Monday 30 May 2011

Well, that’s all right then: Blatter reassures the world ‘it’s just a family tiff’

good news from Zurich where Fifa’s owner (or is that king, I can never remember) has reassured the world that the world football organisation is not in crisis after all. Well, that really is quite some relief, because I was under the impression that dollars, euros, roubles, pounds and Swiss francs were sloshing around with abandon and that Blatter was a crook. Well, apparently not, it seems. In view of his upcoming coronation on Wednesday to renew his kingship (or would that be ownership – please, someone, set me straight on this one), he thought that it might help that the allegations that
Very he and his cronies were stuffing their pockets and those of others with bribes and backhanders simply wasn’t true. On the other hand two chaps called Jack Warner, up until now his deputy king, and Mohamed Bin Hammamm, who was rather hoping he would be crowned on Wednesday, are most definitely wrong ’uns, according to Blatter, and should not be tolerated in polite society. Or not as the case may be. Fifa’s secretary general (or is that Blatter’s accomplice) insists that comments he had previously made about Bin Hammamm – that the man was a complete scoundrel who had bought the 2022 World Cup final for Qatar – had been ‘taken out of context’. What he meant was that Bin Hammamm was a nice chap, but sometimes he didn’t seem to know how to hold a sherry glass. All very innocent, you see. Nothing to worry about. No, sir. The problem is that Fifa’s main sponsors, Coca Cola and Adidas are beginning to get just the teensiest bit worried. And if there is any stuffing of money by some into the back pockets of others going on, at the end of the day it is their money. So, well, you know, let’s not overstate this, but business is business, and Coke and Adidas would, all things being equal, not want to have their brands associated with what is essentially a gang of crooks. Allegedly. Better get that in. I’m not daft, you know.

Saturday 21 May 2011

What’s cooking (Pt 2): a load of bollocks on TV served with hype and desperation. And thank you, Mr Dylan

If you want to make cheap television, go down the ‘reality show’ route. If you want to make cheap television which has the spurious aura of class make a ‘chefs/cooks competition’ show. Time was when we had simple cookery programmes (and boy did the British need them). I can’t actually remember seeing them, but the granny and grandaddy of them all here in the UK were Fanny and Johnny Craddock. Then there was someone called The Galloping Gourmet, but I can’t even be arsed googling the name to find out who he was. More recently we had Delia Smith, whose career followed the usual trajectory of the Press building her up to be the hero of our times, then to take great delight in knocking her down again as old hat. Though Delia (you only have to use her first name because everyone in Britain knows who you’re talking about) ruled the roost, there was competition — that is they all had their own TV series — from Antony Worrall-Thompson, Rick Stein, some fat Italian bloke, Keith Floyd and briefly Ainsley Harriot (who is stilled billed as a ‘celebrity chef’, although I don’t know why. Incidentally, the very term ‘celebrity chef’ indicates how bloody daft it has all become. For some reason it doesn’t actually sound quite as daft as ‘celebrity accountant’, ‘celebrity manager’ or ‘celebrity bus driver’ but it should. But as we also have celebrity gardeners’ — as in ‘my nan used to go out with Alan Titchmarsh’, I suppose celebrity I’m on a sticky wicket).
Of the younger generation there is Jamie Oliver, and then there was a whole raft of chefs who took part in Ready, Steady Cook, who were all working chefs and whose names gained greater currency because of the show, including Nick Nairn, Ross Burden, James Martin, Tony Tobin and Paul Rankin. So given the popularity of these TV shows you might conclude that the standard of food in Britain has risen. Well, don’t. It’s still usually reheated pigswill. It’s one thing watching a cookery programme and ‘gaining tips’, quite another to put them in practice. For example, despite all the good advice, the method of choice for preparing vegetables in Britain is still to boil them for half-an-hour until they show no sign of life whatsoever. And if even that is too challenging for your soap-hungry family, you can get a full meal — meat and two veg — and your local supermarket for less than the price of a pint. Of why not get something ready-prepared and stick it in the microwave for five minutes?
The irony is that meals don’t have to be prepared in under five minutes, that cooking from scratch is not difficult, and that buying fresh ingredients is not only makes for more enjoyable and healthier meals (all that ready-made stuff has to have all kinds of preservatives in it to ensure it stays ‘fresh’ until it is bought, not to mention the vast amount of salt, sugar and fat included to boost ‘taste’) but cheaper. The meal I described a few days ago — breast of lamb, leeks and new potatoes — cost around £4.50 for four.

. . .

The era of the ‘cookery show’ a la Delia and the others came to an end when they all more or less ran out of dishes to show us. I mean there are only so many times you can demonstrate how to prepare choux pastry, so the next move was to send them all abroad or give them some gimmick. Rick Stein buggered off to cook on French canals, Keith Floyd prepared soufflés on a primus stove in the Serengeti and Ainsley Harriot went back to his roots in the West Indies to bake cakes in an oil drum.
The gimmicks with which ever more desperate broadcasters tried to make their show stand out were several and each even dafter than the last: Two Fat Ladies was presented by two fat ladies who used to travel around on a motor bike and only came to and end when one of the fat ladies died. ‘One Fat Lady’ doesn’t have quite the same appeal. That seems to have led to The Hairy Bikers whose sole qualifications for having their own cookery show is that they are both hairy, bearded and fat. But neither is

The Hairy Bikers: redefining cooking for the modern world

a cook or has had any cookery experience at all, although what is in their favour is that they are ‘northern’, which, in the whacky world of TV, spells ‘sincerity’ and ‘lovability’. They also have the common touch (which always goes down well in Britain. It usually means that neither they nor their audience is in the least bit embarrassed when they wipe their noses on their sleeves and fart loudly. In fact, it shows they are ‘down to earth’. ‘My mam always used to say “Better out than in”, pet. Shall I do it again?’ Loud laughs and cheers all round.
Once the broadcasters had run out of countries to visit, and I don’t doubt they will have some pillock preparing a three-course meal on Mars just as soon as it becomes technically feasible to get him or her there, the next move was to introduce the element of competition. So now we have Masterchef, in which amateur cooks engage in a cook-off, with the prize being a job with some well-known chef or other, and, of course, the very, very inevitable celebrity version of the show called Celebrity Masterchef (now there’s a surprise). In Hell’s Kitchen, a chap called Gordon Ramsay makes life a misery for those taking part, the rationale being that there is tremendous pressure on chefs when they are working in anger (so to speak) so they had better get used to it. That show led on to another Gordon Ramsay vehicle called The F-word, because apparently Ramsay says ‘fuck’ a lot and for TV execs that kind of thing is important, darling. Typical of this latest trend is the Great British Menu, which pitches professional chefs from around Britain against each other, with the winner being asked to cook a four-course meal for — in the past — The Queen, the British ambassador to France and the Prince of Wales.
What I find so irritating about these shows is the spurious ‘excitement’ and ‘drama’ they all try to introduce into the format. Everything is against the clock and a collapsed soufflé is a tragedy. Then there’s the hype: every single fucking cook taking part is ‘passionate’ about cooking, ‘passionate’ about using fresh vegetables, ‘passionate’ about making sure they use the right size pan, ‘desperate’ to get it right, ‘unbelievably thrilled’ to have reached the third stage of the preliminary rounds and ‘completely and utterly gutted’ when they don’t. And it’s always, always, always ‘amazing’ when they beat their competitors. Oh for a modest ‘yes, I’m rather pleased I won’, ‘well, I do like to get it right if possible’ and ‘oh, well, I’ll try again next year’.
I can’t deny that were I a broadcaster and was charged with coming up with new ideas for programmes, I would also be clutching at straws, so in a sense my gentle rant is rather unfair, but has no one thought to cut back on quantity and aim for quality?

. . .

Next Tuesday, on May 24, Bob Dylan will be 70 years old, and already a round of the usual brouhaha is being published, with everything adding their usual schtick, so get ready for a welter of nauseating saccharine hagiography - ‘voice of a generation’, ‘he spoke for us all’, ‘protest came of age’, ‘redefined cooking for the modern world’ (no sorry, that’s the Hairy Bikers), ‘an earthquake in modern music’, ‘protestor, poet, propet – all the usual bollocks. The Daily Telegraph here in England, which makes it a condition that readers are over 50 and/or have served in the Armed Forces, ran a piece along the lines of ‘doesn’t matter if you have one foot in the grave – so do Dylan, the Stones, The Who and everyone else you wet your knickers/pants over 170 years ago’. Well, bugger all that. I just think he is a great songwriter, had – has – a – though admittedly unusual – voice and in a world where everyone tries so desperately to be a one-off, he is one without even trying.
To this day I get a chill up my spine whenever I hear the first chord of Like A Rolling Stone. (Another song that does that for me is Aretha Franklin’s version of Say A Little Prayer.) People often say about someone great ‘there’ll never be anyone like him’, but that’s nonsense. Of course there’ll sooner or later be someone of similar, perhaps even greater, stature, but I reckon we’ll be waiting some time.
Below are a few photos of the man himself, taken at different stages of his life are below. Incidentally, I could have written in the title to this blog entry ‘Thank you, Mr Zimmerman’, as that was his real name. But that strikes me as pretentious way beyond the call of duty.
Happy birthday, Mr Dylan.

Monday 16 May 2011

Sex-mad naked Frenchman chases chambermaid down hotel corridor! And British politician forgets his manners! A comparative analysis of the rationalist and empirical approach to scandal with especial emphasis on the tawdry and the dull

In view of the latest scandal involving a French politician, or in this case, a would-be French politician, no one could claim that life is always far less interesting than art. And it also goes to show that life can be just as outrageously clichéd as art: a naked Frenchman chases a chambermaid down the corridor to give her one. As one of our homegrown male Glenda Slaggs would put it: you couldn’t make it up. Incidentally, foreign readers who are rather baffled by my second reference in as many days to Glenda Slagg can go here to find out who she is.
By comparison with the latest Gallic misdemeanour, our current British scandal is pretty small beer. In fact, I feel honour-bound to describe it as a ‘scandal’ it is so pathetically unexciting: several years ago a leading Lib Dem politician got someone else to take the rap when he was caught speeding so he could avoid being banned from driving for six months. Shocked? No, I didn’t think so, but to be on the safe side, I’d best stick in an ‘allegedly’ – he ‘allegedly’ asked someone else to take the rap – Lord, I think I’m going to sleep. (Slightly off-topic – Q: Why did New York get all the crooks and Washington all the lawyers? A: New York had first choice. Having said that, if I had my time all over again, I think I should have tried for the law. But back to my comparative analysis of scandal and how French rationalist scandals beat our British empirical scandals into a cocked hat.)
Depending on how po-faced you are, the French scandal tends to make you smile and eager for further details, while the British ‘scandal’ simply makes you yawn and turn the page of your newspaper in search of last year’s shipping forecast. Certainly, for the chambermaid involved, who is claiming the randy Frenchman actually tried to rape her, it cannot at all have been amusing, but the rest of us are such salacious beasts who are only too delighted to read of the misfortune’s of others that I’m sure we can square it with our sensitivities when we burst out laughing reading the details.
Both scandals – i.e. the one scandal and the other ‘scandal’ – are shot through with the irony that what did or did not happen is way less important than the implications of possible consequences. For the randy Frenchman, who I gather is described as a chaud lapin
by those pretentious enough to drop in French phrases in an otherwise impeccably English piece of prose, was a chap called Dominique Strauss-Kahn (left) who is – or by now perhaps that should be ‘was’ – the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and who intended throwing his hat into the ring to become the Left’s candidate at the next French presidential election. Well, he can stick that ambition in the file marked ‘if only’. More to the point, the IMF is currently working with the EU to help cough up the readies to haul Greece, Portugal and Ireland out of the financial shit. As we know, Greece is already holding out its hand for a second bite of the cherry and given that, not putting too fine a point on it, the future of the euro and quite possibly the EU itself in its present form are at stake, the EU was rather hoping it would all go very smoothly. Well, the bureaucratic side of it all has every chance of going smoothly – it’s those damn money markets everyone is worried about. For if it doesn’t go smoothly and Greece, as I suspect, decides to hold two fingers up to the EU (on which it has form: it more or less did the same when it told lies about its finances to join the euro in the first place) and revive the drachma, it could certainly meadn the end for the euro and, quite possibly, the EU ‘project’.
A second complication which could also have rather more far-reaching consequences than is at first apparent is the question of who will be Strauss-Kahn’s successor. For Dominique had already handed in his notice and was due to leave the MD’s job at the IMF in four weeks in order to start preparing for the big one. And his deputy is also due to leave. Given the delicate nature of the various bailouts, it would suit Europe if the IMF, which is coughing up some of the money, were led by a European. This one is always a ticklish problem as many non-Europeans get rather shirty about the job invariably going to a white honky. Now those who demand the new MD should not be a European have a far stronger hand. Trouble is, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is due to host the next G45 meeting (or is it G7, no G8? No, of course G20), thinks he will look rather foolish if the IMF doesn’t have a European in charge when everyone gathers for drinks and canapés at the Elysee Palace. And French presidents don’t like looking foolish, especially if they are only 5ft tall and are invariably towered over by everyone else except North Africans.
This blog’s France correspondents haven’t yet been in touch to inform me of the mood in the street, but I think the days are over when a Frenchman who is caught with his trousers down
is awarded treble brownie points. Strauss-Kahn has form on that front, having previously faced an attempted rape claim (though, note, no charge) and another scandal a while ago when he was shagging one of his subordinates. But feminism has quite a foothold in France and I reckon even quite a few guys will read of the man’s latest exploits and tell themselves he’s a bit of a plonker. Things still haven’t reached that stage in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi gets ever better poll ratings among men every time he is caught out servicing one of his many ‘nieces’. Italian women, of course, have long thought of him as just another sad old tart.
Pictured is a chambermaid much like the kind Dominique Strauss-Kahn apparently finds quite irresistible

. . .

There are rather dire implications in our very own ‘scandal’. No one actually gives a flying fuck whether or not the politician involved, a rather oily chap called Christopher Huhne (pictured below with his wife Vicky) did or did not ask someone else to
take the rap for allegedly speeding, especially as the story came from the wife he ditched in favour of his new squeeze, a lesbian pole dancer (or bus conductor, I still haven’t been able to establish which it is). She, quite naturally, can’t be at all happy about being ditched, so no one is surprised she blew the gaff. At first she said Chris had asked ‘someone’ to take the rap but wouldn’t reveal who the ‘someone’ was. Now we know she was the ‘someone’, so Vicky is either telling the truth or a very stupid liar. If Chris did actually do what she claims he did (and, yes, I think I falling asleep again, too), he would be guilty of a criminal offence which can carry a jail term. But none of that is what makes it interesting. What makes it rather juicy – OK, as juicy as these things can get in Old Blighty – is the background of the Coalition government, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s growing unpopularity and the suspicion among Lib Dems that he is a bit of a pushover, and the ambitions of the ballroom dancer and part-time politician Vince Cable as well as our very own Chris Huhne to oust young Nick (who I understand had his first shave two weeks ago) and take over. And they, they promise their disaffected Lib Dems will be a damn sight tougher on the bloody Tories than Nick. Oh yes!
Well, what with this ‘scandal’, that would seem to leave Chris out of the running to oust Cleggy, and I just can’t see the faithful taking tippy-toes Cable seriously as an assassin (who reputedly never get the crown anyway), which would leave Cleggy pretty much still in place.
There is one more Lib Dem troublemaker doing the rounds with both eyes on the leadership, one Simon Hughes, who also long ago had ambitions to head up the party, but nothing ever seemed to go right for him on that score. For one thing, for a while he denied being gay, which didn’t go down well with the Lib Dems who don’t mind a gay one little bit, but then came clean and said that although he wasn’t actually gay, he did bat for both sides if and when. That went down even less well, not because the Lib Dems mind a chap or chappess batting for both sides, but they were rather miffed that he didn’t come clean from the outset. There is also a very horrible story I was told about Simon Hughes, but it is so disgusting that I have decided not to believe it and shan’t recount it here.
I should imagine that the only one laughing his socks off at Chris Huhne’s discomfiture is David Cameron, who really is getting a lucky ride. Things were getting a little hairy for David before the speeding ‘scandal’ blew up in as far as Huhne, a Cabinet minister, was causing all sorts of trouble in Cabinet and generally gaining brownie points with the disaffected Lib Dems who want to see the fucking Tories get a fucking bloody nose. (‘Bloody toff scum! Bastards!) Now, he is utterly neutralised, and it looks as though he will stay that way. So David can stick with young Cleggy who despite promising to ‘get tough’ with the Tories (‘I’m going to bloody well start swearing and banging my fist on the table and that kind of thing! You just wait! I’m not nice, I’m really not!) and put into practice something he calls ‘muscular liberalism’ (which sounds so phoney, I can’t even think of a joke. Well, I can but I’m not going to waste it on crap like that).
The Lib Dems are, of course, a goldmine for the Cameron. Without them, he couldn’t have formed a government and that keeps his right-wing in place for the time being. But it also means that all the crap that’s going down over the cuts can be shared with the Lib Dems. In fact, the Lib Dems can be made to carry more than their fair share in such underhand behaviour — bloody Tory toffs roaming the country snatching the bread from the mouths of babes in arms — is quite naturally only to be expected from the Conservatives but not from theose nice fluffy Lib Dems. So when the Lib Dems are guilty of that kind of behaviour, it is twice as bad. (At this point it is worth repeating a comment overheard by one political commentator at last September’s Lib Dem annual conference six months in to the Coalition government. My Lib Dems were very unhappy indeed about their party jumping into bed with those nasty Tory toffs, and one delegate was heard to complain bitterly: ‘I didn’t vote Liberal Democrat to form the government.’ That says it all, really.) So Cameron doesn’t have to do half of all the things the Tory right want him today, excusing himself by saying the Lib Dems won’t stand for it. And he can more or less dictate to the Lib Dems what he does want to do because they know that this is their first sniff at real power in more than 80 years and they don’t want to blow it. In fact, they already have: at the local government elections two weeks ago they were utterly hammered. So as far as they are concerned let the Coalition continue, because if it collapsed and there were a general election, they would no longer have 50/60 seats as they have been accustomed to, but would be back down into almost single figures as they once were when they were nothing but a joke. Actually, from where I sit, they still are a joke, but that’s another entry. Right, I’m off to chase a chambermaid or two.

. . .

And so it goes on, with the euro lurching from dire straits to outright danger, all brought about because the rescuers can’t agree on the right thing to do. They are all agreed that those feckless Greeks most definitely need another several billions in handouts to ensure the country doesn’t grind to a halt. The problem is that the Germans (and I must declare I find them a rather more practical folk when it comes to economic efficiency than some of the other wallies abroad in Europe) who will be coughin up most of the rescue cash are insisting that the ‘plan’ - the Greeks must pull in their belts, cut wages and generally ensure everyone has a miserable existence while their debt is paid off - must be fine-tuned, or even tuned and not so finely. They are in favour of changing the terms of the debt repayment and allowing the Greeks a greater latitude in how they get the money as long as in time the debt is paid off. No sir! say the hardliners from the European Central Bank: forget about debt restructuring, just pull in your belts even more! This alarms the Germans who believe that it will simply piss off the Greeks who will get to the point where they simply say ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, we’re off’, leave the euro and revive the drachma. And they have a point. For one thing, the Greeks could solve their economic problems at a stroke by devaluing the drachma (which would mean loads of cheap Greek island holidays for the hard-pressed Brits who like nothing better than getting takned up on ouzo and shagging a couple of slags from Nottingham), and relaxing once more. It’s at this point, of course, that the ideal of a universal brotherhood of right-thinking Europeans will be put to the test. And, I am rather certain, fail. Institutions can count themselves to be a success when they weather the bad times. The EU was hunky-dory when times were good (an illusion, we now know, built on excessive consumer borrowing and unrealistic cheap Chinese imports, but now the seas have got considerably rougher, the good ship is leaking like a sieve. Now there’s a surprise.

Sunday 15 May 2011

Wives, or a more personal take on this blog. Time to get in touch with my inner whinger

Bit of slightly dramatic time here at home today (and only an Englishman could diminish drama in that way, but there you go, rather that than try to big everything up as some do and lose touch with reality - © US of A - I’ll keep it low-key). And that got me thinking, yet again, that this blog has rather lost touch with what ‘a personal blog’ of the kind I set out to write – part diary, part commonplace book – could be accepted to be. The trouble is that I’m battling against myself: I have long thought that writing is always rather – if not entirely - pointless if, at some point, what is written is not read by at least one other person. And a corollary of that is the more you are read, the more ‘successful’ your writing. Just ask any novelist or Glenda Slagg (©Private Eye, would-be satirist to this parish).

Yet the more you are read and the more relatives, friends and acquaintances read your ramblings, the more circumspect you are obliged to be, or rather, the more circumspect I have become. I mean, to put it bluntly, no one shits in public however great the temptation to slag people off while they have no means of replying.

A diary is utterly different to this kind of thing, this blog – ‘weblog’ - because, a diary is only read if you become famous and are vain enough to publish it; were once famous and some bloody publishers reckons there are a few pennies to be made from publishing it; your diary is happened upon and secretly read; or you are vain enough to circulate it while it is being written. Incidentally, many people claim they write their diary ‘only for themselves’. Well, perhaps it’s the cynic in me which is inclined to jeer, but: pull the other one, sunshine.

According to the statistics, this blog is being accessed in countries around the world and I am being read by several in the UK, the U.S., Germany, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Slovenia, Italy and the Lord knows where else. (No one, it seems, in South America has bothered to linger which means that this kind of thing is not really for them or I am not writing enough about salsa, women, inflation drugs and – well, inflation). I am almost quite certain that none of those who does read this and perhaps returns gives a rat’s arse about my life or any of its details because, naturally, they are far more concerned with their own lives and its details. But the more I am read, the more, being an English sort of chap, don’t you know, with at least four ready furled umbrellas just waiting to be hauled out at the first sign of pleasant weather, I get ever more reticent about writing personally and, specifically, my feelings. Yet, as it happens, that is exactly what, on occasion, I want to do.

. . .

The picture below is Harriet Harman, satirised by those on the right who think their comment is funny, as ‘Harriet Harpson’. I don’t know her from Eve, though I did once

bump into her in Westminster as she was pushing her way out of the door of (I think) Portcullis House, a then new block of offices built for MPs in the early Nineties. I have no idea at all what kind of wife sweet Harriet is or whether or not her marriage is happy, but googling for a ‘cartoon harridan’, I came across this, and it will do.

Harriet, the scion of ‘a good family’ (she's the eldest daughter of Earl Moneybags of Gresham - motto No Bribe To Great To Pay) who went to private school and is generally rather well off, fights bitterly to improve the lot of her sisters. I’ve always thought she was something of a pain in the arse so perhaps the photo is apt. Complaints, please, to the usual address.

. . .

When I first started this blog, I mentioned that is was in direct line to a written diary I had kept from around 1980 to 1995. I got the idea for that after reading that the editor of novelist John Steinbeck had come up with an solution after Steinbeck complained of ‘writer’s block’. He bought him an A4 ledger and urged him to write him a letter on the left hand pages of that letter by way of warming up his writing muscles and then, when he felt able to, to write his novels on the right hand pages.

Steinbeck says the ruse worked. So I, who had always been a ‘writer manque’ (see entries passim) but who was ashamedly conscious (and still is) of having written embarrassingly little, thought that might be the solution. I bought an hardback A4 lined ledger and began keeping a ‘diary’ which was also as much a commonplace book. I don’t think it was especially personal until about 1983/4 when I split with a girlfriend called Sian who was the only woman I should ever have married. I can’t for the life of me understand why I split from her except to suggest it might have been some kind of commitment phobia but, more relevantly, a delayed grief ove the death of my mother in 1980. (I thought I had come to turns with that remarkably well, but looking back all I had done was to suppress emotions which, as they always will, will escape in some other way.)

In the years which followed that split I wasn’t short of girlfriends or bedmates, but I always, always, always hankered after Sian and recorded my feelings in that diary. Similarly today I wanted to record my thoughts about marriage in general and my marriage in particular, but, so far, have held back. I shall sleep on it and decide whether I might record my feelings after all. As a possible taster – remember, I might not write a word – any entry will run along the lines of

1) If you are being treated like a piece of shit, isn’t it, in the long run your fault, in as far as you could really put a stop to it? (For the slow-witted): that is a rhetorical question to which the answer is Yes.
2) My suspicion that of all marriages something like one in five is generally rather overall happy, one in five is hell overall and the rest are nothing special at all. One a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is Hell On Earth and 100 is Pure Heaven, I would give mine about a 28. I shan’t go into the background of how it all happened but it certainly wasn’t any of that ‘Moon in June’ stuff. I was 45 when I married and if at the age you still believe in true love, you are either bonkers or dead. A subsidiary blog entry to those thoughts might be to ask how culpable are all those Hollywood (and, I suspose Bollywood) films we all watch while growing up in giving us a wholly, completely and utterly unrealistic notion of what love is? As far as they are concerned you meet ‘the right one’ and after that it’s heaven on earth. Well, bollocks to that, especially if the one you marry is not and never could have been ‘the right one’ and it turns out that she has a personality which might possibly be affected by mild Asperger’s. (Keep up you slowcoaches there in the back: yes, my wife, my first and, so far, only wife.)

Friday 13 May 2011

What’s cooking? Well, tonight, breast of lamb with leeks and new potatoes and a dash of rebellion, another car crash (my 19th and I’ll soon have the set) and a warning to Old Farts the world over, irrespective of colour, creed, politics or gender

I am not a bad cook. I shan’t be immodest and claim to be a good cook, but I shall claim to be able to produce tasty meals if and when I have to. And I am a better cook than some, perhaps even many. But I have had my fair share of - I won’t call them disasters, but failures, most recently when I tried to prepare a Spanish prawn and chilli dish which is served as tapas in Spain. It is essentially a simple dish which it is virtually impossible to cock up, but, friends, that did not deter me and what I served up to my stepmother and, crucially, my sister, was ‘a failure’. It didn’t taste awful or anything like that, it just wasn’t immediately identifiable as anything much.
There are many ‘recipes’ for this particular prawn dish - that is there are many ways of preparing it - and I followed one which I had seen on BBC TV which involved tomato puree. Not many of the others do, actually. In fact hardly any others do, but this one did, and sadly what I ended up with was more or less a rather thick and spicy tomato soup with prawns. That is, what I ended up with was nothing special at all. Please believe me that it did not taste bad at all (I mention that because some disasters can taste bloody awful), but after the build-up of ‘preparing a meal for you two’ - my stepmother and sister - I did feel very foolish.
But even though I say so myself, as a general rule, I have far more successes than failures. I mention this because although I enjoy cooking and I enjoy eating, I have not been allowed to cook since I was married 15 years ago, and furthermore I haven’t yet enjoyed any of the home-cooked food my wife has produced. Were you to ask her why she doesn’t allow me to cook her at home, she would give you any number of reasons - ‘he makes a mess’, ‘he cooks things the children don’t like’, ‘he takes too long’ - all of which are, I have to say, nonsense. The simple fact is that she want to be in charge most of the time, and especially in charge in the kitchen. Fair enough, and anything for a quite life, but the price I pay is being served up food which is about bad canteen standard in a good day. And having been brought up by a mother who could cook and cook rather well, that is something of a sore point. When I retire, there will be wholesale changes in the household and budgeting for food and cooking will be one of them.
That was all a rather long preamble to the announcement that I am cooking tonight and, for obvious reasons, I hope to bloody God it isn’t ‘a disaster’ of any kind. I happened like this: there are many parts of pigs, lambs and cattle which are just as tasty as the bits we usually eat, but, for one reason of another, are ignored. I like liver and kidney, I like belly pork and I like breast of lamb. Recently I spotted a tray of ready-prepared breast of lamb in the supermarket and bought four. Not only is it tasty, it is also cheap. But my wife didn’t roast them, she braised them and they were pretty much pretty awful, and, as usual, in that obscure way these things happen, I took the blame for a meal no one enjoyed. I didn’t tell her that what she had cooked was awful - I can be  tactful sometimes - but I did tell her that she should not have braised the lamb but roasted it. She insisted that ‘roasting’ and ‘braising’ are the same and it is her habit - her extremely annoying habit - to argue her case until she is blue in the face whether or not she knows she is talking complete bollocks, which in this case she was. I was determined to show her that ‘roasting’ is not the same as ‘braising’ and that breast of lamb can be very tasty indeed. So the lamb is roasting away nicely sprinkled with rosemary, pepper and olive oil, and will be served with roasted onions, new potatoes
and flash-fried leeks. (Right, and still uncooked. I like leeks to be just done, still al dente. I don’t like bits of sad, floppy looking generic vegetable knocking around aimlessly in a stew not knowing what they are supposed to be doing and caring even less.)

. . .

UPDATE: Well, we finished supper about an hour ago (taking just over 15 minutes to do so, another of my gripes - I rather like spending quite some time over a meal, talking, eating, talking, eating, in any order. This mad dash to eat up ‘because Corrie/EastEnders/Britain’s Got Talent/Celebrity Shagging is on in a minute’ pisses me off more than I can say) and the response was as I feared.

I am not talking here about my children’s response as I feel they are still developing (by which I mean they can still be salvaged), but my wife’s. But first things first, and you must accept that I am being entirely truthful. Given that all I had prepared was breast of lamb (ready-rolled and stuffed), new potatoes and leeks braised in butter and given that it isn’t actually haut cuisine, it was 100 per cent successful. No ‘failure’ this time. I had roasted onions with the lamb and they were just right: sweetly carmelised without being at all burnt. The leeks, too, were just right (they have to be done at the last moment as everyone is sitting down - leave it too long and they are just floppy bits of vegetable, nice enough, but not as nice as they can be). The potatoes, well, they were just new boiled new potatoes. I did nothing special with them at all except to wish them God speed and to promise to remember them in my will (one of the easiest compliments to pay anyone. Once you have died, the will is published and you are shown to have lied through your teeth, well, you’re dead. What can they do?) I might also have made a simply gravy, but my wife is a coeliac (‘gluten-intolerant’ for those who aren’t addicted to the newspapers health pages), and apart from possibly using creme fraiche, which I had forgotten to buy today, I was stuck.

The response: well, it seems my children and my wife are far, far too grand for a cut as modest as breast of lamb. My daughter made great play of ‘cutting off the fat’ and apparently discovering that once she had done so, there was no meat. That was odd, because rather than let it be thrown away, I took what she had discarded and found some rather nicely roasted pieces of lamb. My son, on the other hand, finished all his meat (and had commented earlier while the lamb was still roasting that it ‘smelled nice’) but left his potatoes and most of his leeks.
It pains me to say so, but at 11 going on 12 (on May 25) and 14 going on 15 (on August 7), my two glorious children have been rather badly brought up, in this case by my wife. I accept none of the blame. Indulgence is not necessarily a bad thing, but the child being indulged must be made fully aware that he or she is being indulged and must not be allowed to forget the fact or else they are simply spoilt beyond reason. But I suspect as far as that is concerned those who know what I am talking about agree with me completely and those who haven’t a clue are asking themselves ‘who is this ante-deluvian moron?’ So I’ll leave it there. But as I say, I am an optimist and believe that despite, in this respect, an unfortunate start in life, my children, who are both essentially good-hearted and - I’ll put it this way - not completely stupid, can I believe still be salvaged. It might take some hard knocks later on in life, but that, too, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

As for my wife, well what didn’t she criticise? I should count myself lucky that she had nothing to say about a possible inadequate percentage of carbon in the stainless steel cutlery, but apart from that it was a massacre. It is remarkable how much can be conveyed silently, but with the faintest of gestures and facial ticks. You’d think she suspected I was trying to poison her. Still, believe me or don’t, it was a very tasty meal, far, far tastier than anything I have eaten in this household since last I cooked. The secret, I think, is to develop an even thicker skin. That Bin Laden, he doesn’t know how lucky he was. But I am not going to be put off. You bet I’m not. When it comes to eating, I prefer food, not swill. My one mistake tonight, perhaps, was telling my wife as much.

. . .

The most exciting news from yesterday (I am writing this the day after my gala meal featuring breast of lamb, new potatoes and leeks) is that I ran into the back of some idiot on Wentford Bridge while I was on my way to pick up my children from the school bus. The stupid woman suddenly braked to avoid running over a stoat or a weasel (which safely made it to the other side of the road, you’ll be pleased to hear - I saw it scamper away yelling ‘nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me’), I immediately braked, too, but still went into the back of her mini Chelsea tractor. She had the spare tyre stuck to the back of her car, which is the practice with these bloody vehicles and strikes me as nothing more than unashamed showing off, lending the car a spurious ruggedness which screams ‘I’m tough!’ (The Worshipful Company of Car Dealers And Other Assorted Crooks commissioned a survey last year to find out how many of these very popular - very, very popular with people who live in nice, well-ordered, middle-class suburbs - off-road 4x4s were actually driven off-road. The answer was: none at all. Not one. The closest they come to being driven off-road is when they move to the verge to make way for the Queen.) I will grant that her bloody vehicle was tough enough to escape any damage whatsoever, whereas my effete Rover received a right battering.

The police refused point blank to get involved, which was a blow, because I’m sure they could have testified that the whole incident was her bloody fault. Apparently, it is now ‘policy’ not to ‘attend’ ‘road traffic accidents’ unless the road is blocked, there is an injury, or Lord Lucan was spotted on the scene riding Shergar. Bastards.
What is most irritating about it all is that in this instance I was wholly blameless in that I wasn’t speeding, I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t in a rush and none of this would have happened unless this bloody woman had not braked suddenly. But I am bound to admit that I have something of a reputation in my family for crashing cars, and this episode will do nothing to persuade anyone that that reputation is unwarranted.
The only slight silver lining to all this is that I am taking a week off work next week and so will have enough time to get myself a new set off wheels.

I’m assuming that repairing what has been done - the radiator is also badly damaged - will top the £55 the car cost me in the first place, so strictly speaking she is a right-off. The second silver lining is that I because of the puzzles work I do on the side for the Mail, I have a couple of pounds put by and so won’t have to go into debt getting another car. And the third silver lining is that hereabouts in rural Nowheresville, any middle-class sort of chap with the right accent and who knows how to hold a gin and tonic correctly is invited for drinks with the Lord Lieutenant of the county if he is involved in more than three crashes (‘RTAs’ in police speak) in two years. I’m pleased to say I qualify on all counts and look forward to receiving my invitation.

. . .

The usual refrain of Old Farts here in Britain, but, I should imagine, also the world over – why should black, brown, red or yellow Old Farts be any different to the white variety? – is that ‘ah, they good days are over, they – comedians,/divas/clever politicians/sportsmen and women/actors – just aren’t what they used to be. Well, might this Old Fart (62 in November, can’t get a hard on, and would prefer to go to bed at 8pm than 12pm) register a note of dissent. And if your answer is ‘no, you can’t’, all I can say is ‘fuck you, I’m going to anyway.
I can confidently predict that there is any number of comedians/divas/clever politicians/fabulour sportsmen and women/actors who might well be, at this point in time (that was once a cliché, but in this instance I rather think it isn’t) unborn. They don’t yet exist. The twinkle in their dad’s eye which signals that he might well like to shag their mother and conceive the chap/chappess is not yet apparent.
I write all this as a Manchester United supporter, a club which is managed by a great, great manager called Alex Ferguson. But I also write after having watched just a few hours ago the English FA Cup final between Manchester City and Stoke. From the off, City were the better side, classier, more elegant, more tighter, but as can often be the case their sophisticated game was up to a point neutralised by Stoke’s rough and ready, muscular approach. At half-time the score was 0-0, and it wasn’t until well into the second half that Yaya Toure scored what was to prove the winning goal. But, I hear the clamour around the world, what has this to do with Old Farts and their penchant for dissing everything not at least 30 years old. Well, friends, I shall tell you.
City are and have been for many, many years one of United’s arch-rivals. As a rule United were invariably way in front with City being one of those Premier Leagues/First Division teams which tagged along. Chelsea were once also such a team, as are – are, I’m afraid – Aston Villa, and West Ham.
But given that City beat United in the FA Cup semi-final this year and did United out of a possible second treble United won the League, the Cup and the Champions League all in the same year 12 years ago) and given that City have qualified of the Champions League next year and given that the riches of whoever owns them – some bloody sultan or other with more money than sense and most definitely more money than any love or knowledge of football – football in England is shaping up rather well.
After he game and before setting fingers to keyboard to write this particular instalment of waffle, I googled City’s manager Roberto Mancini to find out more about the chap. And he has some history. After a rather glorious playing career when he also played for Italy, he went into management and did very well, particularly with Inter Milan, but the buggers sacked him after four years, reputedly for not winning the Champions League.

We are now at the end of the season. United, under Sir Alex Ferguson, have won the League (for a record 19th time), and in two weeks take on Barcelona in the Champion’s League final. City, under Roberto Mancini, have now won the silverware they have craved since 1976 (statistic courtesy of whoever was commentating in ITV – don’t ever think I know what I am talking about), have, it would seem, finally escaped their also-ran status and are contenders in a way which is not brave, alcohol-fuelled braggadocio. Spurs didn’t get to the Champion’s League next season, but by no means disgraced themselves this season and are back where they belong. Liverpool also seem to finally have shrugged off all the bad times, will be competing in the Champion’s League next season and are once again realistic contenders for the League title. And Kenny Dalglish is now managing them. Chelsea? Well, Chelsea were always rather fragranted wide-boys – would that be ‘narrow boys with rather nice hips – but have achieve prominence because their owner had the billions necessary to buy good players. Yet despite that they are well managed, and they, too, despite the dubious provenance of their reputation, are contenders. And all that means that next year should be one hell of a season, though given the nature of money, power and ego, perhaps Carlo Ancelloti will not be leading them next year. Shame, and I’m sure he will be crying all the way to the bank to deposit his £6 million pay-off (as in the rest of his contract, though, as of today he hasn’t yet been sacked).

So what has this to do with Old Farts (of whatever colour, creed, race, sexual orientation or, I suppose, gender)? Simpy this: fuck off and go bore someone else. The future is where it will always be.