Jon Gale

Ex ship & yacht builder. Pirate, cider maker, parent, husband, grumpa, morris dancer, Lab owner. Bowel cancer survivor, Fellow of The English Breakfast Society.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@muzzleloaderjon I’m not sure whether these came from Henry Krank or elsewhere off the internet. It’s a long time since I bought any. I’ve mostly been demonstrating matchlock loading and firing of late!

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

So this little pistol, anyone able to identify it?

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@muzzleloaderjon

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@muzzleloaderjon No flies on you! Exactly that. It’s for sea shanty “pirate” festivals where the public mustn’t be frightened by authentic or de-acts. My 1805 Sea Service is too valuable and too heavy for an old pirate to carry for such outings!

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@curlybob69 Ha ha! Neither would I.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Dark chocolate is the only confectionery with a press team. "It's basically a superfood," people murmur, snapping off a square with the solemnity of someone taking a vitamin. Start with the word that sells it.

Antioxidants. The flavanols everyone cites are the cacao plant's own defence chemicals, and they barely survive your digestion. Rather than mopping up oxidation, they cause a little of it, a flicker of stress that mildly poisons your cells and forces your body to switch on its own repair machinery. The benefit, such as it is, comes from your system scrambling to neutralise a plant toxin. The marketing sells you the toxin and takes the credit for the cleanup.

Now the metals. Cacao is a bioaccumulator. It hauls cadmium up from the soil and picks up lead as the beans dry on roadside tarps. In 2022 Consumer Reports tested 28 dark bars and found both metals in every one. For 23 of them, an ounce a day pushed an adult past a recognised level of concern. Cadmium then settles into your kidneys for decades and sends no notification.

While it sits there, the oxalates in the same cocoa get to work building kidney stones, and the pesticide residues from intensive cocoa farming ride along uninvited.

And the crop itself is an ecological disaster, most of it grown on cleared West African rainforest, a good deal inside protected parks, much of it by child labour everyone deplores for a fortnight at a time.

So enjoy your square. Just retire the word medicine. You are eating a metal-laced, stone-building plant toxin, and calling the damage a health benefit.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@Eman_8282 A health warning? Particularly if any of it has come into contact with that filthy cooker!

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@jimthekeeper Just the thing for a shoot day. Right tyres on them and they will go absolutely anywhere. My 39 year old 90 has power steering, which is a great “modern” advantage!

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The woman speaks for the entire country right now. An absolutely glorious rant against Keir Starmer. And she signs off in the most quintessentially British way.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Walk into the cave at Lascaux. The paintings are around seventeen thousand years old, made by people with no writing, no agriculture, and no opinions about cholesterol.

Look at what they painted.

Aurochs, the enormous wild cattle that stood taller at the shoulder than a man. Horses. Bison. Deer. Great heavy-bodied animals laid down in ochre and charcoal across the ceiling by people lying on their backs in the dark, holding a light up with one hand and painting with the other, because this mattered to them more than comfort did.

Now count the paintings of grain.

Count the lovingly rendered root vegetables. The heroic turnip. The sacred bowl of lentils.

You will be counting for some time.

The people of Lascaux painted what they revered, and what they revered was the animal. The animal was food, clothing, tools, sinew, fat, marrow, and the difference between surviving the winter and not. They did not paint a balanced plate. They painted the thing that kept them alive, over and over, for generations, in the most important room they had.

Seventeen thousand years later their descendants would be told that the animal was the problem, and that the road to health ran through the field of grain the cave painters never once thought worth drawing.

The oldest art we have is a menu.

It is not a subtle one.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@Forest2Furnitur @AndyWoodturner It’s an absolutely must-have machine. Now you need to find something for it to drive. Have fun.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@Forest2Furnitur @AndyWoodturner I use mine to chop apples for cider.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@meddlingmike This bitter is a 4.8% ABV premium golden ale by an independent local brewery & won the Hampshire Beer of the Year award in both 2013 & 2014. This multi-award-winning ale is highly celebrated among local drinkers & is brewed in Cheriton, Hampshire.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@meddlingmike How can you overfill a glass. It’s a pint brim measure. Look it up. That beer has won the CAMRA best beer of Hampshire on various occasions. It’s brewed by a small independent brewery and is served in my local straight from the cask on gravity dispense. You are just so wrong.

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

@meddlingmike Is presumably one of those “designer” beers that the young trendies drink? This is what a pint of bitter should look like and at least the glass is full!

[Jon Gale @JonGale4]

Just a pirate! On stage. With Salties Mark, Andy & Paul plus other singers from the weekend!

[Jason | 🇬🇧 🇿🇦 🇮🇱🇺🇲 @Ajaon_of_All]

Let me categorically Debunk this utter rot. @sainsburys.

I am a poultry Breeder. The hens that lay white eggs (Amberline/White Star) DO NOT have a lower carbon footprint.

Yes they eat a bit less and produce roughly the same amount of eggs as the Brown egg layers (Bovan/Lowman/ISA Brown) but they live shorter lives, are prone to dying suddenly when startled, a flighty and nervous and because they live shorter productive lives (12 -18mnths) vs brown 18/24mnths (both commercial farmed), you have to incubate more which is increased (Electricity/gas costs) and their eggs are not the same quality.

I breed and keep 20+ different breeds, including: ISA Brown hens and White Stars. All my hens are 100% free range, Not a single barn kept bird, I have ISA browns that are 5yrs old and still laying beautiful Brown eggs, I have not seen a White star live beyond 3yrs and certainly none have laid eggs past 18-24mnths.
White stars Lay themselves to death. They are slender birds and because they dont eat a lot, it drains their personal vitality to keep up laying the eggs you want to sell because of the nonsensical lie that they are "More Carbon Neutral"

You want to know about eggs, come talk to someone like me, Don't rely on some hairbrained imagination of a buyer who's trying to squeeze the profit margin for a few extra pennies at our expense and to the poor hens detriment.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Freya has had a calf.

Nobody saw it coming, which is the point, because bison are built so nobody sees it coming. A pregnant bison conceals the pregnancy. She gives nothing away. There is no announcement, no slowing down, no behaviour the estate manager could point to and say, there, that is an animal expecting. It is a survival trick older than the species' memory. A predator that cannot tell you are vulnerable cannot time its move.

So the estate manager did what he does every morning. He looked for Freya at the tree line at quarter to seven. She was not there.

He found her two hours later in the densest part of the wood, in a hollow she had chosen herself, standing very still over something small and dark and already on its feet.

The calf is the first born on the estate. In the wider story, the European bison was hunted down to nothing, a few dozen animals in captivity by the 1920s, every wild one gone, the entire future of the species resting on a number you could fit in a single barn. Everything alive today comes from those few. Freya comes from those few. The calf comes from those few.

Six thousand years ago, give or take, the last of the wild bison faded out of these islands. The hollow Freya chose to give birth in is on ground that has not had a bison born on it since before the people here built anything out of stone.

It has one now.

The calf was up within the hour, because a bison calf that cannot stand and move with the herd does not last the first night, and evolution does not grant extensions.

The estate manager did not approach. The whole point of the project is to want nothing from her, to let her do the one thing six thousand years of absence had made impossible, which is simply to be a bison, on this hill, raising the next one.

He watched from the track for a while. Then he wrote one line in the log and went back down to leave them to it.

The line read: "She is back. Properly back. There are two of them now."