Month: November 2023

Florentines – they sound very romantic: hot summer nights in italy, dancing under the moonlight not a care in the world. In reality, they are a round biscuit (or cookie) made of caramel with almonds and cherries or candied orange peel with a layer of chocolate on the bottom. So in many ways, much better than a trip to italy.

They are the taste of my childhood, an absolute treat and I love them. They used to be sold in bakeries everywhere, and they were massive, the size of my palm or bigger and they were quite cheap to buy. My mum would often get one for me for being good, which did happen sometimes, so I definitely must have had a least 3 ever.

Sadly, I never see them anymore. Where have they gone? Have I been bad for 35 years, meaning that I’m not allowed them any more? Even worse, sometimes people buy me these weird chocolate things with a green nut and a bit of candied slime in the middle. These look vaguely like the same thing but they are not, I believe they exist just to spite me.

And so today, there was kind of a miracle. A new Marks and Spencer has opened in town, very shiny, very clean, very expensive. And there in the corner at the back was a shelf of perfection – boxes of 8 milk chocolate Florentines. Heaven. Of course, they are not the same as before, these days they are small – about half the diameter they used to be, and, because they are thought of as a delicacy, so they are eight times the price. However, I decided this was an important life moment that I needed to record by making a purchase.

As soon as I left the store, I took one out and savoured the flavour of my childhood. But not for long. I gave one to Mrs Rad and tried to save the rest. That didn’t work, they seemed to magically dissappear. I really tried to save the last one so I could take a photo to go with this story. Instead, all I have is a picture of an empty box of florentines.

Lockdown was a bad time for a lot of people, but overall it was not quite so bad for me. The major problem I had was that I put on a lot of weight and lost a lot of fitness. I’ve been trying to get that fitness back and lose the excess pounds, but it hasn’t been easy. I tried a lot of things but mostly exercise is exhausting and chocolate is delicious.

So the latest idea was to try a different approach. I read that ‘low heart rate training’ was a good way to gain fitness and lose weight without putting any effort in. This sounded like the programme for me, because there is no history of anyone lying about the benefits of these types of programme.

It’s pretty simple, you do a little calculation that works out a maximum ‘low’ heart rate – in my case 134 beats per minute and then you are off to the races, the very slow races. I also added in a daily 1 minute plank, because daily planks are also some kind of exercise meme.

So I decided to do 30 days of 5k at a low heart rate, because clickbait. And my word it is slow at first. 45 minutes to do 5k (3 miles), thats about the same speed as a fast walk. And I hated it. I took my gopro with me to bask in my successes but I looked back at the recordings and it is mostly me moaning, about the weather, about being tired. Basically everything I could complain about, I did, and because it’s 2023 I also recorded it so that I would become famous on youtube.

But, after a couple of weeks I did see some improvement. The 40-45 minute times started slowly to become 37-39. But I didn’t feel any better. I’d also been doing a weekly ‘fast run’at parkrun but they also weren’t getting any faster. Very quickly I devided that I wasn’t going to see much benefit after 30 days and so 30 days of 5k became 100 days of 5k.

At the end of september, we went to a family get together that included a disco. The youngest radling, 9 years old, decided he was too scared to dance. So I picked him up and danced with him, holding him under my arms. Wierdly it seemed this was possible and I could do it for a few minutes without struggling. This was the first time I thought that maybe I was gaining some fitness.

I’ve really only improved from there, I’m now on day 80-something, and most of the running is easy, with my time being all under 35 minutes for the last 15 days.

So, hot on the heals of the amazing sucess of my 30 days of 5k I’m now doing ’30 days of essay’ of which this is the four

Oh and, did I lose any weight – nope, I still love chocolate

We went out for breakfast this morning, obviously we went to greggs,because its the cheapest. As it’s december we had the Christmas menu – Santa’s proundest achievement. It’s fun, festive and fairly boring.

As we were sat there eating , basking in the averageness of our pies and bakes, we noticed we were opposite the old department store, and thought we’d take a look around to see if we could find some christmas gifts for the family.

This place used to be something really special, a posh department store where you went searching for that perfect gift that you couldn’t quite afford. But now it looks more like a jumble sale or as we call them in 2023 an ‘outlet store’.

At least the escalators still work, just, but they are still operating as they did in their heyday, when you would politely browse around the store enjoying the ambiance as they took you on a tour through an Aladdins Cave of delights.

Nowadays it feels more like a game of real-life Snakes and Ladders, when you are expecting a down escalator it goes up, and when you are expecting an up escalator it goes down. We went up 4 flights to realise we had got to the wrong part of the store and then down 2.

Finally got to where we wanted to be. There were stacks of overstocked items piled high everywhere, some of them new, most returned but all with broken boxes, 1% cardboard, 99% Sellotape.

And it’s cold – freezing cold – clearly those low prices means going without paying the electricity bill. So we stand their shivering

But there we all were, hundreds of us looking around for a bargain, imagining that we would be the one to find a great deal, the needle in this haystack, the pot of gold in this rainbow of consumer waste.

But it was the store assistant I noticed the most, a sad, forlorn figure stood there shivering in his thick winter coat like an Eskimo. How did he feel? What was he thinking? Probably just counting down the time until his shift finished and he could rush out for his Greggs Festive Bake.

So we finally decided to buy an Air Fryer. Electricity is expensive and we are cheap. Plus why buy a sensible, traditional appliance, when you can have a gadget?
But how did this relate to me cycling 14 miles in the bitter cold?
After months of deliberations with Mrs Rad, we decided to place an order for an Air Fryer on Black Friday, to take advantage of the reduced price, which is probably the same as it was a week ago, but we didn’t check that.
The order went in yesterday, you can expect that as usual Amazon would deliver it today. Sure enough at about 10am, they said they’d deliver it between 10 and 12. They even sent me a handy little map showing where ‘my amazon driver’ was at the moment and how many deliveries were in from of me. And he got closer and closer and closer.But then, he started getting further and further away? No longer did the message say ‘your the next customer’, but that he still had a few more packages to deliver before me.
Then the delivery time changed – to between 2 and 5. And we were supposed to be going out with the kids to a christmas market and to see the christmas tree lights switched on, but we also had to stay in to collect the package.
Well we were desperate for our long awaited air fryer. So we hatched a plan where Mrs Rad would go to the christmas lights with the Radlings on the train and I would wait until the last minute for the air fryer, and then rush down to Bournville on the bike and meet them.
And of course the package didn’t come. And of course it was absolutely freezing outside and dark, and I had to pedal super fast to get there. And although it was fun to watch the lights get switched on, it was just a single tree, so took about 5 minutes and we had to come almost immediately back. Another 7 miles of bike riding in the bitter cold.
But we were in luck, we got back and it still hadn’t been delivered, so there was just a chance. Except as I walked in the door, a text message arrived ‘there was a problem with your delivery, we’ll try again tomorrow.
And now we get to wait in all day tomorrow instead.