Reboots

In recent times, meaning the period in which social media has risen and conquered the recording of history present and past, along with so much else (also known as the New Dark Ages among the enlightened and the Knew Dark Ages among the wits, so called because of the effect that social media has had on truth and by extension knowledge), the time of year associated with rebirth has shifted, from New Year’s Day to Midwinter’s Day.
This is in part because of the association of Midwinter’s Day with the longest period of darkness, meaning that once the Shortest Day is over, the days start getting longer and lighter and generally better, until the wonder that is the Clock Change arrives and everyone is back to commuting in darkness again until summer arrives in England, usually scheduled for late August.
There is something undeniably rebirthy about Midwinter’s Day, the Shortest Day, call it what you will.  Oddly, few if any refer to it as the Longest Night.  This is probably because there is an ancestor-memory aversion to contemplating extended periods of darkness, doing so will lead one to Google cures for Seasonal Affected Disorder, and also give rise to an odd compulsion to light fires in caves, or inconveniently the modern equivalent thereof - normally an airing cupboard, or paint the walls with pictures of woolly mammoths.
There is no doubt that days getting longer and lighter are a good thing, good for those who like to sport shorts, good for those who enjoy outdoor stuff, bad for vampires yes but, you know, everything comes at a cost and since the Brexit referendum those Transylvanian bloodsuckers, literally, can bugger off back to their own country.
What hasn’t happened, yet, is the moneytisation of Midwinter’s Day, with the exception of the National Trust who treble the cost of parking at Stonehenge that day.
New Year’s Day, however, now that’s all about the rebirth.  It’s all about the Brand New You, because the Old You is fucked, let’s face it.
First of all, you’re too fat.  You must be, given the huge number of diets that launch in the New Year.  Possibly the problem is down to the increasing use of fats and sugars in our processed food and food manufacturers not being as transparent as they might be about what’s in the food, while food sellers push two for one deals on unhealthy stuff and fizzy drinks but rarely on lobster.
In addition, let’s be honest, you have just come out of a Christmas where you, as an adult, had an entire selection box for breakfast at least once, and have, if you have the means and are lucky enough, have not stopped eating leftovers since 3:15pm on Christmas Day.  Let us be quite clear, there is no upper limit to the tolerance of the average British male to a turkey sandwich if he is offered one.
Second of all, you’re too stupid.  That’s why at New Year you will be offered the opportunity to begin collecting partworks about WWII, HMS Victory, or Elizabethan knot gardens (free seed packet with first issue).  You may think that you could educate yourself by watching the ‘Yesterday’ channel, a lot, but the real scholar recognises that only by buying what is essentially a collection of Wikipedia articles, printed out in 200 separate weekly magazines, will you become an authority on any subject.
Know a male by his strata of literature.
Lying on his bed, a paperback by Stephen King.
Under the mattress, Razzle (other mags are available, I am given to understand).
Under the bed, 74 copies of ‘History and that’ or similar, collection abandoned when interest waned because they had covered all the good stuff by issue 12.
So the new year can be a time of rebirth or, this being the Century of the Fruitbat, reboot, or even reimagining.
G&P has been on a two year sabbatical, more or less.  There have been some specials, some more special than others, but bluntly there is so much going on that one feels it is almost a moral duty to write blog posts that nobody will ever read.  Time to reboot.  Up the arse.

Postcard from Corsica – eat, drink, drive.

As an island, there’s a premium on anything that has to be imported to Corsica. This means that the food in the markets tends to be simple but, because it is all locally grown or made, it’s all good. I think the term normally applied is rustic, which means that 90% of the diet comes from something you kill, and around half of that is killed in the traditional Corsican manner, that is, poached.

Because of their antipathy towards France, the Corsican’s have taken France’s sole contribution to world cuisine, killing things cruelly, and turned it on its head. The Corsicans have invented ethical veal. That is, veal that is allowed to gambol wild and free rather than living in a crate. Okay, so we’re still talking about killing calfs, but by applying ethical dilemma test number 1: does it taste good? I find that I’m okay with that.

So the majority of the food is meat and the rest of locally grown vegetables. You can tell that they are locally grown because they have clumps of soil on them. This makes the tourists coo with delight at the authenticity of the carrots and makes the shop keepers coo with delight because the veg is sold by weight and the tourists are essentially buying dirt.

The local wine is very local. In the valley inland from St Florent in the north of the island sit lots of little vineyards. These sit on the valley floor and then climb the hills until the vines are clinging precariously. The vinyard stops where the tractor used to harvest the grapes topples over. This is no rustic heritage site with horny footed sons of toil treading the grapes. The crop is collected in a big trailer and tipped into a huge press thing and the end result is either bottled, or sent to the shop in the town.

These are interesting places, most of the vineyards have a presence in the town, usually a sort of hole in the wall place selling bottles of wine…and containing two stainless steel tanks about seven foot high and three foot wide. At the bottom of these lies curled a hose and they look for all the world like petrol pumps. What you do is take along your two litre plastic demijohn and get it filled with either red or rose. Because this costs you two euros for two litres, I suspect that what you actually get is rough red or rough rose and one hell of a head the next morning but what you save on the wine you can use to buy paracetamol, or a new liver from a Turkish boy on eBay.

The main industry on the island is tourism, goats, wild boar and wine. If they actually did get independence, the economy would implode after about fifteen seconds, but it would be a hell of a party.

The sea food was very good, very fresh but the stand out dish had to be the wild boar and anything that had butter in it.

The wild boar was endlessly adaptable, by which I mean you get a lot of sausages out of what used to be an angry wild pig. What you also get is a boar pate. This is a speciality of Corsica, meaning that no other nation would consider making the stuff and no other nationality would consider eating the stuff. It’s basically a high velocity pork delivery system with some artery clogging properties tagged on for good luck. If you haven’t got the time, energy or inclination to cook bacon or sausage, this is a way to satisfy all of your pork needs quickly and efficiently. I was thinking of importing it and marketing it as the midnight snack for drunks. ‘Too drunk to cook but fancy something porky? Try a spoonful of pork paste, throw your lungs up and be right as rain the next morning’.

The croissants don’t need buttering, they are at butter saturation point. So what you do is smear fig jam on them. You now have a breakfast that is more than 100% fat and will not need to eat for a week.

Back to school with Dr Atkins

The Atkins diet has come to Macnabbs Mansions. It’s like hell for vegetarians in the kitchen at the moment, the fridge bursting with not just meat of many kinds but eggs and cheese as well. Deliveries of the stuff are now made by Lancaster Bomber dropping cows into the back garden.

I, however, am not on the Atkins. Instead I’m showing support by helping out on the consumption of meaty stuff, but either served in a bap or with chips on the side - the Atkins with carbs…essentially the Fatkins diet.

The Atkins is the perfect diet for lazy sods. Eat as much as you like and take no exercise whatsoever. The only sacrifice you have to make is that you can’t have carbohydrates. These apparently exist in far many more foods than you could possibly imagine. Bananas for instance. Bananas are bad for you when you’re on the Atkins. Fruit, bad for you, when on a diet. Something tells me that the small print at the back of the diet books shows that the research was funded by the national associations of master butchers, hog breeders and cow-pokers.

With madness such as this being accepted as a ‘diet’, it’s little wonder that this week it was revealed that a lot of kids have stopped eating school meals now that a healthier diet has been introduced. I’m not intimating that the media is owned by the same vile corporations that own the sort of food outlets that have to give you a toy to convince you to buy food there, but surely the story is not that a few thousand chavs are not now having school dinners but rather that millions of kids are now enjoying a healthier diet.

I mean, genuinely, what sort of thick-as-shit parent is going to let their kid bunk off school meals in order to go down town and get a burger? - because it’s sure as hell not one who’s going to provide a packed lunch, unless that packed lunch is packed by somebody else, such as a spotty youth in a fast-food place. Kids go back to school today and, frankly, after seeing some of the chip-guzzling, lard-arsed, lank-haired, dead-eyed fag-sucking trolls* that squeeze themselves into their full-to-bursting leggings, it’s no bloody wonder that they don’t worry about their kids diet - it looks like the only time they break a sweat is when they are confronted by salad.

Food is a subject close to my heart - increasingly so as my diet lays down the fatty deposits on my arteries, and I’ve been eating long enough to be suspicious of anyone who thinks that a skinny body lies at the bottom of a plate of sausages. The only thing you’re going to make skinny eating sausages is the pig you get the pork from.

* I’m not kidding, they look like they should be spending their time lurking under bridges and subsisting on an all-goat diet