary kitchen scales (measuring to 1g) are fine for weighing out the sugars, but you may want to get a more accurate balance for the other ingredients. You can get small scales which weigh up to 500g with 0.1g resolution on eBay for about £15 (they look like CD jewel cases), and they’re accurate enough. Don’t even think about the tiny ones which supposedly weigh to 0.01g and cost a few pounds, because they are crap.
I buy 12 x 500ml packs of spring water from Asda for about £2.00 and add my powder to those. At 17p a bottle, each finished drink works out at around 33p. It’s worth noting that if you didn’t flavour the blend, it would only cost about £2.80 per kg, and each completed drink would cost about 28p (this is the base price). With commercial powders, each drink comes in at around £1.20!
You can adjust the recipe if you want longer term energy supply by cutting down the glucose and fructose (keep the ratio at 2:1), and increasing the maltodextrin. It’ll be less sweet, since maltodextrin isn’t sweet, but your body has to break this down into glucose by itself. You could also replace it with sucrose (cane sugar), which is sweet. And you may want to increase or decrease the amount of flavour slightly depending on what strength you buy. Just make sure everything adds up to 400g. Each 40g serving delivers 258mg of sodium and 60mg of Potassium.
It tastes rather good. I had a few fun issues to start with. First of all, it tastes very bland without any acidification, and – as I discovered – the level of Citric Acid doesn’t need to be as high as it is in the fresh fruit (my first try had eight times more acid and it gave me wicked indigestion). The acid has to be buffered using Citrate. And Malic Acid rounds off the flavour dramatically. Once I researched the formulation of soft drinks and built in the ingredients listed on several commercial packs, everything came together perfectly.
On a final note, the acids and the citrate have E numbers associated with them. You will find lots of nonsense on the internet about how that is bad. It isn’t. Citric Acid is made from natural ingredients, and sodium citrate is made from it. Malic Acid occurs naturally, although the manufacture of it commercially is via a synthetic process.
Another one that annoys me. I was just finishing a lesson with a pupil and we were turning left on to Bluecoat Street from Huntingdon Street. We’d already had one white van cut us up within the last few metres.
Anyway, we were waiting second in the queue, and as we moved off at the lights this prick in one of those crappy white vans with windows – reg. no. SG57 UCD – just flung himself across in front of us. He then drove off at significant speed in 20mph zones (doing at least 35mph), and since people like this often have more than one skeleton in their closet, maybe the police might want a word with him. It would be nice to think they’d pull him over on a regular basis just to keep him on his toes, but you can only live in hope!
Well done Sarah, who passed yesterday with 10 driver faults. It was her second test with me, but her eighth attempt overall!
Sarah’s biggest problem has been her nerves – she had been prescribed beta blockers and I made sure she took them for her test. She can drive, but she easily gets distracted by making things too complicated or overthinking them (as we walked into the test centre she asked which way she should drive to go out of the car park – I just said not to drive through a wall, because there was only one way in or out, and we’d just used it). On both her tests, I got texts late the previous evening asking things that weren’t important.
To be honest, I think the reason she hadn’t passed previously is that she’d had instructors who merely pandered to her nerves instead of trying to deal with them. I focused on the fact that she could drive, and built her confidence up from there.
Another milestone is that this was the first time I have had anyone in floods of tears – and I mean hard tears – because they passed. It meant that much to her. And she admitted that the possibility of passing, this time or in any future test, had not occurred to her.
Well done Misha, who passed at the end of last month with just two driver faults. Misha is a professional carer who works those God-awful hours carers often do, and being able to drive is going to make a big difference to him. He plans to start looking for a better job in nursing.
It was hard for him, because his current job is so poorly paid, and it was only because a relative paid for the test that he could afford to even take it. A satisfying result for both of us.
Well done Ayesha, who passed a few weeks ago with just two driver faults. It wasn’t her first test, but it was certainly a very good performance. We finally cracked her intermittent problem with roundabouts (intermittent in that it only ever happened on test).
It was her third test with me, but she’d failed four times before that – always involving a roundabout somewhere. The biggest problem was getting her to acknowledge that whatever her brain told her to do automatically was wrong, and that she needed to think more. I finally got through!
I’ve not done one of these for a while, but today has been particularly bad for morons on the road and I had my registration plate file open in my graphics programme from that last story.
One of my pet hates is when people use the wrong lanes to cut ahead of everyone else and avoid queuing, especially when it’s only a small queue. LD61 JOJ – a Red BMW – did it this morning at the Nottingham Knight roundabout, and then shot off down the A60 at speed. He was initially going to queue properly – for all of 45 seconds – in the correct lane, but then his BMW brain kicked in (it’s a small thing about the size of a peanut, a few centimetres above the anus). So he cut sharply out and used one of the left-turn only lanes, then cut sharply back over on the roundabout.
A dangerous one, this. On the approach to the roundabouts at the junction of Mansfield Road and Gregory Boulevard this dickhead in the black saloon, reg. no. FD09 KTP, overtook my pupil (who wasn’t driving slowly) a few car lengths before the give way line. I saw him approach at speed, cut sharply out, and then speed past. He also sped around the two roundabouts and went back up Mansfield Road – so as well as being a dickhead, he was also a crap navigator.
Another one of my pet hates – people texting when they have already demonstrated that they can’t drive in the first place. This black Peugeot 107, advertising Martin & Co (a local letting agent), overtook a pupil on South Sherwood Street near Trinity Square. I’d already noticed that the driver was distracted when it was behind us, but when it cut sharply back in because it had used the wrong lane to gain advantage, I pointed out to my pupil that the driver was doing something in her lap (we could see her chav hair bun going up and down). She had no idea what was going on around her, and she continued to concentrate on whatever she was doing while stopped at subsequent lights on both Bluecoat Street and Woodborough Road. Come to think of it, she may not have been advertising Martin & Co – she may have been working for them, and was trying to navigate to a location.
On a lesson this afternoon, we were driving up Woodborough Road and – surprise, surprise – there were road works. They were controlled by manual STOP/GO signs.
Anyway, we were approaching them and several cars had already gone through. The signs were set to GO, and had been for some time. But some swarthy looking prat in a black sedan, reg. no. BF53 SSK, decided that he had some sort of special privileges and came through, causing us to brake. The signs were still set to GO as we left the road works area, so the big red STOP on his side would have been clear to all but the most stupid of people.
Judging from his appearance, the car he was driving, and the way he was driving it, the police might want to pull this twat over if they get a chance, because those kind of people tend to have other skeletons they’d rather keep hidden in the closet.
One of the routes I often take my pupils on is along Spring Lane (from Mapperley) down to Lowdham, then back through Burton Joyce or off to the A46 (or the opposite way, depending on where they live). It passes the site of the old Gedling Colliery, which closed in 1991, and which has been used for some time as a dogs’ toilet by local people.
The route is important, since it is one of the few remaining roads where the idiot council hasn’t cut the national speed limit to 20mph, although it has reduced part of the road from NSL to 40mph. It enables learners to be taught how to handle the type of road where statistics tell us they are likely to have most of their accidents without having to travel 20 miles out of the council’s jurisdiction. But I am worried that might soon change.
Council stupidity goes far beyond introducing 20mph speed limits on roads which should be 30mph or more. In this example, it concerns their conversion of the old colliery site into a “country park”.
I don’t know about you, but to me a country walk means dirt tracks, old trees, brambles, and mud if it’s raining. And it means not many other people around. To the council, it means digging all that up and installing Tarmac (or some other artificial surface) footpaths and a nice big car park for people to drop litter in. It also means extra lighting and footpaths outside for “accessibility”. And this is exactly what they have been up to for the last six months, with all the associated road closures and restrictions. 
When I was young, people could lay several miles of new paved footpath in a week. As I say, it has taken them close to six months to lay 25 metres of Tarmac along part of Spring Lane, and temporary lights have been up all that time. Of course, this was carried out slap in in the middle of the tram works (which have overrun by about a year so far), the Ring Road improvements (which have created more traffic jams), and the grossly overrunning “Creative Quarter” road works on Manvers Street (where two lanes of city centre traffic now – and forever – will have to make do with just one, and where pedestrian crossings have been placed on blind bends for use by the kind of people for whom it is borderline that they should be allowed out unsupervised in the first place).
The “country park” also has a 34-acre expanse of solar panels at its heart (this was opposed by virtually everyone, but approved by Gedling Borough Council anyway – and it was built quicker than you could say “no, hold on a minute…”). The park narrowly escaped having a waste recycling plant built on it.
I won’t go on about the detrimental effect all this is likely to have on the diversity of species on the park, because for reasons best known to him, Terry Lock (the chairman of some group known as “Friends of Gedling Country Park”) who once saw a badger reckons it will increase diversity. So who am I to argue over such absolute scientific fact?
No. My point is that when I went past the place with a pupil last week, we rounded a corner to be met by rows of cars parked on either side of the road for about a quarter of a mile, creating a corridor that wasn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass at the same time. I assumed it was some sort of opening ceremony, but given that Spring Lane is a narrow country lane (as this old Google Earth image shows) I thought how irresponsible it was of Gedling Borough Council to have allowed such dangerous parking.
However, when I went past on another lesson over the weekend we encountered the same thing, but with the additional problem of people blocking the road trying to get into the car park which was obviously full, otherwise those hundreds of other cars wouldn’t have been lined up outside. I noticed dozens of people out on an Easter “country walk” with their prams and designer wellies, wandering along the artificial paths that had been installed. The indiscriminate parking creates a long and continuous corridor with several bends, so you cannot see if anyone is coming the other way. It also means people are parking on grass verges outside residents’ homes and screwing up the grass borders.
So well done Gedling Borough Council for creating an absolute disaster-in-waiting. Someone will get killed and it’s all thanks you your bloody stupid ideas of what constitutes a “country park”, and your desire to attract the kind of morons who don’t give a f*** where they park as long as they get what they want.