Nibbling the guilt-free way

I used to be very restrained when it came to naughty nibbling. (Things like biscuits, I mean. Good grief.) But I have to confess I had sunk into a bit of bad habit. I felt, after I'd walked the dog, I needed a biscuit or three with my coffee just to get my energy back. And then when it came to my afternoon coffee, well, everyone knows you get low energy in the afternoon... so out came the biscuits again.

I may have found a partial solution - there's a company called graze.com that sends little boxes of relatively healthy nibblables through the post. It's a cunning scheme. They supply about 100 different products, of which your box will contain four. You can filter this online, knocking out the ones you don't like, though I left it as open as possible to start with. These range from straight forward things like nuts and dried fruit to interesting chocolate coated goodies and mini flavoured breads.

Our first box has definitely been a success. Admittedly there was one item everyone hated (wasabi peas) - but even these were a success as the girls have taken them to school to get their friends to try them and see their faces. Even more of a success because it's free. If you enter this code: W8HJ87RN at graze.com into the offers/code thingy on the form you get your first box free and the second one half price. After that it's £3.49 a pop. We've done some feedback on the first offering and await the second with interest. We even got excited about the packaging, which is brilliant.

I don't think it will 100 percent replace the biscuits, but it certainly helps. Tuesdays (you can choose which day your box arrives, but it can't be Mondays if you want the chance of bread) will never be the same again.

My thanks to Kate Grant for pointing out the existence of graze.com

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog