iblog » Charlotte

Spinach – is it really good for you?

Charlotte — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:01:16 +0000

If like me you have never liked spinach and feel vaguely uneasy about missing out on all the health benefits which it provides, you may be glad to know that it is not such a good guy after all. It and other foods high in oxalic acid, like rhubarb (and sad to say, chocolate) can interfere with the absorption of calcium by forming insoluble salts in the gut. Popeye may have had big muscles thanks to his love of spinach but the truth is he may also have been putting himself at risk of thinning bones!

Catch 22

Charlotte — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:58:51 +0000

How on earth does anyone manage to get into journalism nowadays? A first degree is no longer adequate and so you have to do either a Masters or another postgraduate qualification. Leaving aside the cost which can be up to £6000, the best of the courses insist that you have had at least 4 weeks work experience on regional newspapers before being accepted. All the newspapers that I have approached will only give work experience to those already on these postgrad courses. I have spoken to various journalists on national newspapers through contacts at Uni and they have all said that the way they got their work experience was through family and friends. Too bad then if like mine, your family and friends all chose the wrong career and there’s not a journalist amongst them!

Taxis

Charlotte — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:56:18 +0000

We have heard a lot from the police recently about making sure that we plan our journeys home carefully, whether because of the temptation to drink and drive in the festive period or for the poor women of Ipswich when there was a murderer in their midst. Booking a taxi ahead of time is often easier said than done though. My brother tried to pre-book a taxi to pick him and his girlfriend up from a night out last Friday. They expected to arrive at the station at 1am . He was told that no bookings could be taken for weekends and as that would technically be Saturday morning they could not help. He then asked whether they could be picked up at 11.45pm – still Friday night as opposed to Saturday morning. Unfortunately, they explained, bookings could not be accepted for between 6pm and midnight on weekdays either. In the event, they phoned when they got back to the station and only had to wait about ten minutes but had this been me on my own I would have felt far from safe standing in the dark in the small hours of the morning at a railway station.

The Boring Bits of Backpacking

Charlotte — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:53:56 +0000

When you’re getting ready to go backpacking and done all the exciting things, it’s tempting not to bother about the boring bits. Here are a few reminders:
1) Normal holiday insurance, even annual policies, will not cover you for trips of over 30 days so make sure yours does. Check what sports your policy covers you for. Even the more sedate sports such as horse riding are sometimes excluded and you never know when you might be tempted to do a bungee jump!
2) Check that your passport is still valid and bear in mind that a lot of countries require at least six months validity. Make sure that you have all the right visas including Working Holiday Visas if you plan to work. Scan your passport and e-mail it to yourself just in case it gets lost. This can save you a lot of time and trouble.
3) Do all your cards have PIN numbers that you can remember? If not disguise them as telephone numbers in your address book and if you don’t already have a Nationwide account open one up – they are the only bank that do not charge you for withdrawing cash abroad.

Online inconvenience

Charlotte — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:32:49 +0000

I have noticed when ordering things online that more and more companies will only send goods to the address at which your credit card is registered. This is all very sensible and done for our own protection but it can also be really inconvenient. I had only been back at Uni a couple of weeks last term when my printer died. I have a Dell laptop and so the printer has to be a Dell too. Dell products can only be bought online and there was absolutely no way that they would deliver my new printer to Cambridge. Instead it had to be delivered to my home address 100 miles away. Luckily for me my parents agreed to bring it up when they visited me a couple of weeks later. It’s a good job really that I’m not studying in Aberdeen!

Nectar Rewards

Charlotte — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:28:59 +0000

If you use your Nectar points to get money off your shopping bill you should have a look at the other “rewards” you could use them for. 2000 points would have reduced my shopping bill by £10 and yet I have just redeemed them for a two person one month pass for my local Cannons gym. This would normally cost £108 for two people –what a bargain. Of course you can’t keep doing this. There is a limit of three passes a year but being a student living away from home in term time, that suits me perfectly. If your New Year resolution is to get fit then think about using your Nectar points at Cannons and don’t be one of the millions who join a gym in Jan and never go again after the first month or two.

Whatever happened to the apostrophe?

Charlotte — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 10:33:56 +0000

As I drove round the M25 the other morning, the main source of irritation for me was not the fog or the Polish lorry which pulled out in front of me with no warning but a car bearing a sticker saying “Honk if your horny”. It was not the sentiment that got to me although that was bad enough. It was the missing apostrophe! Why oh why are people incapable of using it properly? Every day we see signs outside greengrocers advertising “tomatoe’s” and menus in pubs advertising roast “potatoe’s”. Even A level English students were apparently guilty of getting “its” and “it’s” muddled in exam scripts and it is probably fair to assume that it wasn’t just the pressure of the exam to blame. I know from a friend who is a Junior school teacher that it is still taught in school so where does it all go wrong? I can just about forgive shops that say “less than” instead of “fewer than” and even my English tutor at Uni agrees that only dinosaurs get upset about split infinitives but please please please think about the poor old apostrophe and don’t make me crash my car on the motorway!

The Art of Re-gifting

Charlotte — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 10:31:39 +0000

Giving away unwanted Christmas presents used to be something that few people would admit to but it now seems not only to be socially acceptable but also something of a virtue. It proves how unwasteful you are and there is even a book on how to do it, entitled “The Art of Re-gifting”. It seems that the two pitfalls to avoid are giving the present back to the person who gave it to you and not removing the original gift tag. It’s certainly food for thought. I just have to remember who exactly gave me the leopard print thong!

The Return of the Cardigan

Charlotte — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 12:35:47 +0000

The last time I wore a cardigan I was at infant school and had trouble doing up the buttons properly. I am sure that like me you tend to think of cardigans as something your grandma would wear but according to the fashion pages they are this year’s must-have for the trendy man’s wardrobe. Do you remember seeing the Beckhams arrive at Tom Cruise’s wedding? Do you remember what David was wearing? Yes – it was a rather strange looking woolly cardi, the type of thing his auntie might have knitted him for Christmas. How ignorant of me to think that when he was obviously bang up to date in the fashion stakes. They are all over the shops now from River Island to Dunhill and some of the young City types are even wearing them under their suits for a more relaxed feel. Whatever your age or tastes there’s one out there waiting for you!

Christmas carbon footprints

Charlotte — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 12:32:19 +0000

Each year more and more houses are festooned with external Chistmas lights. I don’t want to sound a killjoy like the councils that make carol singers have entertainment licenses or the schools that forbid parents from taking photos of their children in the Nativity play. However, it does strike me as a bit odd that we are dashing around buying low energy light bulbs and turning off our TV sets rather than leaving them on standby whilst outside we are using enough electricity to power the whole of Oxford St!