16. Gollum and the Norwegian Bone Broth

< Previous | Next >

I started writing this nearly 5 months ago when the muse suddenly left me and I had no urge to write at all.  It would appear that I can only write whilst properly ill. Anyhow the following is the last thing I wrote back in April....

This is a bit of a turn up for the books, only two days since my last missive and I am back at the keyboard.

Those of you who have been following my, for the want of a better word, progress or maybe more pertinently regress.... Doh, now I've lost my train of thought, I'm fairly sure that the last sentence has become an orphan and makes little or no sense. 

Right yes, if you have been following my progress you will have been very pleased with my announcement right at the end of the last blog that I had, after five days, finally had a poo.

I had eaten actual food and I can report that I went to bed that night pleasantly full and didn't throw up, not once. As I said, things may be looking up.

The next day was a Monday and it was back to the grindstone or at least back to the keyboard and monitor, alright I am a complete geek and it's back to five monitors, yes I know overkill but hey ho if you've got it, flaunt it I say.  I am working on expense software for a charity currently and I spent most of the day gently banging my head against the brick wall of someone elses impenetrable code, code which, I might add, never fails to fall over and generally bite me ferociously in the arse when I least expect it. Well to be fair, it tends to fall over and bite the charity that I am working for ferociously, it's just my job to work out why it's not working and then rewrite it so it does work,

So anyway, all this brainwork requires sustenance which has been in short supply over the last few weeks.  This morning however I had tried a bunch of different things for breakfast.  I am still unable to eat quite a few things, I have an abiding love affair with toast, bread, pretty much any baked goods, however these are, frankly, impossible to eat, something about the texture gets properly stuck at the back of my throat and I find myself unable to swallow.

My first experiment for breakfast was a smidgin of custard tart, the previous evening I had made this for Helen, proper egg custard mind, with duck eggs and double cream no less. I was able to eat it, just about but it wasn't really doing the job. Eventually I gave up and had a mug of bone broth.

And thereby hangs a tale, you may remember me mentioning the Norwegian bone broth that my sister in law had given me a couple of weeks ago.  At the point that she had given me it I couldn't really eat anything at all and to be perfectly honest this was starting to depress me somewhat. Everything was making my mouth and throat hurt but the bone broth had gone down fairly easily.  I was literally dreaming about what I could manage to eat in order to get some sort of nutrients in. To the point that when I returned from the hospital on the day that I was on the drip I actually dreamt about making bone broth. I woke up with a plan fully formed in my head to go to the local butcher and pick up some bones to make broth.  

Our butcher is in the local farm shop and when I arrived I asked the butcher if he had any bones that I could buy.

"Is this for yourself?" he asked,looking somewhat doubtful

"Yeah, I want to make some broth"

"I don't think I should let you have any of these", he indicated a bucket full of bones under the block he was working at, "They've been there all day"

Right, back to the drawing board, I decided to go to the butchers in Blagdon but when I drove past it was obvious that they were no longer in business. Bugger, back home then. I remembered that there was a good butcher in Chew Magna, so I looked them up on the web and against their address it said "Permanently Closed"

The universe has obviously become vegan and decided that I should not be making bone broth.  One more spin of the dice.  The nearest other butcher was Hodders of Congresbury, I rang them up and a very friendly voice answered asking how could they help.

"Do you sell bones, by any chance?"

"We do indeed, we generally charge £2 pounds"

"I'm wanting to make bone broth, would they be OK for that?"

"Yep no problem at all, how many do you want?"

Well, of course, this completely stumped me, "I haven't a clue, how many do you think I'll need to make broth"

"Well we have beef bones right now, I would recommend just the one to start with. Would you like me a cut it into three for you?"

"Er, yes, that would be lovely, I'll be over in half an hour or so"

I arrived at the shop and asked the woman behind the counter about the bones and she immediately produced them, and by them I mean it, it was about half a metric ton of cow thigh bone cut into three. It's a bloody good job I didn't ask for more than one when she asked. I would have had to hire a low loader to take them home. I then realised that I had no cash and would have to pay by card which seemed a bit presumptuous and I really ought to buy something else as well.

"You wouldn't happen to have any beef dripping would you?"

"Yes we have loads, I'm afraid it's just in an old coffee jar, you can have it for free"

I finally bought a pork belly roast as well to go with my cheapy bones and free dripping and left laden down by the bows.

The beef bones were, frankly enormous, nothing ventured however, I fired up the pressure cooker, added onions, carrots, celery, a bunch of herbs and covered everything with water and pressure cooked for a couple of hours.

I drained the resulting liquid and left it in the fridge to cool. It produced a truly outstanding amount of beef fat that solidified on the top of a layer of jelly.

I am aware that this sounds properly disgusting, but until my first foray into solid food I have been existing primarily on beef broth for the last two weeks. Just add a spoonful of the jelly to a mug and add boiling water and you get what I believe the Victorians called "beef tea", apparently full of nutrients and more to the point I could drink it very nearly painlessly.

Anyhow, that is where the bone broth came from that I had for breakfast. I spent the morning working and by the time lunch arrived I was feeling distinctly peckish.  I wandered into the kitchen and investigated the fridge, this was not revealing anything that I could eat. Helen had made a cottage pie the night before but I couldn't eat it as the tomatoes in it were just too painful on the throat.

We had run out of bread so Helen was looking somewhat downcast as she likes a sarnie for lunch.  I decided to make pancakes again so made bacon, mushroom and cheese savoury pancakes for the two of us. Now according to Helen they were 'lush' unfortunately for me they tasted of, well, nothing really. This is pretty much par for the course, I can eat, but still can't really taste anything. Still, it's fuel which is the main thing.

During the afternoon I even had a couple of cups of tea, something that has been missing from my diet for quite a while. So when it was time to knock it on the head for the day I was feeling fairly chipper and inquired of Helen whether the car was available as I had it in mind to take a trip over to Fowler's Motorcycles. 

There is a reason for this, beyond my being overly infatuated with two wheeled motorised transport that is. If you cast your mind back over the weeks you will remember at the beginning of this debacle I told you all about my overly large motorcycle and about taking out a Triumph 400 that I wondered about changing to.  This bike has been wandering around at the back of my consciousness causing a certain amount of discombobulation in my thinking. 

My current motorcycle is now a tad too large for my sadly altered body plan. When I bought it back in late 2023 I was a husky 78 kilos. I am now a, frankly, weedy 65 kilos on a good day and depending on the food intake maybe only 64 and a half kilos.  This makes the hauling around of a rather fat motorcycle a little challenging and I keep thinking that I should change it for something smaller.  

With this in mind, I changed rather laboriously into the the bike gear, kevlar jeans, waistcoat, waxed cotton jacket and bike boots. Spent an entertaining five minutes searching for my gloves and crash helmet and headed out to the garage to get the bike out. Now, last time I had ridden the bike was for a blood test at the back end of the week before and while trying to back the bike out of the garage I had very nearly dislocated my knee, again.  I distinctly felt it jump out and back in which left me a little nervous.

I leant all my 65 kilos against the bikes 200 plus kilos and hauled backwards. Thankfully the bike came out of the garage without attempting to de-knee me again. As soon as I got it out onto the drive it began to rain. Bugger. 

I located a pair of waterproof over trousers and hopped around the garage on one leg trying to get the bloody things over my motorcycle boots. I finally had myself dressed when the rain stepped up a notch. Bloody hell, when I had checked the forecast it had sworn blind that it wasn't going to rain all afternoon.

I stood rather disconsolately in the porch contemplating the rain when Helen appeared and informed me that I could take the car as she wasn't going to be using it after all.  

I spent another entertaining five minutes hopping around trying to take off the wet weather gear I had just laboriously put on, and jumped into the car, whereupon it immediately stopped raining.  This is just the typical 'barrel of tits' behaviour that I have become used to.

I mooched around Fowlers for some time waiting for the Triumph salesman to get off the phone and then organised a couple of test rides on the two baby Triumph 400's for the next day. I'd already ridden one of them and didn't like it but it was playing on my mind and on my knee to be honest. A 400cc bike was much less likely to try and de-knee me than my rather portly 750.

I also spent a rather happy twenty minutes chatting to another middle aged motorcyclist about the pros and cons of the two Triumphs and swapped some bike tales that may have been embellished somewhat.  

As I left Fowler's my mind turned to thoughts of food, or more pertinently, what type of food I might persuade my reluctant mouth and throat to put up with. I had discovered over the last week or so that I couldn't eat anything even slightly acidic, tomatoes are out, most green veg just stuck in my throat and refused to go down. It then occurred to me that now I had a perfect excuse to eat whatever crap I fancied, and what I fancied was a burger. With this in mind I headed out of Bristol via the Hengrove branch of McDonalds.

When I arrived at the portal to hell which is Hengrove McDonald's the queue for the drive through stretched out of the car park so I determined to actually go inside and order food the old fashioned way.

Once inside I ordered a Big Mac Meal with a chocolate milkshake, something I have not had for over 15 years, ever since the discovery of galloping diabetes and high blood pressure made the ingestion of sugar completely verboten.

It turns out that ordering inside was a huge mistake, I kid you not, huge. In the end I had to wait for over an hour for my order to appear. There is not much in the way of entertainment in a McDonald's I can tell you. I spent the hour reading reviews of the two Triumph 400s that I had just booked test rides on. Eventually my number was called and I grabbed the greasy paper bag and exited smartly. I tried the milkshake immediately and this may have been a mistake, it tasted of, well, nothing to be honest and did nothing to assuage my thirst. As I drove home I started to feel a bit dodgy. I got home to a bit of disapprobation about my purchase of McDonalds, as it turned out I couldn’t face it and sure enough within 10 minutes of arriving I was once more communing with my plastic sick bowl.

The sickness didn’t last however and the next day I headed back to Fowlers on my 750 to take the two baby Triumphs out back to back.

I tried the Speed 400 first which is a more road oriented bike. I hadn’t gone more than about half a mile when I decided that I really hated it. Really, I hated it, I turned straight round and took it back to the shop to take out the 400 Scrambler.  I swapped bikes and the position on the bike immediately felt better and I set off up the Well’s Rd, however much to my disappointment the seat was like the plank and uncomfortable in the extreme. So much for swapping to a smaller bike it would appear.

Over the next couple of weeks I started eating a more varied diet, albeit somewhat altered. I still couldn’t face my own cooking, a couple of forays into curry and lentil stew were a bit of a drastic failure on my part. Although everyone else seemed to like them I couldn’t force them down if I tried. 

The weight continued its downward trend until at my lightest I was weighing in at 63.4 kilos about 9 stone 13 in old money. To be perfectly honest since I was now eating I was quite happy to remain around 65kg it was quite nice to be no longer carrying a couple of stone of unneeded weight for basically the first time in my adult life. This however is not so appreciated by my nearest and dearest.  I wandered into the bedroom wearing only my boxers and Helen, who was talking to her sister on her phone looked at me aghast and as I left with a clean set of socks and boxers I heard her say something to her sister but I didn’t catch it but heard Nic laughing. Later on we were chatting about my new svelte figure and she said that she had told her sister that I was far too skinny.

“What did you actually say to her? I heard you laughing”

"I can't tell you"

"Right, now you have to tell me"

Some back and forth ensued and eventually she confessed that she told her sister that I looked like Gollum. 

I could include a picture of myself clad only in boxers and socks for comparison with Tolkiens finest but the ensuing panic and horror amongst my readers is not to be countenanced. Suffice it to say that I've seen myself in the mirror and to be honest, I can see the resemblance.