The Return of the Blogger

After a couple of days absence I decided I should make an appearance on these hallowed pages lest you should think I'd abandoned you all. The truth is unfortunately rather mundane, it is merely the pressure of work. During this week I have been starting at 5.30 am necessitating early nights and so I have been unable to find the time to write something here. Work had been rather quiet for the last couple of days until today when I had to work downstairs and mix the biscuit dough, a really annoying job that I've been finding myself doing more and more over the last year. Today I was making Fruit Shortcake which are usually easy to make, you just throw everything in and the biscuits come out perfectly, but not today. I was getting complaints from the ovens that the dough was too soft, well what do they expect me to do about it? Some interfering manager had changed the recipe, considerably increasing the fat content; I reduced the fata little, but it didn't make much difference; maybe I should have gone back to the previous recipe to saw what happened. I know that if I asked my manager he'd tell me to take some water out, but there's hardly any water in it to begin with, it's all fat! Maybe the manager who'd fiddled with the recipe had come across the same problem and his solution had been to reduce the water and increase the fat to compensate. Unlikely, but if so, it didn't work, mate! I hate all this uncertainty about things. I had a scientific education, I like everything to be precise and fixed. Making biscuits is not a science, it's an art form. A recipe that makes perfect biscuits one week make crap biscuits the next for no apparent reason. I find that really annoying.

The top news story at the moment in Britain is the Court Martial of three soldiers in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers for alleged abuse against Iraqi prisoners. The images that we've been seeing of the alleged abuses are sickening and what makes them even worse is that they were apparently done by British soldiers. What is the world coming to when we see what looks like soldiers abusing prisoners in this way. The soldiers claim that they were following orders, which is possible but it still looks like British Soldiers were not treating the Iraqi prisoners in a humane way. It's one thing to see American soldiers behaving like this; you almost expect that kind of thing from the Americans these days, but not from British soldiers who around the world are held with a much greater respect. This can only have a damaging effect on the reputation of the British Army, and on Britain in general. It is very distressing. Till next time...