Mattress; toothbrush

I guess that my new open-coil mattress has now mostly settled. My lower back still often aches in the morning but, I think, not as badly as it did. While putting on my socks I no longer think goodness, I must buy a new mattress so I am inclined to chalk that up as a win and turn my attention elsewhere.

I am postponing properly replacing my electric toothbrush. I realized that I ought to do something given that the reason for having one was something about not overbrushing the exposed roots of my teeth since my gums receded so I bought a cheap interim travel toothbrush from China which was flown from Hong Kong to London Heathrow. (My glasses case instead arrived from Germany into East Midlands Airport.) It turns out that the toothbrush is so cheap as to not have the usual pressure-sensing stop feature but with an ultrasonic brush it seems less likely that I will press hard anyway. I shall have to replace it in time because I am not aware of a source of replacement heads.

My travel toothbrush does teach me of one useful feature: it disassembles, including its head, via low-force twist-lock moulding rather than linear push-and-click. That may not suffer as badly from the increasing-friction issue that ended my previous toothbrush's life. I shall carefully scrutinize images of other toothbrushes to try to spot similar in models of prospective replacement toothbrush.

Wearing remembrance poppies

In the UK this year we have Armistice Day immediately followed by Remembrance Sunday so we had two periods of silence this weekend. This morning we have BBC One showing the service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and BBC Two showing from Australia the rugby league match between England and France, creating what for me is a typical conflict because what I feel I should do and what I actually want to do. At least my nearer family members, both military and civilian, survived their conflicts but even my civilian family members still suffered much loss through war.

The wearing of the remembrance poppies has become politicized enough to confuse me. I do not see that the red poppies are necessarily positively encouraging of war, quite the opposite, though the term glory is flexible enough that I can see how those who want to see things like that can do so. Despite my reluctance to indulge semantic change, perhaps what a remembrance poppy effectively symbolizes may be what people now take it to symbolize, whatever the wearer intends. My appearances in society are mostly work-related and I feel bound to keep politics out of the workplace.

Jesus warns us that your almsgiving must be secret and when you pray, go to your private room, shut yourself in and part of me wonders if such acts of remembrance should be similar: that it is good to remember but ostentation does not quite fit. I can imagine that some may find comfort in seeing that their remembrance is shared but I doubt that anybody who is likely to see me will be much comforted by my poppy-wearing. One may donate to the Royal British Legion without requiring a poppy in return but, without the poppies, people may not think to.

Traditional meals; Indian food; beer

My lunch today feels rather conventionally British: steak pie with chips (in the UK sense) and a can of bitter.

I thought about how deeply Indian cuisine became integrated here as chicken curry with chips and beer also now feels traditional. I further noticed that with chicken curry I would have selected lager instead of bitter. Perhaps that makes sense but I usually combine foods more by intuition than conscious rules so I can rarely justify such choices.

I recall how on the international grocery store shelving in the US the Indian foods would often be shelved in the British section. More specifically, here in Scotland one finds fusion dishes like haggis pakora.

As a diet trick these days I favor the fatter, straighter oven chips as they tend to cost fewer calories for a similarly hearty portion. Pastry-encased comfort foods are already fairly challenging to plan into my day as, of course, are fried battered Indian snacks like pakora.