Dom Davis (The Blog)

Educating the world about the importance of, and need for pancake griddles, one post at a time.

My new job is 15 minutes walk from the station in Norwich which, unlike London, puts it a little out of the way. I couldn’t even tell you where the nearest Starbucks is, Pret has to be over 10 minutes walk and I don’t even know if Eat exists outside of London. While there are analogs closer we’re still looking at a 5 minute walk before you get to a news agent and sandwich vending establishments.

There is, of course, the ubiquitous Sandwich Man, which I think is now mandated by European legislation offices over a certain size, who comes at 11ish and apparently we have access to a canteen over the road that supplies overpriced, badly cooked food to another company and is quite happy to rip off employees from surrounding places which I’ve been warned off.

I discovered all this on my first day, choosing the sandwich man (prawn in maryrose sauce bap, crisps) and being quite impressed with his fayre.

Tuesday I brought a packed lunch. Cheaper and much better for me, plus the paucity of snack vending establishments nearby means I can’t easily supliment my lunch with crap and defeat the object.

Wednesday was a team lunch so we went out for food, Thursday and Friday I was off.

Monday there was no bread (we’d been away and not got round to shopping) so I had a tuna and red onion sarnie with crisps from the sandwich man.

Today I made my lunch, put it in my shiny new lunch box and promptly left it in the kitchen. Sandwich man again for me then. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll get into the habit of packing my lunch and actually remember to bring it. As it is tomorrows lunch will be today’s lunch rescued out of the fridge (if I remember :S )

Since my records began (over 3 years ago) I have handed over somewhere in the region of £15,000 to the rail companies, mostly National Express East Anglia, formerly One. At the end of my London career I was handing over £361 per month for the privelidge of sitting on the floor in the foyer of London bound intercities and a further £40 a week to get to and from Cromer and my Tai Chi classes. Tot that lot up and it comes to over 6 grand a year. Even when I was working from home it was costing me £80+ every time I went to London (thankfully only a few times a month).

Between stopping work and now I must have spent £50 on the trains tops (which actually equates to quite a few trips as it’s only £6.20 return to Norwich off peak) which is a much better state of affairs. This changed yesterday when I handed over £1436 for an annual season ticket. It’s the cheapest season ticket I’ve had since I lived in Zone 2, something I was quite pleased about… which just goes to show how numb I’ve become the cost of rail travel.

The last few months I’ve been working The Zozos shift patterns and working from home, with the last couple of months being self employed. Weekends, as a concept, dissapeared and there were just days working and days off. Days working were 8-3:30 with zero commute. Mondays were a thing of the past.

All that came to an end this morning when a Monday suddenly hoved into view and I had to go rejoin the commuterate.

Thankfully I’m being eased into it. 3 day week this week with a nice 4 day weekend… although there’s a Monday lurking behind that. I can tell.

It’s going to be odd. I’m used to being able to potter about, nip to the shops, do my shopping on a daily basis and cook for The Zozo when she gets home to a warm house with a lit fire. Poor old Zo is now going to be comming back to a cold house where she’ll have to build and light her own fire and then either eat alone or starve until I come home. At least with this job I’m not being woken up at 5:45, I’m getting home well before 19:45 and I don’t have to fight for a seat

Last night The Zozo and I were subjected to the new 2010 advert for webuyanycar.com, a low budget affair that relies on the musical equivalent of malaria¹ to lodge itself in the brain. The lyrics of the tune as follows:

webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – any make, any model, any age, any price, from fifty quid to a hundred grand.
webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – buy a newer car and don’t part ex, you may get a better deal when you buy next.
webuyanycar.com – enter your reg number now at webuyanycar.com.

Most important to note is the ‘dot com’ part of ‘we buy any car dot com’ is said in a slightly different voice and it is this that makes the tune so hard to remove from the brain once it’s got lodged there.

This morning The Zozo and I have both been suffering from having this tune stuck in our brains and it’s not got to the stage where she will go ‘we buy any car’ and I will go ‘dot com’. Worse still, I’m not putting ‘dot com’ on the end of bloody everything [dot com]… see!!

I’m hoping the meme will burn itself out but in the mean time I’m trying not to go crazy with the little voice in my head going ‘dot com’ to everything [dot com]. Gaaaaahhhhh!!!! Make it stop!².

¹Highly infectious and not pleasant if you have it

²dot com

The one downside of my interview suit is that the shoes are phenomenally uncomfortable. They are a pair of stiff leather Churches and the right hand shoe has developed a crease which means that with every step my big toe has a fold of hard leather rammed into it. Normally it’s uncomfortable for a day or two, but gets better. This time the pain seemed to get worse… but not every day.

Worried I may have done something bad to my foot I went to see the nurse at the doctors surgery who first suggested hairline fracture, but then went on to conclude it was tendinitis once I’d pointed out the pain was not everywhere she thought it was. The advice was to rest the foot and it should get better over a couple of weeks. And get better it did, slowly, although on days where I walked further it hurt a bit more.

Last night, however, it was worse than it had ever been, to the point where I was awake for several hours despite copious amounts of fairly potent pain killers. Noting that this was my last weekday before I became gainfully employed, and therefore the last day I could easily do anything about it, I toddled off to the local minor injuries unit. My thinking was that since they had an x-ray there if it needed to be x-rayed it wouldn’t take too long.

The bod there poked and prodded, asked questions, poked some more and then decided that he was fairly sure it wasn’t a stress fracture given I was too fit and healthy and I’d not put undue stress on it, just worn some bloody uncomfortable shoes. He then went on to explain how there was an outside chance that it could be gout, a minuscule chance it could be arthritis related, and a possibility that it could be related to my kidneys being inflamed and not filtering uric acid properly. He went on to tell me that while an x-ray would rule out (or confirm) a stress fracture the chances of it being that were too low to really warrant doing one so he probably wouldn’t and, on reflection, it’s probably best if I did gentle exercise, elevated the leg when resting, applied ice if needed and avoided anything like Deep Heat…

At this point I needed to interject to find out just exactly why one would avoid Deep Heat. Apparently, I was told, it is entirely the wrong thing for an inflammation injury such as this and would simply make it worse. It was at this point I realised what had happened. The day before doing to the doctors, and yesterday, I’d gone to bed with the foot being sore, so I’d applied Deep Heat thinking it would help. Last night I applied masses of the stuff. Instead of making it better I’d just made things worse, it was just tendinitis and perhaps, if I laid off the Deep Heat, it would get better by itself. Whoops :S

In my previous blog I documented the procedure for creating perfect pancakes. Since it is Jif Lemon day I decided to once again share my pancake making knowledge with the world¹.

You will need (per person):

• 1 Large Egg (I’m not going to go all ecomentalist on you but free range do taste better)
• 4oz plain flour (sieved if you can be bothered, can cut down on lumps or extra whisking)
• 0.5-1.5oz sugar (use less if you’re making savoury pancakes, more for sweet)
• A quarter of a pint of milk (roughly, depends how thick you want your mixture)

You will also need:

• A mixing bowl (the more people you’re making for the bigger it will need to be)
• A mixing implement (wooden spoon, metal spoon, whatever floats your boat really)
• A whisk² (at a push you can get away with just stirring with a spoon)
• A pancake griddle³ (no, not a pan, see the footnote)
• Optionally: a measuring jug to poor the mixture into (makes it easier to poor into the griffle)

The method:

Sieve (if you’re into that kind of thing) the flour into the mixing bowl. Add the sugar and made a depression for each egg (you can use the egg itself for this). Crack the egg(s) into the mixture and add a small amount of milk. Mix the mixture with the wooden spoon slowly adding more milk. Once all the milk is mixed in take the whisk and go to town. Whisk forward. Whisk backwards. Whisk holding the whisk still, whisk while moving it about⁴. When the mixture is smooth and the constituency of thick soup you’re done. If you have the measuring jug poor the mixture into that, otherwise you’ll need to arrange some way to ladle, poor or otherwise decant the mixture from the bowl to the griddle.

Heat the griddle over a medium flame⁵, poor enough mixture to cover the griddle to a depth of about 2mm. Cook until you see the bubbles that form on the surface of the mixture burst and the surface become solid. Flip the pancake⁶ and cook the other side. Once done put on a plate and consume.

These pancakes can be served with sugar and Jif Lemon (the traditional way), with butter and topping (jam, honey, golden syrup) or with savoury fillings. My favourite is tuna mayonnaise with sweetcorn. Go to town, have fun, knock yourself out. The possibilities are endless and the world is, quite literally, the bivalve of your choice.

One tip is to make up the mixture with less sugar, make savoury pancakes for main, scoff those, add sugar to the remaining mix, make more pancakes, consume for pudding.

Enjoy.

¹Do bear in mind we’re British here, so none of this ridiculously thin French crepe rubbish, nor the stupidly thick, heart attack inducing thick pancakes. These are just right.

²Manually whisking is a pain in the behind, I recommend one of the whizzy whisks when you turn the handle and the two beaters spin. Great for getting rid of lumps in the mixture and huge fun to boot

³Using anything but a pancake griddle here is tantamount to drinking champagne out of a pint glass. We’re not heathens here people, we’re British, we do things properly or not at all. A griddle will be properly seasoned. To maintain the seasoning you don’t want to wash it. To avoid having to wash it you want to just cook pancakes and drop scones on it so it can be wiped clean. You go using something that you also cook bacon and eggs on and it’s going to get washed up and the seasoning will go, you could get flavours leaking in, it might not heat evenly, it might cause the pancakes to stick. No, right tool for the job so if you don’t have a griddle I suggest you go toddle off and get one now, I’ll be waiting when you get back… off you go… quickly!

⁴All this does rather assume the manual whisky thing. If you’ve got a boring hand held whisk (or no whisk at all) then you’re going to miss out. If you’ve got an electric whisk then you’ll probably be done before you have a chance to have fun.

⁵Not using gas? Hah! Good luck

⁶This doesn’t need implements but then you’re probably ignoring my insistence you use a griddle so you’ve only got yourself to blame if you can’t just flip the pancake using the pan and a deft wrist motion.

So recently I’ve been spanking large sums of money with these lovely people (actually, who am I kidding, I’ve been spanking large sums of cash with them for some time now given half my camera kit was bought from their website) since they are one of the better camera shops about and I need lots of things for my course and photography business. On Saturday I needed to get a background so, on my way home from my course, I swung by the showroom. It was heaving. Turned out there was a 1 year anniversary for the new, bigger showroom so there were loads of special offer on, lots of reps from different companies, various events and a prize draw. I vaguely recalled hearing something about it but had not realised it was then. Anyway, I waited my turn to speak to a sales bod while they dealt with the masses and looked at the shiny things on display. 30 minutes later and I walked out with my stuff, they put my name in the prize draw box (free entry if you bought something) and I headed home.

Today I received a call from them. At first I thought maybe I’d left something there, or maybe I’d been charged for the wrong item, but no, turns out they want to give me a rather nice A3 printer as a prize (the most expensive prize in the draw no less) which I think is rather sporting of them. I don’t think I’ve won anything like that before

So todays little escapade meant that by the time The Zozo and I got home the supermarkets had closed. Given I had intended to go shopping during the day it meant there wasn’t any food in the house for our valentines meal so takeaway was the only option. Valentines day dinner was a nice romantic candle lit kebab and chips for two in front of the fire. On reflection we did feel that it needed garlic bread to make it a truly magical meal

This morning I woke up with a slight twinge in my side. Nothing unusual in that. These days I wake up with all kinds of aches and twinges, but todays twinge didn’t go away. Instead it decided to get steadily worse until, at about 8am, I decided enough was enough and I was going to fight back with some of the more potent pain killers in our medicine cabinet. Unfortunately these take time to kick in and I ran out of the quick fix tactical nuclear pain killers some time ago so things started to get even more painful.

After a few minutes walking round the house in a fashion similar to the oh-my-god-I-need-the-loo-but-someone-is-in-the-bathroom thing the people do when they don’t think anyone else is looking [or is that just me?] I decided I’d better pack a bag with a few bits in it just in case this wasn’t going to get better by itself. After all, I know this pain and the conclusion is, more often than not, A&E.

After having packed my bag¹ things were getting to be really quite bad and it was making me cry so I called in reinforcements to take me somewhere with better pharmacological supplies than I have. Unfortunately, en-route we found out that the local drop in places wouldn’t take me and that I was going to have to go to A&E (see, told you). Joy.

1 hour later and I’m being dressed in one of those ever so fetching gowns with a nurse shoving a cannula² in my arm and another nurse doing the blood pressure and temperature thing. Of course, by this time the pain was easing and I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have just ridden it out and not bothered everyone.

6 hours after that and I’ve been X-rayed, pumped full of contrast, X-rayed again several times, peed into tubes and pots, had blood taken and told a number of people that I woke up this morning and I started hurting in the same way I hurt the previous God knows how many times I’ve had kidney stones.

Upshot of it all is they can’t see a stone (although that’s not to say there isn’t one there), they can see inflamation, there is blood in my urine and they’ve given the the pharmacological items I need to stop it hurting should it start again³). Although this morning I was in very real pain time has dulled the memory of the pain and I am left thinking perhaps it was all a storm in a teacup :s Still, for places to take your fiancée on valentines day A&E has to be up there on the list

¹ Clean underwear, clean tshirts, clean socks, laptop, charger for laptop, charger for iPhone, headphones – no toothbrush or toothpaste :S

² You know, the things they jab in your arm with the 18foot metal spikes that stick into your veins and will rip your arm open causing you to bleed to death if you so much as think about looking at it in the wrong way just so they can take blood and pump you full of contrast easily.

³ Unfortunately none of it opiate or synthetic opiate based but I they’re moving away from that these days and at the end of the day if it stops the owie I’m happy.

Spread betting is basically betting on the movement of stocks, currencies and the like. I used to do Forex trading betting on the exchange rate between the US Dollar (USD) and the Euro (EUR). The exchange rate is quoted as, for example, 1.5250 which means that €1 buys you $1.5250. You’re betting on the final digit ticking up and down, so a £1 spread bet means that for every 100th of a cent (point) the exchange rate moves you make (or loose) £1, and move they do. The Forex market is stupidly huge and those numbers change constantly, sometimes by 10 or 20 over the space of 10-15 minutes, sometimes by 100’s.

Despite the name, spread betting isn’t quite gambling. A reasonable strategy and good risk management will make you money. Lets assumed your strategy wins 40% of the time. That’s loosing on 6 out of 10 trades. You will risk an amount, £X and try to make £2X. Over 10 trades, on average, you’ll loose £6X (you’ve lost 6 times) and win £8X (you’ve won 2X 4 times). That’s a profit of £2X. X also wants to be about 2% of your total trading capital so you can loose up to 50 times in a row before being out completely.

When I started I started small. I was betting 10p per point with trades being placed for minutes rather than hours or days. The way spread betting works you’re automatically down when you enter a trade. With EUR/USD I’d be down 2 points, or 20p before anything had happened. I’d set my trade up so if it went another 28 points in the wrong direction to get me out of the trade. This would loose me £3 tops.

Quite often (in fact most of the time) the trade would go the wrong way to start with. I’d often see my 20p loss grow to £1 or £1.50 before it headed in the right direction again. Eventually it would break even, then start making a profit. More often than not the profit would then start to get eroded, sometimes heading back to break even, or maybe even a small loss, before moving to greater profit. So my bet would start at -20p, move to -£1.50, head to £0, go on to £1, head back to £0, go on to £3, back to £1, then to £5, back to £4, on to £7 and so on and so forth. My goal here is £6 since I’ve risked £3.

The way I worked would be to change the trade when it got to £2 or £3 in profit so that my trade would automatically be closed if it went back to break even. I’m now risk free. Each time it gains £1 in profit I move the point where it would automatically get closed by £1. Sometimes I would think that it couldn’t go up any more, cash in, and be happy. Other times I’d ride it as far as I could and have the trade closed by the automatic stop. Doing this I could make £15 or more in a trade which is much more than my target. Quite often I’d get two of those in a row netting me £30 in a day. Sometimes I’d have a bad day, but it was only £6 down. The problem was, even with making 3 or 4 times my risked X, with things averaged out I was only making £9-£12 per 10 trades which was 3-5 days worth of trading. I needed to scale up and that’s where things started going wrong.

I scaled up by 100 times. Instead of 10p per point I traded £10. That’s £300 risked with my strategy, and a gain of £600 every 10 trades assuming everything goes as planned.

So the trade is on. I’m automatically down 2 spots so I’m at -£20. Things go the wrong way to start off with so could go to £100 or £150 down before moving back towards break even. Despite the trade going in exactly the same way as before physically, psychologically I’m panicking. £150 is a lot of money. As it heads to £0 my nerve breaks and I close out the trade as soon as it starts turning a positive profit, possibly just a fraction of a point, netting me £3/£5 or £8. That’s all well and good but if I make a loosing trade I’m £300 down and I need to make 60 winning trades at £5 per trade to make it up. That kind of winning doesn’t happen.

Even when I could hold the course and watch the profits rise I need to be banking £600 minimum. I watch the profits rise to £100, then it reverses and heads towards £0 again. With the smaller stake I take this in my stride and sit tight because I’m pretty sure it’ll go back up again. Now I’m watching my £100 become £90… £80… £70… will it stop or will it keep going to -£300? My nerve breaks, I bail at £50. Sounds like a good profit, but I still need to make 6 winning trades for every losing trade to break even and that isn’t going to happen.

No matter what I tried I couldn’t get passed the fear of loosing vast sums of money when the bigger amounts were in play. I’d even do trades on two accounts, one at £10 per point, one at 10p per point. I’d bail with the £10 account, let the 10p run and watch as it made me £6, £10, £15. That’s £600, £1000, £1500 IF I’d let the £10 account run.

So you get yourself worked up. YOU ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT INTERFERE WITH THE TRADE. You set it up so it’s completely automatic. You’ll walk away with a £300 loss of a £600 gain. Nothing else is allowed. Problem is there is a 60% chance you’re going to walk away with the loss (possibly more so as you’re worked up and not thinking about things as rationally as perhaps you should). I did it a few times and each time I lost. I’d not done enough trades to see my 40% wins, was down hundreds and doubt has now kicked in. I started second guessing my trades, deliberating too much, waiting too long and entering trades too late, resulting in more losses. You have to remember that 6 losses in a row still doesn’t mean your system isn’t working and means you’ve lost £1,800. You could make that back and more in your next 4 trades. But then again you might not.

So there is my problem. I can make money with spread betting, quite easily. I just can’t make very much. As soon as the numbers get to any appreciable value (much more than 50p per spot) I freeze, make mistakes or just bail too early. The Fear just gets in the way. unfortunately the trading system I use is very subjective. I can automate getting out of the trade once it’s on but there is no way to automate entering the trade. If I could work out how to do that I’d make a fortune.

As it was my spread betting experience has left me roughly breaking even. My small gains over a few months were wiped out by a few bigger losses as I ramped things up. I’ve withdrawn most of the money from my trading account now, but there’s still some in there because I do still enjoy trying to diving the vagueries of the financial markets.