In Sickness And In Health
Naming Your Children and Cheese On toast
I didn’t manage a Substack post last week as planned because BAM! I was hit with a mystery virus. There I was, at a friend’s 60th birthday party on the Saturday, dancing away and making all the teenagers cringe as I got down with my funky self - albeit to house music when suddenly at midnight, I felt a bit strange. I hadn’t been drinking as I was driving home.
When I got home I told my partner I was feeling a bit weird and went to bed. I had something similar about 3 years ago, a strong fever that turned out to be some type of pneumonia that knocked me out for 6 days. Obviously, being a man I was convinced that I had something akin to the bubonic plague and was waiting for someone to start chanting ‘bring out your dead’. Look, if I want to be dramatic, I’ll be dramatic, alright? One thing to note is that my partner is not a ‘nurse’ type of person. Her bedside manner can only be described as brutal, as in ‘How dare you be sick!’. To be honest though, sometimes that’s what I need. I’m pathetic when I’m ill.
My partner is a Nutritionist and what I would describe as a closet witch. Her remedy was to chop up a red onion, wrap it in a tea towel and heat it up in the microwave. The poultice was then plonked on my chest like a hot water bottle, which I duly clung on to all night. The smell was pretty unbearable but by this stage, I didn’t care. I’ve had this remedy once before and I was very sceptical about it working. But work it did. It worked this time too. The fever peaked and by the morning I’d stopped the shivering and the hot sweats and just felt weak as a kitten. I then spent the rest of the week recovering.
Since I had cancer about 7 years ago my immune system has been compromised and I spend a lot of time trying to be healthy. Between my nutritionist partner and my Vietnamese friend Chi, I am constantly trying out weird and wonderful concoctions purporting to be good for you. Chi loves to give me soups made with liver, ginseng, tarot root and brandy. Real ‘kill or cure’ stuff. My partner on the other hand will juice 6 different fruits and vegetables and watch me drink it while taking various vitamins and mineral supplements.
While living in Hong Kong as a youngster, my Chinese girlfriend would take me to the market to have snake soup when I was feeling rough and also to have various unidentified potions during the winter. They all seemed to work, so now I never pooh-pooh anything suggested. You never know!
Naming Your Children
Personally, I think that as a parent you have the right to name your child whatever you want, so long as you think it through and it’s not a name that your child is going to be bullied for or made fun of growing up. This includes names where the initials spell out something stupid or offensive. A case in point was a guy at secondary school with the ordinary name of Philip Gosling. Unfortunately, his middle name was Ian and he wasn’t a slim fella. His life was made a misery.
Over the years I have come across some people with strange/cool/weird names. Some were born with those names and some people gave themselves the name when they were older. I have met quite a few Rainbow’s (male and female), a Zoomer, Othello (seriously), Bran-Dee, Pumpkin and my all time favourite was Hitler. I shit you not. He was a guy I knew in Hong Kong called Steven Chan and he changed his name. I asked him why he chose Hitler. He said he chose Hitler because he was very famous in history. Everyone knew him. I asked him if he knew that Hitler was responsible for killing 6 million Jews. Steven said no, but he thought that was okay because it meant Hitler was powerful as well as famous. I eventually persuaded him to change it to Alexander after Alexander the Great. He was happy with that.
The reason I mention this is that when my ex-wife and I were naming our children, a boy and a girl (who are now in their late 20’s) we named the boy Joshua. A good, solid name. A couple of years later my daughter was born and I wanted to call her Raveon. I thought it was a cool name and I still do. I had just left the music industry and rave’s were still a thing. My ex-wife said absolutely no way was our daughter going to be called Raveon. I put my foot down. Anyway, she’s called Jessica. I couldn’t even sneak Raveon in as a middle name.
I was looking at all the stupid names that celebrities call their kids. Elon Musk takes the biscuit with X Æ A-Xii, closely followed by pop star couple Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz calling their kid Bronx Mowgli. Having said that, every pregnant couple I meet that are having a baby girl, I do ask if they’ve thought about the name Raveon? Strangely, it doesn’t seem to have caught on yet.
Cheese On Toast
Everyone has their own recipe and way of making cheese on toast, a true British classic snack, and I’m no exception. We have a young lad from Trinidad staying with us and I was in the kitchen making my version of cheese on toast. He was stunned. I asked him how he made his. He said he got a piece of toast, scraped some butter on it, put a couple of slices of cheddar on the toast and grilled it for a minute or two. Job done. I said that it was an appallingly amateur attempt. Stand back and watch a master. I hasten to add that Cheese On Toast in Britain is not to be confused with a Grilled Cheese in the States that appears to be simply a cheese sandwich which is then fried in a pan.
I showed the young whipper-snapper how it’s done. Firstly, you have to choose the right bread. I like wholemeal bread and I make my own which means that I can slice it quite thickly. Then comes the cheese. A good blend of grated mature cheddar and Red Leicester. Put in a bowl and add some ground black pepper, a teaspoon of chopped spring onions, add a dollop of mayonnaise and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and mix well. Butter your toasted bread, spread the cheese mixture on it and add a splash of Worcestershire sauce and put under a hot grill for 2 minutes. It is perfection. My Trini friend tried mine and declared that it was the best he’d ever had. If you have a better recipe please put it in the comments. I am willing to try anyone’s cheese-on-toast masterpiece.
That’s it for this time, thanks for reading and hopefully the next time I post on Substack I’ll be back to writing and podcasting. Until then, stay happy and healthy.
Simon JJ Green