Presidential?

It should come as no surprise that some parts of the media* are reporting that Jeremy Corbyn was in attendance at the now infamous Presidents’ Club gala dinner and gropefest.  Corbyn, for all the work that has been done by the mighty machinery of Labour and the momentum movement, looks like the sort of person who would sexually harass a young woman, and then get caught.  It’s the beard, which simultaneously makes him resemble a disgraced former lecturer at a polytechnic who was ‘let go’ after unfortunate incidents with a number of female students described as ‘brave’ in left leaning newspapers and ‘attractive’ in all the others and is now on a register of some kind, and also just the sort of allotment keeper who, despite the ounces of organic loam permanently residing in the turn-ups of his suspiciously ironed jeans, keeps the real filth in his shed.

The dinner in question is now the subject of extensive reporting, none of which has yet posed the question ‘who, the actual fuck, thought it was a good idea at the height of a rebalancing of gender inequality relating to harassment and remuneration, thought it was a good idea to have a men only dinner of financiers?’.

There is so much wrong with what happened at the Dorchester that night that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  Or actually, where to stop.

So let’s start with the sexism.  Why were there no male waiters?  What sort of organisation can get away with hiring staff based solely on their gender?  Or maybe there were male waiters, but they were not harassed.

And yes, it’s ‘waiters’.  It’s not ‘hostess’.  A hostess is a female who hosts a party.  Or invents a trolly with an integrated hotplate.  Somebody who brings drinks to your table is a waiter or a waitress.  Hostess is one step away from describing yourself as an ‘entertainment event facilitator’.  It’s pure snobbery, what the fuck is wrong with being a waiter or waitress?

The sexism on display from the arseholes (let’s not dignify them with the term ‘men’, a man, a real man, is a gentleman.  I know what makes a gentleman, take a look at the fucking title of the blog if you don’t believe me.  I don’t claim to be one, but I can recognise the virtue in others.  The clue, by the way, is in the way the word itself is constructed) was staggering.  What sort of person touches another person without first being invited to, unless pushing them out of the way of an oncoming crazed badger or similar?  Sticking your hands on somebody uninvited is, er, assault, is it not?  Let’s examine it this way, all of the descriptions of the tactile goings on, let’s substitute all of those with this image, a bloke wets his finger and inserts it into the ear of another person.

How.  Fucking.  Creepy.  Is.  That.

‘Socially unacceptable’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.  It’s the sort of thing that would result in any sensible person reaching for their cigar cutter and indulging in a bit of digital decoupling.

Apparently, the women were all asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.  Now, I may not know much about the catering business, but apart from the very reasonable contractual obligation of senior KFC staff not to reveal the Colonel’s secret recipe, I don’t understand why the catering trade should require a secrecy pact, it’s taking a few glasses of plonk from the kitchen to a table, not serving snacks on Air Force One.

The dress code was a bit interesting too.  The industry standard for waiting staff is black trousers or skirt and white top.  The white top suggests clean hygiene, the black trousers suggest infrequent laundering.  Apparently the defining characteristic required of the waitresses was that they were sexy.  Let me tell you, the defining characteristic of anyone waiting on tables is that they should be prompt with the food and booze.

The company that set all this up ‘Pimper Events’ or something, appears to have got off lightly, considering that they appear to be auditioning for a move into the exciting commercial opportunity of trafficking if their instructions to their employees are anything to go by.

All in all, it’s pretty bloody horrible.  Women have been treated as objects, again, arseholes have proved themselves to be arseholes, and got away with it, again and Jeremy Corbyn, a man with a proven record of discourteous behaviour towards women (every Wednesday afternoon) has yet to deny he took part in the proceedings.

*RT, Twitter bots geotagged in North Korea and Chipping Norton, DailyMailOnline

Sober January? Oh do please fuck off

G&P is the first to admit that the benefits of sobriety, in the short, medium, and long term are inarguable.  The benefits of inebriety are mostly confined to tolerating situations and people, and even then it’s a stretch.  Still, drinking must have some benefits, otherwise why would so many people do it, in so many different forms, so often and for so long?
Having reread that last sentence, one could well ask the same about smoking, the point of which really is lost on me unless it’s to satisfy an addiction.
People drink for many reasons, to relax, because of social convention, or because their universe is a lot better when observed through the bottom of a pint glass that was until recently full of cider.
Drinking, obviously, has its drawbacks.  Too much alcohol prevents one from enjoying many of life’s pleasures.  However, in fairness, it also allows one to enjoy drinking, and beer gardens, and starchy snacks, in a way that just does not happen in Soberland.
Here at G&P, it’s fair to say that we like a drink, by which we mean booze.  We love the idea of situation specific booze most of all, with port on Christmas Eve when listening to a Ghost Story for Christmas, fizz on Christmas Morning, wine with lunch, and spirits throughout the Yule period.  Being visited by spirits at Christmas should not be the exclusive preserve of repentant Dickens characters.  This indulgence, one might argue, is the springboard for sober January.
But it’s not just Christmas that provides opportunities for booze.  Any visit to the theatre requires a gin and tonic during the interval.  Social occasions increasingly rely on fizz.  Wine is appropriate with dinner and lunch on Sunday, although tea remains the only beverage to drink while having a bacon roll, champagne is an option when enjoying fish and chips.  Keith Waterhouse was right about that, at least.  During the summer one can enjoy long drinks, such as a two litre bottle of Strongbow.  And of course the cocktail is the perfect way to mark the transition from dressing gong to dinner gong.
Booze has yet to go out of fashion.
Sobriety is, increasingly, becoming fashionable.
It used to be that the only long term sober people were recovering, lapse free, alcoholics.  Now we witness people giving up booze for a month, ‘going sober for October’.  They profess to feel good, sleep better and have more energy, and yet the day after Halloween they are back on the sauce like an HP quality assurance taster.
January is both the best and the worst month to go sober.  Best because after the Yule period you are probably ready for a few days off the sauce, worst because January is longer than a few days.
If you do decide to go sober, get ready for a long haul through some long dark evenings.  You may not be going to bed when it’s still light out, but that’s only because it’s winter, it’s still seven thirty by the time you are in your jim jams and ready for bed.  This is because sober television is no fun.
If you do decide to go sober, please keep it to yourself.  Vegetarians and their militant wing, vegans, have recently found the confidence to start talking to people about diet at barbeques.  And yet any chap taking a healthy bite of his bacon cheeseburger, while being talked at by some lettuce licker, will notice the way that any veggievegan’s gaze will be drawn to the glorious grease dribbling down your chin, and disquietingly wonder if the fellow is about to crack and lick about 8,000 calories of beefy goodness from your chops.
Similarly, any fellow doing dry January, and letting you know it will, if you are both in a pub, be looking at you taking deep, refreshing, draughts of your pint like a desert dweller regarding an oasis that does both still and sparkling water, and has a lemon grove attached.
Self control is of course laudable.  G&P recommends periods of sobriety, extending to lunchtime in normal circumstances and prolonged if operating heavy machinery, such as a 747.
Naturally, G&P recommends drinking if flying in one.

My favorite roadside cafe

The homogenisation of the high street started with the chain stores moving in and a growing concern that one high street looked much the same as another.  The downside to this was that high streets lost their individuality, the upside was that shoppers could be confident that on a Saturday, they could buy their pick and mix, purchase an LP, rent a VHS or Betamax video, and fail to find the right sized garment in M&S, no matter where they were.
The health of the high street means that comment has turned from condemnation to concern, and the same chain stores that were once criticised are now described as flagships of the high street.  At least you can still be assured that M&S is unlikely to have the right sized trouser for you, as they continue to adhere to the winning business model of making sure their garment rails are fully stocked with unusual sizes and fail to acknowledge entirely the effect that their food range has had on the collective waistline of their clothing customers.
The new uniting factor on the high street is food and beverage outlets.  Where it was once the occasional golden arch or sinister looking bearded fella with a thing about fowls, now it’s coffee galore.  With just so many coffee shops at least the mystery of just why there are so many fucking discarded coffee cups littering the nation is hardly a three piper.
Our food and drink has been homogenised in our town centres, because if you go to a well known pizza place in any town centre you can be reasonably sure you are going to get what you expect when you order, because it’s probably all made and packaged up in an industrial food prep place in Dudley and shipped by artic to the franchise you are in, where it is effectively reheated and presented with a flourish by a local surly teen.
That’s why, if you want individuality, you have to go out of town.  And I don’t mean some gastropub in the Dales where they raise and then bludgeon to death their own goats, I mean roadside cafes.
I love roadside cafes.
My favourite is situated in a quiet layby on an A road not far from a busy motorway junction.  The layby has a screen of trees separating it from the road, but the noise and the pollution are still a feature of the layby.  The café itself is a converted caravan which, like the cook’s apron, probably started life as white.  A union flag flies from an improvised flagpole atop the caravan.
The menu is varied; sausage sandwich or bacon sandwich.  Add egg if you an epicurean or eggycurious.  The bread is white, of a sort not available outside the layby café catering trade.  It transfers the grease from the filling to the fingers, but never loses its consistency, something of a molecular miracle.
If it’s a refreshing drink you require, then you are in luck.  You can have a cold can, not just a can you understand, but a cold can.  You can have tea, or coffee.  Both are served in Styrofoam cups of the sort that were actually banned in 1997 and are not so much non-biodegradable as possessing a half-life.
Sugar if available from a bowl on a ledge.  You can consider the absence of sachets as a nod to the environment if you like, and you can also speculate that the sugar encrusted teaspoon that rests in the bowl is the roadside café equivalent of those lolly type things used to sweeten beverages in hipster joints.  You’re wrong.
The shelf is also where the condiments are housed, and you can tell that this is a classy joint because instead of generic red and brown sauce bottled containing God-knows-what, these bottles are branded, ‘Daddies’.  Possibly like premium brand vodkas in pubs the contents may not match the label, but it’s the presentation that counts.
There is mismatched patio furniture to dine on, but customers prefer to stand, having been sitting all day probably.  There are restroom facilities, just behind that ailing shrub.
You may smoke.
And, naturally, no Michelin stars, two Michelin tyres.

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.

Red Wine

Aggghhhhhh!

Can I just assure you that the above is an exclamation of my mixture of frustration and anxiety at having spilled red wine over my laptop.

You know what this means?  I no longer have to take the ‘Which Big Bang Character Are You’ test twelve times to get to ‘Sheldon’.  I’m Penny.

And it’s a merlot.  A variety that, as was pointed out to me this very evening, is so detestably rough that it has its own scene in the movie ‘Sideways’.

It was bound to happen one day.  Lets face it, the amount of food and drink that falls into the average keyboard could probably feed a family of five for a week and merit its own cookbook and C4 show; ‘Cooking with QUERTY’.

I was expecting one of two things; the final reel of a 007 movie style explosion, or the insides of my laptop fusing into some sort of pissed AI.

Maybe I’ve been saved by the age of the laptop.  Let’s just say that if I used this bad boy in a Starbucks, I would not be mistaken for somebody working on their screenplay, rather I would be taken for somebody trying to e mail 1997.

I bet you couldn’t do that with the new Powerbooks.  Anything short of Petrus spilled on them and they would probably restore to factory settings, meaning you’d have to delete that bloody U2 album all over again.

Write on white

Famously, Laurie Lee, one of the nation’s most beloved novelists, wrote ‘on wine’.  Whether or not he was ever drunk in charge of a typewriter is unclear but one has to entertain the possibility that, as a poet, he typed without due care and attention.  He did his writing in the Greek Islands, presumably because in the days before bargain booze, affordable New World wines or even Blue Nun, this was the only way he could become sufficiently inebriated to welcome the Muse should she come to visit.  Also, proximity to Mt Parnassus may have helped.

Rock stars smoke, inject, inhale and presumably occasionally insert for inspiration.  Writers drink.  Christ alone knows why, as excessive booze normally leads to feelings of alienation from the world and a profound sense of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, all of which is achievable through the simple act of publishing a slim volume of verse.  Alcohol also inhibits early morning creativity, and certain writers famously were at their creative peak at first light.  Presumably this meant they could post the latest chapter of their novel off to their publishers at eleven in the morning on their way to the pub.

However, in the spirit of enquiry G&P is embarking on a five-part special to explore the effects of various types of alcohol on writing, beyond those of not being able to remember that fantastic idea for a novel you had last night (something about a boy wizard?) just before you passed out, or not being able to decipher the notes scrawled on a beermat that could be a poem, or somebody’s e mail address.

We being with…white wine.

White wine suits poets.  It’s bucolic.  It’s also, these days (as Stewart Lee would say) bloody strong.  Back in the day, there’s a chance that Laurie Lee was drinking something delicious, refreshing, good with fish and not terribly alcoholic.  So, a couple of glasses with lunch and then crank out a few thousand words of gorgeous literature, then a nap.  Great.  The poets of today do not have it so easy.  White wine is literary rocket fuel, in that all the action happens very quickly and in a very short space of time.  First sip, feel inspiration tingle, middle third of glass, burst of creativity, bottom third of glass, decision time.  Second glass, your day’s work is over.  The only major literary decision you are going to make for the rest of the day is trying to get the password on your Majestic account right to order another crate of the stuff.

The thing about white wine is this, it’s an event in a glass.  It should be served chilled, cold enough to disguise the fact that you are serving your guests the £3.99 special with notes of grass and petrol.  This should chill the glass, resulting in that race to the bottom before it gets warm that only The Queen is immune to (special gloves, liver like a…well, liver like a monarch rather than a weak and feeble woman).  Glasses of white wine look especially good when placed next to manual typewriters.  The portions are these:

A bottle of white wine in the afternoon – poets

A carafe of white wine – novelists

A glass of white wine – readers and people who think that they have something fresh to write about vampires.

Alcohol, of course, is famous for allowing one to overcome one’s inhibitions.  To this extent, the reveal of the true self, one wonders if Dr Jekyll’s formula was actually: gin.  But if employed by the author, white wine, very much the perky, sharp, slightly noisome friend/fiend in the bottle, can be beneficial.

It’s summer.  Bees drone, lawnmowers drone, drones, well, buzz, which is odd, because bees also buzz, and some bees are drones, but few if any bees carry cameras.

OK, I’ve had a glass of wine.  That’s the rule.  Drink while you write.  I don’t make the rules, apart from this one.

Oh, and fank thuck for spelllcheck.

Right.  It’s summer, cows moo, bees drone and the poet or novelist is in his or her shed.  It’s too hot to write, it’s too hot to think.  Cotton is sticking to buttock in a way that is more uncomfortable than alluring.  Then.  Sandwiches and a glass of white wine.

The inspiration flows.  The verse is conjured, the stanzas flow.  The plot thickens as the characters develop, maybe one of the characters has a glass of wine and a ham sandwich.  I would read that book.

Cold white wine is a shock to the system, it’s invigorating.  It opens up a world of wonder and excitement and here’s why authors really, really love it, it leaves us wanting more.

Associated with: spy novel, novels about the Napoleonic war, poetry about hedges, anything to do with sport (grass notes), anything to do with the sea (great with fish), any author who writes 250 words a day.  Literary lunches.  Literary launches.

White wine is very much a summer drink, while glorious halcyon days may be bad for creativity, who needs inspiration when you have condensation beading on the outside of the glass?  After a second glass it’s time to put away the typewriter, and Google the reviews of your last book, after a third, the real work of the afternoon, going on Amazon under an assumed name and reviewing/shitting all over the latest offering from that wanker who called your last effort ‘disappointing’.

Finally, white wine is the only drink on the planet whose character is wholly unchanged by being served in a plastic receptacle.  At a literary festival?  Don’t know what to order?  Let me tell you what’s going to be delicious, refreshing and pleasingly cool in the hand in a sweaty marquee in a summer in the Shires.  Served from a box?  Oh, OK.

Fuck you too C**e C**a, you don't know me either

Not so very long ago, seeing your name in print was a Very Big Thing, especially if it was for the right reasons rather than as a result of your name appearing in newspaper story titled ‘Convent School Flasher Apprehended’.  Even today, certain Sunday newspapers, not all tabloids, contain little glossy magazines you can order personalised items from.  Golf balls seem to be a speciality, although surely it would be simpler to change your name to ‘Slazenger’.  There’s a cottage industry, presumably, stamping initials on everything from handkerchiefs to corkscrews.  The same sort of chap who has his initials on his jumper probably has them, or a close approximation, on his car’s number plate.  But if you don’t have a tiny cock, there are acceptable uses for personalisation, such as school kit or, well, that’s about it really.  And of course where your name appears is all important, for instance, on a car parking space, probably good, on a cell door, probably bad.

Recently, Starbucks started to ask you your name, rank and serial number when you ordered a coffee, and so it came to pass that a lot of immigrant, minimum wage workers learned first hand that the English can be a surly, belligerent but oddly creative bunch first thing in the morning before they have had their coffee.  Either that, or ‘Fuksake’ is a really, really popular first name.

Where one beverage giant wanders, another aimlessly trundles after, and so we have the personalised cola bottle.

That’s right, a cola company has decided to add a little bit of soul to a product that is, if the ingredients are to be believed, water, sugar, more sugar, syrup and a colour to turn the entire thing the shade your piss goes after a three day fast.  OK, so that may not be exactly the ingredients, but I can’t be arsed to fetch a bottle and check for myself.

Cola is suffering something of an identity crisis itself.  During the adverts it’s drunk by attractive people.  When the adverts end and it’s back to ‘Britain’s fattest slobs’ it’s drunk, by the gallon, by fatties who are crying either shame, or because they have a self-righteous teevee presenter screaming at them.

Now though, somebody who had obviously drunk far too much fizzy pop for breakfast decided to put names on cola bottles.  This is genius!  You can actually drink out of a bottle that has your name on it or, even better, drink from a bottle with somebody else’s name on it.  How subversive is that?

The upshot of this is that there are now three categories of cola drinker.  The first is the ‘don’t give a shit whose name is on the bottle’ type.  The second is the sort who will look through the stock to see if their name is there, and be a little bit disappointed if it’s not.  Finally, and also my favourite, are the people who will choose the most interesting name, often of the opposite sex, just like in the early days of internet chat rooms.  Surely nothing is more impressive than the sight of a hairy arsed tattooed, bearded bloke builder sucking on a bottle labelled ‘Marjory’.  It’s so wrong it’s right!

Like everything that comes out of the boardroom, there’s room for conspiracy here, so certain names are forbidden no doubt (so (more) bad luck if you have the misfortune to be called ‘Adolf’) whilst there is probably no chance of you, or more likely your servants, finding a bottled labelled ‘Crispin’.

I am actually all for personalisation of beverage containers.  I remember years ago a Scottish beer company used to adorn their cans with, I understand the technical phrase is, ‘dolly birds’.  Collect the set and become a harmless alcoholic with a soft porn gallery that you will one day display on ‘Antiques Roadshow’, rather than a sugar fuelled rage machine because the shop has run out of ‘Jimmies’.

Although, obviously, if you should see a ‘Kylie’, you must purchase it at once and keep it about your person at all times, so that should you ever chance to meet the Aussie songstress/goddess you have an opening line other than ‘er….er….er…’

Cheers!

Fuck you S**rbucks, you really don't know me!

In what has to be the worst ever corporate mandate, or simply an astonishingly ham-fisted attempt at analogue data gathering about customers, Starbucks staff now ask you for your name when you buy a coffee.  Presumably this is because ‘Jeff’ is easier to remember than ‘double no-fun skinny latte and give it wings’.

The only plausible reason for a coffee shop drone to ask you your name is if you are the fiftieth person in line to sequentially ask for a latte and they need to differentiate you from all the other folk who can’t think of a more interesting beverage.

I do not like being asked my name in Starbucks, as a corporation famous for ending individuality on the high street by trying to drive independent coffee shops out of business with their mugs, and their staff, and their shots of syrup instead of the traditional stale cup of filter whatever-is-on-special-at Costco blend available in traditional coffee shops, it’s a bit bloody rich that they are trying to introduce individuality by writing the name you choose to give on a mug.  Also, I expect them to then ask for your rank and serial number.

Really, if I wanted personal service, I would have spent my money in the little independent coffee shop next door that Starbucks put out of business years ago.  Of course, if I had done that, it wouldn’t have gone out of business.

Or I would get my morning coffee at the Krispy Kreme Koncession, where they greet me with ‘Good morning sir, latte?’.

Sir!  What’s wrong with Sir?  The Krispy Kreme Krew don’t want to know my name, nor do they care, nor do they pretend that they care.  They just want to know that I am latte guy and that, even if I actually wanted a flat white that morning, I will now have a latte instead.  I can respect that.

Obviously the drill in Starbucks is now to at least give a made up name, or answer ‘Sir’ or ‘Valued Customer’ or ‘Master’.  Or ‘Doctor Claw’ or any of a number of cool names, if you can summon the courage to do that to some poor Starbuckian who has been on shift for eight hours slinging coffee to an ungrateful public, a suspiciously large number of whom seem to be called ‘Gengis Kahn’ or, if you are a Star Trek fan, ‘Kahhhhhhhnnnnnnnnn’.

As it was, I panicked and gave my real name.  And I’ve seen ‘The Great Escape’ loads of times, I should have known what I was doing.

As it was, she not only wrote my name down wrong but she also made the wrong coffee.

Thinking back on it now, it’s just possible I may have picked up the wrong cup.

Fox Tray

Bloke goes up to a bar and orders five pints of bitter, a gin and tonic, a scotch, and a bag of pork scratchings.  Barman asks ‘Would you like a tray?’.  Bloke answers ‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to carry?’.
Can you give an old joke a home?  For just £24 a month, you could keep Radio 4 Extra going and so ensure that jokes like that are preserved for the nation, whether the nation wants them or not.  For more information, see Barry Cryer.
That joke is so old that there are remarks about it being old written in hieroglyphics.  Old, and true.
Because nobody should operate a tray without being trained in the art first.  By trained I mean nobody should try to use a tray who is not a character in a P. G. Wodehouse story or a drunk uncle who does a rendition of ‘Mule Train!’ that is astonishing in its capacity to shock, delight and put the poor drunk bastard in A&E with a concussion every Boxing Day.  For the unwary, the untrained or those without sufficient upper body strength, the tray is simply a way to drop a lot of things more efficiently.
One should never have to transport more than two cups of tea at any one time unless you are a paid employee or, to give them their politically correct term, skivvy.
The tray itself though is something of a social marvel.
At one end of the social spectrum, say Downton Abbey, the tray itself is made of silver and is worth more than the vicar's virtue, and that's before it's loaded up with enough booze to make the conversation at the dinner table of an English country house bearable to anyone who thinks that 'tying one's own flies' is a simple precaution to prevent unintended. chapout.
Then there is the Formica tray, that has done service in many a home for many a decade.  In more civilised times, the tray would be beringed with the evidence if a million cuppas safely transported from kitchen to front room.  In these less enlightened times, the tray is a personal dining table, allowing each family member to enjoy their evening meal not in the company of each other, but bathed in the gentle light of the idiot lantern.
Let us not forget either the plastic tray, black or red, always slightly damp, picked up at one end of a self serve counter and loaded with sandwiches and beverages before being used to assault the cashier who thinks it's OK to charge you £7.99 for a BLT and a coke.
And let's not forget coke and, in that act, take a moment to reflect the makeshift tray, that flat object that can be used to transport stuff from hither to yon and, when fashioned from something black and shiny, is ideal for serving stimulants.
My new acquisition is far from an impromptu tray, although it is stimulating.  It is, in short, magnificent.  Who can fail to be thrilled by a proper tin tray featuring a country house scene with a couple of foxes frolicking in the foreground.  Who?  As a the owl, also pictured, might ask.
It's a tray that tells a story.  What is happening in the house?  Is there a party, is there a tray within a tray in use?  Or is there bad business afoot, is the daughter of the house being forbidden from marrying her true love, a humble woodcutter, albeit one who has had his woodcuts exhibited at the Tate Modern.  And what of the foxes?  What role do they play in this drama.  Is it Evelyn Waugh, or M R James territory that we're in?  All of these questions and more occurred to me as I saw this object for the first time, but perhaps the most pertinent was 'are you going to buy that tray or just look at it some more?', as posed by the shopkeeper.
I think it's charming.  I am also convinced the house pictured is the one from 'The Mousetrap', which would explain why the tray is just the right size to serve up a book and a cuppa, or a revolver.

Postcard from Norfolk - Daffy and Dickie

  

An association is rather a good thing for a public house.  Fame and infamy can equally add character to a pub and, pubs being pubs and human nature being human nature, any pub of a decent age will be more likely to be infamous than famous.  Pubs, you see, even respectable ones with coffee machines and a breakfast menu, are less likely to be the place where a National Treasure hung her bonnet when writing the sort of fiction that is adapted for Sunday night viewing, and more likely to be the place where a laudanum soaked poet wrote his last before drinking himself into an early grave.  Alternatively, they were frequented by a bloke with the charming name of ‘Mad’, ‘Chopper’, or ‘The Lathe’, once to be avoided and now on a Gangland Walks trail.  Many pubs have Blue Plaques, more still have stained carpets.

Indeed, companies exist that can create character in a pub for you.  They scavenge skips (or to give them their full title rural action houses) and can transform a former car showroom into Ye Olde Something Or Other with the addition of only a few antique agricultural implements and a pine-effect condom dispenser.

However, it takes more than a few antique cigerette or Fry’s chocolate machines converted to dispense vape-sticks and pistachios to give a pub atmosphere, especially since the smoking ban came in.  What a pub really needs to do is a holistic historic makeover, setting up web-sites that will convince you that your local boozer has that most attractive of qualities, a pool table (just kidding, I mean A Past).

I used to drink in a pub that was featured on Crimewatch.  Everyone suspected that the landlord had done his wife in because a) she disappeared and b) the cellar acquired a new concrete floor.  The thing is, he kept a good pint.

Tricky moral decision, but when asked if one wanted a quick one ‘up the murderer’s?’, the answer was usually ‘yes’.  In his defence, I don’t think he served Stella, so he was obviously anti-violence to women.

Many pubs have, of course, been around since pilgrims needed somewhere to stop off for a quick drink before visiting Jerusalem.  Given the state of the Middle East today, that remains a good idea.  The older the pub the ‘richer’ the history, usually featuring, appropriately, claret.  But stabbings, gangland slayings and poetry is the least of it, given the amount of former entertainers, a trade that traditionally like a beer, now being locked up, it’s a wonder the police don’t just visit every pub called ‘The Yew Tree’ and throw a net over the regulars.

Of course, the best a Bristish boozer can boast is a resident highwayman.  Bierkellers are an efficient, mechanised, German pub and, if grainy black and white newsreel footage is to be believed (and why not) most of them were frequented by Hitler.  Not so much a Blue Plaque, more a brown shirt moment.

Britain’s pubs are richly decorated, and not just at chucking out time.  The walls of pubs in Britain are adorned not just with Sky Sport posters but with everything from hunting prints, to tabloid front pages, to wanted posters.  Look closer still and you will see why, in Britain at least, pubs remain haunts of gentlemen; photographs of regulars who may have stepped out, but who remain in spirit.

The Hoste Arms in Norfolk remains one of the best pubs in Burnham Market.  It remains so in rthe face of significant challenges, such as having a spa on site, and being frequented by very wealthy people.  It remains a good pub because the staff are quite, quite lovely and the place is at the same time the last word in excellence and not remotely pretentious.  I have had some great times there and sitting in the October sunshine with a glass of champagne and a springer smelling faintly of beach is one of life’s great joys.

The walls of the bar are adorned with original cartoons by Annie Tempest of her weekly strip (ooh er!) in Country Life magazine, ‘Tottering by Gently’, featuring Lord Tottering (‘Dicky’) and his wife, Daffy.  The strip concerns itself, as far as I can determine, with the upkeep of Tottering Towers, their stately home, red wine, dogs and, bizarrely, social media.  The strip is very ‘Country Life’, a magazine slightly up its own arse, more usually up a fox’s arse, but amusing.

All very lovely and slightly more original than a Space Invaders cabinet converted into a wifi booth or whatever.  A recent addition though are busts of Dicky and Daffy.

It’s always tricky to pull off a likeness of a cartoon character.  The last person to do it successfully was Michael Keaton.  However, one you get over the initial shock, they are actually quite fun.  Daffy is just as you would imagine her, although worryingly close to the red wine.

Dicky is fantastic.  That he does not resemble the cartoon character so well is fortunate, because the bust is an incredible likeness of the late, much missed, Professor Brigadier Richard Holmes.

Possibly the sculptor captures the likeness of the wrong Dicky.  Probably he captured the right one.

And if you were playing pub heritage top trumps, military history beats everything else.  From faded photographs of local lads in kaki, through oil paintings of Spitfires, through to bright photographs of local lads in desert gear, and never forgetting the gentleman in the red jacket, every pub should have a military connection.

Finally, the Hoste has it all.

Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and Chips

One of the holiday party has announced that they are on a mission to have fish and chips every day of the holiday.

Given the enthusiastic rapture that I was in yesterday as a result of the seafood platter at the White Horse (a dish that deserves capitalisation and so will henceforth be known as the Seafood Platter), and the secret ambition I am nurturing not just to have the Seafood Platter every day but, if at all possible, every meal, I am in no position to criticise what I now consider a sound and admirable moral choice.

Because if you are going to choose to have fish and chips every day, this is the place to do it.

Fish and chips on the Norfolk coast is a single meal option with a multitude of options and varieties.  Obviously, you have your sauces, but you also have side dishes.  Well, one side dish, mushy peas.  Simply remembering there are more fish than cod in the sea that taste astonishing when battered for your pleasure makes the possibilities if not limitless, then certainly enough to fill a week.

Me?  I go for cod and chips from French’s, the best fish and chipper in the world.

This, it appears, is hardly a secret.  The queue was, literally, out the door when I arrived.  However, thanks to the experienced team working the friars, it was a moving queue and, because we were all only ten minutes away from golden battered goodness, it was a good humoured one.

It’s not just the tourists who turn up to take away here, it’s the locals too.  What I love about the take away service is that fish and chips is, more than any other food, ideally suited to being a take-away product.

Most importantly, French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard container.  No polystyrene here, just good, honest paper-based flatware.  What’s more, they warp them in sheets of paper to keep them warm.  What’s even more, they bag them in paper bags or, more precisely given the amount of fish and chips I was picking up, sacks.  French’s must have a paper bill just below that of a mass-market tabloid.

The benefit of all this is twofold.  Firstly, it keeps everything toasty for the journey back to the caravan, without everything going soggy in the way that using unnatural, godless packaging makes it.  Secondly, it allows the aroma to drift gently up and around the interior of the car.  This is especially wonderful of a wet winter night when, with a warm bag of fish and chips in your lap, the interior of the car slowly becomes a vinegary fug, a different variety of the atmosphere that is normally only found under duvets; warm, welcoming, comforting.

Finally, of course, one has the sauce sachets and condiment packets.  One is treated like a grown up and trusted to sauce and season one’s own whips.  The question is, one sachet of red sauce, or ten?  The supposed answer may be found in the pages of the better guides to etiquette, the actual answer is; as many as one thinks is appropriate.  We don’t judge.

Postcard from Norfolk - Seeseafood

 The Ship, at Brancaster, is one of my favourite pubs.  The staff are friendly, the parking ample, the beer good and the food great.  They make a great flat white coffee, they have conversations with one another about how to make a great flat white coffee, and at the end of the evening the bar staff get up on the bar.  They aren’t doing a dance or anything, they are holding the credit car machine aloft, trying to get a signal.  Maybe in a county as flat as Norfolk, a couple of feet makes all the difference.

Getting a signal was clearly a problem the day when their ‘phone wasn’t being answered, this resulted in taking a punt on getting lunch.  Bad call, no room at the inn.

No problem, onward to the White Horse at Brancaster, which is reliable, spacious, has a great bar menu and more than ample parking.

The White Horse also has something new on the menu.  The seafood platter.

Oh.  My.  God.

This is what bliss tastes like.  This is the desert island meal.  This is the Death Row meal.  This is so very, very good that you want to accost everyone else in the bar and ask them why they are not eating it, while simultaneously resenting anyone else ordering this because they might tell others about it, and reduce the number of seafood platters in future.

It was better than beer.

That’s right.

It should have been no surprise.  The White Horse does exceptional food.  This is a pub that is on the salt marsh and, when the tide is in, is so close to the water you can just about row up to the bar.  This is a pub that has pools full of mussels just outside its back door.  This is a pub, in short, that does seafood.

Presumably they know a chap who does platters and the chef thought, ‘hey ho!  I’ve got an idea!’.

Let’s be quite clear, I was ready to enjoy lunch at the White Horse as only a man who has been disappointed not finding a table and then found an excellent alternative can be.  I was simply not prepared for just how great that alternative was.

The Ship is still one of my favourite pubs in Norfolk, the reasons now extend to that time they were full and we went to the White Horse instead, and discovered the seafood platter.

Now we don’t need to worry about where to go for lunch for the rest of the holiday.  The only conundrum is how many times during the remainder of the holiday it is seemly to go to the White Horse and order the seafood platter.  I’m thinking ‘as often as possible and far more than is decent’.

Cultural vandalism

Scottish food is not just a load of stodge in a polystyrene container.

Scottish cuisine has, shall we say, something of a reputation for not being the healthiest in the world.  Maybe, but if you've spent the day staggering in a blizzard through the gloaming looking for a stranded coo or bewildered hiker, a dinner rich in radish is not going to cut it.  Ideally, you want something rich in fat, grease and wobbly bits that go crunchy when fried.  Even if you work in an office and live in Glasgow.

But is it as bad as all that?  

The Canadians think it's worse.  It's reported that they have outlawed a wide variety of British foods, such as marmite, but also the fabulous Scottish beverage Irn Bru, which is either a fizzy, tasty and refreshing drink, or a vile cocktail of artificial colours and flavourings just not found in nature, or food shops in North America, apparently - but are found in chemical weapon factories in angry countries, and Scottish corner shops.

It's not like Scotland can hit back in some sort of tit-for-tat trade war.  Canada bans Irn Bru and so Scotland bans, er...well, I'm sure there's a Canadian export that could be targeted.  Obviously not any kind of alcoholic produce.  Moose? Do they export moose?

As far as I can determine Canada's chief exports seem to be belligerent people with French accents and comedians who pretend they are American so that they can get a career in Hollywood.  So that appears to be it, if they ban our Irn Bru, we introduce strict prohibitions on Rick Moranis.

It's also served on fine china.

You'll have had your tea

Myths persist for three reasons.

Firstly, repetition.  Repeat something often enough and it will gain, if not credibility, then at least popularity or even notoriety.  The great thing about the repetition of a myth is that it can be done by people who have not even heard the original source material, but wish to confirm something in a manner that indicates they are privy to information others are not.  For instance 'I hear the Pope has six toes on each foot'.  'Ooooh, yes, I heard that too.' and so on.

Secondly, the myth is something we want to believe.  Alien life visiting our planet and fumbling with yokels' trouser parts is a far more interesting belief to hold than, say, we are alone in the universe and even if alien life did visit, it wouldn't try to touch us up because we are such a repellant species.

Thirdly, it's credible.  There could be an undiscovered creature living in the Himalayas.  There could be a dinosaur swimming in Loch Ness.  Haggis is a Highland creature.

The fabled 'Pyramid of haggis'.  

If there's a better way to display tinned haggis, it's yet to be invented.

Let's be quite clear, haggis is not an animal found in the Highlands of Scotland, it's a mixture of offal and meat, like a big spicy sausage.  If the haggis were an animal, I would imagine that it would not come in a vegetarian option.  I may not be a qualified vet, but I'm not aware of any animals that are actually vegetables.

Haggis does however, taste exactly like the meat of an animal that lives a very rough life in the Highlands of Scotland, subsisting on a diet of heather, rain, granite and the occasional lost hiker.  If Haggis were an animal, then hunting season would be early January (of course they're hunted in the wild, whoever heard of intensive haggis farming?), to adorn the plates of diners on Burns Night.

Robert Burns's verse on the side of the Scotish Parliament building.  

If you're verse adorns the side of a Parliament building, you are a national treasure...

or possibly a little sod with a spray can who styles himself a 'graffiti artist'.

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, arguably Scotland's greatest poet.  Arguably the United Kingdom's greatest poet if you consider having the poet's verses reproduced on tea towels as a measure of fame.  Without doubt the worlds greatest poet if you measure fame by having a dinner named after you - take that Shakespeare, Thomas and Yeats.

It's Burns Night tonight.  All over the country people will be dusting off their best tartan biscuit tin, downloading a verse or two from the Internet, calling potatoes 'tatties' and using the celebration of the birth of a gret poet to drink a lot of scotch.

There is, apparently, a right way to partake of a Burns supper.  This involves, depending on your means, a piper, or some recorded pipe music (bag, not pan).  It also involves many, many toasts and an address to the haggis which is, apparently, the great chieftain of the pudding race (coming as a surprise to all those who thought that was rolly polly and custard).

This example of Scottish cuisine can be enjoyed any night of the year.

The problem is when you enjoy it every night of the year.

It's also the one day a year when Scottish cuisine is enjoyed.  The rest of the year Scottish cuisine is merely feared and respected in equal measure.  The world over, people eat traditional Scottish fare, neeps, tatties and of course haggis.  Well, let's be honest, people eat what they think is traditional Scottish fare.  If people were tucking into traditional Scottish fare then, in my experience, dinner tables would largely feature a double portion of chips liberally soaked with saltandsauce, washed down with Irn Brew.

It's easy to knock Scottish cooking.  And it's fun too.
And unfair.  I bloody love Scottish cooking and I think it's wrong that it gets ridiculed.  True, Scottish people do like hearty food, leaning towards the meaty, and well cooked.  Stews, mince and flat sausage all pander to the 'if it's brown, wolf it down' sensibilities of the Scottish palate but it's unfair to knock exotic items like the deep fried mars bar - if Heston had come up with that, it would be hailed as a work of genius and possibly even 'witty'.
Certainly, I'll be tucking into my haggis and probably partaking of a dram or two.  Cliche?  Possibly, but also an opportunity to toast the great man who wrote 'my love is like a red red rose' and 'Tam O'Shanter', poetry which, like Scottish cuisine, deserves celebration.

G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Edinburgh

There's more to the Edinburgh Festival than 'getting pissed and eating chips'.  Apparently.

Belt failure does not, in this case, result in unexpected tackle in the baggage area but rather long queues at check-in at the airport.  The BA staff scramble man and womanfully to cope, and as a result we are checked in at the First Class check-in desk, opened to cope with the backlog.

'Does this mean we get to fly first class?'

'No.'

Our luggage is now travelling in a better class than we are.

The departure lounge is the haunt of fragrance bandits, who stand ready to spray you with scent should you slow down.  If you are already a melody of malodours, they will spray it onto a little cardboard strip for you to smell at your leisure, or even to keep.  Frequent flyers are known to keep their sock draw smelling of sandalwood for years on end by replenishing their scented strips.

The bookshops of the departure lounge are unashamedly places to obtain holiday reads.  If you want to bulk buy Dan Brown in hardback, then this is the place to come.  My selection was 'World War Z', a novel about a pandemic that originates and spreads from China by, among other means, air transport.  My seat-neighbour on the aeroplane was a well mannered Chinese man and his reluctance to turn off his mobile 'phone meant that he was either not an English speaker or was arming something but was definitely not a zombie.  So that was a relief, eh.

The airport departure lunge remains, in the main, a mall, but with bars where people can start drinking (or 'getting in the holiday mood') at nine in the morning in preparation for drinking on a long flight and then drinking in a different time zone.  As call after final call after last call went out for four passengers to catch their flight to Barcelona NOW, I wondered just what might be more fun than catching your flight.  That said, it was Easyjet, so maybe they're had decided that another lager in the Sky Bar and a taxi ride home in disgrace was a sensible way to go.

The flight itself was brief and pleasant and thee was even time for a cuppa and your choice of biscuit or crisp.  The crisp packets had expanded like balloons in the relatively low pressure of the cabin and looked like those pillows National Express passengers drool into on long journeys.  I imagine that when opened they went up like some sort of snack based IED.  I settled for the biscuit as opening exploding bags and being showered in cheese and onion flakes can be a distressing experience, not least for the poor sod who has to clean up the crisps and nervous reaction afterwards.

On the cobbled, crowded streets of the city, festival visitors mix with people desperate to get you to go to their show and with people who have been in shows and are now on their way to see their mates' shows, or more likely get a drink.  Celebrity spotting is the order of the day but when 'The Shawshank Redemption' emptied out, it was like spotting celebrity fish in a boozy barrel as the actors emptied onto the street and headed straight for the pop up bar on the street right outside the venue.

Of course, 'celebrity' status is debatable and we cannot even begin to assess the damage to teevee careers that the cancellation of 'The Bill' has wrought.

The shows may not turn a profit.  The local printers do.

Rick Wakeman was spotted at The Assembly Rooms.  He has a show there, so it probably was him.  The problem with identifying the real Rick Wakeman is that Rick Wakeman looks a hell of a lot like a hell of a lot of other blokes up here for the Festival, blokes of an age where they think long hair is still a rebellious statement, even though it has been many years since there was ever any danger if them being mistaken for a girl from behind.

Esther Rantzen was in the audience for Marcus Brigstocke’s show (showbiz mates, she guested on his radio show and was, if I recall correctly, rather entertaining).  I hope she liked the joke about Rolf Harris.  It will be interesting to see just how much material the Edinburgh comics can wring out of Yewtree.  Normally of course it’s just puppets that benefit from peadoes.

The Book Festival, neatly corralled in the literature-friendly surroundings of Charlotte Square, is wonderful, with marquees arrayed around the green and a pop up book shop (a shop in a tent selling books, not a shop selling pop p books, although there may have been pop up books in the children’s section).

My god, I thought that young people at the Fringe could drink, they are amateurs compared to the middle classes at a literary festival, hoovering up red wine at ten in the morning.  It would appear that if you’re in a marquee normal rules are suspended and if it comes in a plastic glass, it doesn’t count.

Jonathan Coe was on fine form as the audience (average age = Radio 4 demographic) were confronted with the ugly truth that ‘the News Quiz’ is not satire.  Coe named Stewart Lee as the country’s leading satirist, leading the woman sitting behind me to gasp ‘my God!’ in a scandalised exhalation.  The Book Festival may be sponsored by the Guardian, but the audience know their real parents are Radio 4.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satirist, attracted quite a crowd of young people.  Indeed there are many young people in Edinburgh at Festival time, all apparently very keen to hand you a leaflet; and of course they all go to one another’s shows.  Eventually, there will be so many shows that the Festival will consist entirely of drama students doing improv musical comedies, endlessly circulating as the audience for each others shows.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satarist, was name-checked by Richard Herring during Herring’s show.  I’ve seen Richard Herring a couple of times at the Festival and he regularly mentions Lee, but Lee never mentions Herring.  It’s getting to be awkward, like when you stay friends with a couple who have separated and one has moved on whilst the other, around about the second glass of wine, asks ‘does he ever mention me?’.  The wrong answer, which is, ironically, the right one, leads to an evening of Lambrini flavoured tears.

The point is reached in the Pleasance Courtyard when you stop celebrity spotting and simply accept that the world you inhabit includes celebrities released into the general population, although it’s got to mean something if there are more celebrities in the audience than there are on stage.  Andrew (shagger) Marr was in the audience for a satire about the BBC news department.  So, no pressure to make it accurate, funny and successful then.  Still recovering from his stroke he looked frail as he leaned on his walking stick in the queue.  That’s the Festival for you, they don’t even fast-track you if you’re a celeb.

Certainly, it’s been the best food of the festival this year, mainly because a little bit of research and planning has resulted in at least one hot meal a day not eaten out of a polystyrene container with a plastic fork whilst standing up.

A ‘Scottish fruit bowl’

The hotel were kind enough to set out a ‘Scottish fruit bowl’ upon arrival – a selection of Tunnock’s delicacies, artfully arranged on a slate and dusted with what looked and tasted like icing sugar.  It looked almost too pretty to eat, almost.

Scottish healthy option – note salad leaf

Showing unprecedented levels of foresight, two restaurant bookings were made this year, instead of the usual tactic of turning up at the Magnum bar and promising to do three courses in 45 minutes.  The first was a fish restaurant off the Grassmarket where, it being Festival time, every table was taken despite booking two weeks in advance and we had to sit up at the bar.  What hardship! 

It was great, dining perched atop a barstool is always a treat, particularly at the horseshoe shaped bar giving great views of other diners, and of course I have the balancing skills of a jolly jack-tar aloft in a nor-easter.  The other reservation was made, on foot, on a smartphone, walking to the restaurant in question. 

The wonders of technology, I got the booking confirmation about the same time as I was opening the door of the restaurant.  The wonders of technology.

Top show – Rich Hall, without a doubt, the perfect mixture of raw seething anger, crowd interaction and comedy all wrapped up in a voice that comes all the way from the Old Testament via the heart of Texas.