Marmite

Hubby came home on Sunday after a fortnight cycling in Germany and Austria. He kept teasing me that most of the 21 other participants were women. I didn’t mind at all – the photos showed how dreadful they looked in Lycra. Apart from one, whom he photographed while riding behind her. This probably explained the expense of the souvenir gift he bought me.

I loved Friends , the American TV comedy series about, well, friends. Each show had a memorable moment, like the one about Rachel losing her engagement ring, and the one about Chandler flirting in a bank’s ATM foyer. Inevitably, the phrase ‘the one about’ became synonymous with the show. Part of its charm was its relatability; the protagonists were always falling out with each other or having a larff at each other’s expense or hugging or crying or being plain stupid.

The debate that refuses to be extinguished: should game shooting be allowed or should it be banned? It’s another platform for impolite society’s handwringing, self-knot tying and moral grandstanding, while polite society couldn’t give a (s)hoot.

If you haven’t been, go on, treat yourself. If you can’t afford to go, do something like we do: save up, play the lottery, ask rellies to give cash instead of tat at birthdays and Christmases, delay your house purchase, cancel your holidays, rob a bank.

Beef featured prominently in my life last week, literally and idiomatically. On Tuesday night, after our er second glass of wine, me and my mate H started on the state of British farming through no fault of the farmers. At one point, I wailed, “Why oh why do we have to trace every beef burger back to one animal? Or even one farm? As long as we know it’s British beef, we know it’s reared to a sufficiently high standard. Just get the beef to the butchers and let them do what they want with it. It would cut costs all along, literally, the food chain.”

Here we go again. The food police, in the guise of insufferable sanctimonious pseudo-celebrity and 15-minute-meal-fraudster Jamie Oliver, and war criminal Tony Blair, are headlined in the Times , pushing for salt and sugar (S&S) taxes to solve the health crisis. The obvious objection to the proposals is that they come from two egomaniacs with no democratic mandate or sufficient knowledge about diet and economics. Oliver is only a celebrity chef, and a failed restauranteur, not a busy housewife, dietician or economist. Blair’s just Blah. Oliver’s recipes rely on too many ingredients, most not that popular with many UK households, and too many steps. I’m a wham-bam-thank-you-man kinda cook. And delicious with it: the meals that is, not me. Oliver’s never going to get people to cook from scratch if they’ve got to get used to lots of unfamiliar ingredients. 

Maybe if I blogged about cooking rather than current affairs I wouldn’t upset people. Except I would. Someone once told me it was insensitive to blog / brag about foie gras and truffle oil when people are relying on food banks. In that case, maybe I shouldn’t write about hiking because some people can’t walk very far. Maybe I shouldn’t discuss art or literature or philosophy or string theory because not everyone is fortunate enough to have had an elitist education. Maybe I shouldn’t use the word elitist because the concept of elitism is probably offensive.