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

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.

Forecourt Forage

I recall, more fondly than a Frenchman dunking a poncy biscuit into a weak, Gallic, beverage, childhood car trips up to Scotland to visit family.  This would involve a long drive from the Wild West Midlands through Birmingham, a stage of the journey that took us on a section of elevated motorway through a city of tower blocks, like Mega City One but without the glamour, and with Brummies instead of Muties,

The journey was broken by two pit stops, both at motorway service stations.  The first stop was at a motorway service station that was probably just north of Birmingham but could have been anywhere in England back then, a classic 1970s (oxymoron alert) boxy affair on each side of the motorway, linked with a bridge spanning the traffic.  Facilities were duplicated on both sides of the highway, an early example of cloning and so the bridge was either an unnecessary architectural flourish or a meeting place for intelligence officers, or both.  I couldn’t pick it out of a line up today but I could, I think, identify it by smell; classic leaded petrol, diesel fumes and warm tarmac.

I have no idea what the catering and dining facilities at this place were like, according to nostalgia sites on the inter web they were famously awful, because we always took a packed lunch.  This consisted of cheese sandwiches, cheddar on white bread, augmented if you were a child by adding salt and vinegar flavoured crisps on top of the cheese.  This early example of fusion cuisine tasted divine and to this day I think a cheese sandwich lacks something if it does not crunch when eaten.

This was paired with Thermos Tea.  Thermos Tea is distinct from tea from a Thermos.  Tea from a Thermos could be boiling water from one Thermos, tea bags added separately, milk added from another Thermos.  Thermos Tea is tea first brewed in a pot, then poured with milk into a single Thermos flask to provide a brew with that particular tang, especially if served from a Thermos that has been well seasoned.

The one facility patronised was the loo.

The next stop was in the Borders I think.  I don’t recall much about this service station, beyond it being surrounded by scenery that was so jaw droppingly spectacular that these days the hills would be crawling with location scouts for fantasy epics.  The hills, I recall, were always topped with mist, so presumably we were across the Scottish border by this point.  This is usually where more Tea was taken for the final push to Glasgow.  Tea which had now been maturing for some five hours and was probably the beverage equivalent of crack.  It was also here where the facilities were used, and I would usually be the beneficiary of the service station shop, a book bought to keep me quiet for the remainder of the journey.

We probably also used the loo here.

I should say that while service stations are all very well, I remain a devotee of the roadside cafe, a caravan located in a layby where a hungry trucker can get a bacon buttie, a cup of tea in a non-biodegradable cup, and a hand job from a tranny, and still have change from a fiver.

Garages, back in the day, used to sell three things; fuel, oil, porn.

Today, things have changed somewhat, although roadside cafes remain a bastion of tradition.

Motorway service stations have followed the airport terminal model and become, essentially, out of town shopping centres with a petrol pump attached, and you have to look bloody hard to find the petrol pumps, and when you do there’s probably a Costa outlet there as well.  As well as what is essentially a food court offering many varieties of fried snack, there are mini-supermarkets on site that would not disgrace an upmarket camp site.

Garages have changed too.  You can still by fuel and wine gums, but the porn has been replaced by ‘Hello’ and many garages now come with the obligatory mini-mart attached.  One near me has an M&S outlet.  That’s right, the poshest place to buy groceries near me is the local garage.

Tits Oot

Breasts, and womens’ breasts in particular, are once again the subject of vigerous, if not mass, debate.  Let’s be frank, there is a section of society where womens’ breasts are frequently a matter of debate, that section of society being males.  The question that has arisen recently though is not so much concerning breasts, but what is attached to them.  In short, breastfeeding.

If the question is ‘when is breastfeeding appropriate?’ then the answer is ‘whenever there is a hungry infant and a nursing mother’.

Simply put, and there’s no denying it, infants are poor at preparing their own food.  Give a newborn a can opener and a tin of tuna and they will be completely unable to open the can.  Utterly useless.  And they are no better with pouches or jars, or bottles, whether screw top or cork.

Breastfeeding is an excellent idea, not least because the mother deals with the removal of any packaging before commencing feeding, even on the bus.

However, some are not in agreement.

There is, for instance, discussion about breastfeeding in the workplace.  An interesting conversation to be sure, but surely the conversation should be about infants in the workplace?

There may be workplaces where it is not a huge distraction introducing the baby into the environment, for instance a crèche.  I can think of few others.  Just as playing death metal at ear shattering volume is not conducive to a productive day so an infant, even a well behaved one, is a disruption.  This is based on my experience of children on public transport, where one can be sat in a train carriage, oblivious to a whelp of mass distraction, until it goes off.  This is normally a noise far out of proportion with the size of the being generating it, more akin to some sort of city wide early warning system than a simple signal of hunger, or pooping.

While infants are possibly not suitable for the workplace, for instance on an oil rig or aircraft flight deck, breastfeeding of an infant in the workplace should not be an issue, and anyone thinking it offensive is invited to look at their fucking work and not the chest of their colleague.  Breasts are, of course, appropriate in the workplace, especially if that workplace has a name concluding with ‘Club’ or ‘A Go Go’.

There was also recently discussion about whether breastfeeding is appropriate in restaurants.

Once again, the question might more simply be are infants acceptable in restaurants?  The answer is ‘not near me’ but I concede that there are many, many restaurants that I do not patronise on a regular basis, in fact that’s the vast majority of them, so let’s take a more general view.

What, really, can be the objection?  Is the patron concerned that a punter is getting a free meal?  I hardly think that an infant having a feed is quite the same as some chancer rocking up, ordering a glass of tap water, then proceeding to unpack several cool bags and decant various thermoses while uncorking a few bottles they have brought, of home brew to neatly complete the example.  Will it offend other diners?  Again, what are those other diners doing looking at the chest of somebody at a different table?  I may not be an expert on etiquette, but even I know that staring at the breasts of a woman at another table has three likely outcomes, the first is your girlfriend storming out of the restaurant after catching you ogling, possibly covering you in today’s special as she goes.  The second is the lady’s dining partner thumping you, probably while your girlfriend holds you down, the third is a restraining order coupled with a lifetime ban from the entire chain, and that’s a long time to go without KFC.

Anyone who has seen breastfeeding will know that you don’t actually see breast, just the back of a baby’s head.  So what’s the objection?

The sooner children learn how to behave in a restaurant the better.  Of course, an infant can’t send a boob back, but they can learn at an early age that dining with family is one of the great pleasures in life.

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!

Terrorists could never make 'Bake off' - their video's are shit!

Back when the world was black and white, people knew how to behave in front of the camera.  They stared into the lens as if hypnotised and spoke either in a sort of strangulated RP, or with a regional accent, usually northern.  Headscarves featured.

The popularisation of the family cine camera did little to lessen the public’s respect for film, which was finite and had to be processed by the chemist.  The early days of video cameras started to erode the mystique of moving images, when anyone could appear on their own telly and mistakes could be taped over, or sent to television shows so that you could appear on other peoples’ tellies with your skirt ticked into your knickers or something equally hilarious.

It took Yoohootube to make us realise that the democratisation of broadcasting proved that talent is not democratic, but the lack of it certainly is.

‘The Great British Bake Off’ is beyond Event Television, it is Phenomenon Television that has made stars of its presenters (a bloke apparently made of mahogany and a woman who is a cross between an Aunt Sally and Zelda from ‘Terrahawks’) and of the contestants.  How?  Two words: Peril!

Women directors like Jerry Bruckheimer strive to introduce peril into their movies, and usually do so by Blowing Shit Up while all the time threatening something that will make those explosions look like atom farts.  This can be a meteor, or a bomb, or a bomb strapped to a meteor.

But fuck that.  You want to know what peril is?  Peril is having your bake judged.  Anyone who has every put a plate of home baked biscuits down in front of a bunch of unsuspecting friends knows the moment of peril just after one of them takes the first bite.  The next thing out of their mouth had better be ‘that’s delicious’ and not ‘as I was saying…’ or ‘fuck, that’s atrocious’, because you can go from friend to cunt in one chew if you don’t praise the bake.  That’s what it means to bakers.  They all know this.  Anyone who has ever had their cooking criticised will know that there is only one reaction, a cocktail of shame and psychosis.

That’s why the audience are on the edge of their seats.

That, and the British fucking LOVE cake.  National game is cricket, yea?  Right, name me one other game, IN THE WORLD, that stops for lunch, and then for afternoon tea.  Test matches last for five days.  That’s ten opportunities to get some cake down you.  Think I’m kidding?  Google images of Mike Gatting and tell me that there’s a man who refuses carbs.

People look forward to Bake Off before it starts, enjoy it when it’s one and talk about it when it’s finished.  Know why?  Because it’s lovely.  This is a reality show where the only villain is time and whatever idiot confesses to bringing along any sort of store bought gadget or device.  Knocked up that cookie cutter in your shed?  Great!  Bought it?  You fucking disgust me!

Bake Off is British through and through.  The clue is in the title.  It’s great television and it demonstrates beyond a doubt that you need talent to appear on telly, either to make, present or just fucking cook scones badly on, you need talent.

A sword just don’t cut it.  Terrorists have taken to sharing their holiday videos with the world and the news media.  For what reason, Christ alone knows because if they think it’s somehow going to frighten, scare, intimidate or impress people, they really, really need to fire their audience research people.  The same audience that are nearly in tears when the old chap gets a hug from the Sex Pest on bake off and hang around to watch the news are then shouting ‘arsehole!’ at the bloke with his mum’s headscarf, a balaclava and a glaring deficiency in the girlfriend department.  Whatever terrorist videos are (and the only thing I can possibly think they are in internet terms is ‘troll bait’), they certainly aren’t good.

Think you’re tough?  Try baking two dozen identical flapjacks with the nation waiting to Tweet things about you?  No?  Thought not.

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.

Who'se the Daddy?

Right!

Let’s be quite clear, I love condiments.

I occasionally consider that food, actual food, is essentially a primitive condiment delivery system (the same way that celery performs two functions; a thousand island dressing long spoon, and a jaunty adornment to your bloody Mary (the acceptable face of problem drinking)).

Condiments represent, to me at least, that moment in man’s evolution after he had tamed the beasts of the field (by cooking them) and the fruits (and veg) of the land (by turning them into alcohol…no, dammit, by roasting them on a Sunday alongside a joint of Beast o’ the Field) but before it all went Captain Titsup and his Carnival of Terror and industrialists instead of cooks started producing food.

(BTFW: Message to all ready-meal makers – I can add my own salt.  Salt is a readily available substance and many English people are quite capable of shaking it onto their food.  Normally before they have even tasted it.)

Condiments come from a golden age of food when people were thinking ‘oooh, these spices are interesting, what happens if I snort some…'

…twenty minutes later, when they had quite recovered, they decided that mixing spices with a vinegar base was a better idea.  And so condiments were born.

My favourite?  Worcestershire Sauce, naturally (see above), but I think a close second would be brown sauce.

It used to be HP Sauce.  Not now.

HP Sauce used to be made in England, it is now made abroad.

I have no problem with foreign condiments.  Tabasco sauce perks up a meal, especially when your host has neglected to mention it is a feature.  Still, who doesn’t sweat at dinner?

But, really?  It’s not EU Sauce, it’s HP sauce.  Houses of Parliament.  It has a history connected with England which if you could be arsed to ask Siri, I am sure she would tell you all about.  Surely this is the sort of thing that the EU invented that thing for food where it can only be made in the area it’s named, like Melton Mowbray pork pies, or some sort of cheese that can only be made by a particular cow in a specific field.

Also, it now tastes different.  And fuck right off if you are of the opinion that every single ingredient, including the bloke that stirred the mixture, was imported and is hence still the same.  It just does.  The same way that Banks’s Bitter took on hints of piss, shire horse piss mind, but still piss, once the brewer changed.

HP sauce is now made in the Netherlands, which may be neither here nor there, but that it is made abroad is, I think, important, because this is something that can raise a sausage to a religious experience.

Every time we sauce our sausages we are hoping for something extraordinary.

I have had a lot of sausages in a lot of places.  Generally the best have been from roadside cafes where I strongly suspect they have their own sauce recipe, which is the dregs from all their previous sauce bottles cut with (oh God I really hope it’s) vinegar.  In which case somebody should market it, although in retrospect the reason the sauces were so good is probably because they had been fermenting in a hot caravan for a while and hence are  a) mildly alcoholic and b) insanely wrong to serve to HGV drivers.

Hey ho.

But to the point.  HP Sauce is polluted.  Not actually, spiritually.  That’s why, when it comes to brown sauce, in the absence of a Roadside Cafe, I go Daddies.

It may possibly be owned by the same people, and made in the same factory, by the same stirrer guy (or lady), but it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

Because a sauce is created to add flavour, not disguise it, and for that reason it needs to be honest.

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’.

A little bit on the side, or on the top

I adore chips.  I adore their many varieties.  There’s your basic chip, essentially a (thick) slice of potato, deeply fried.  Then you have your french fry, and finally, for the aesthetes in the crowd, the crinkle cut.  The shape of the chip is just the start of the journey, as it’s the preparation that makes such a difference.  Rule of thumb, the more of an animal you use in the preparation of a vegetable related product, the better the outcome.  That’s why double-dipped larded fat-and-grease loaded chips, cooked in cow, are the best sort of chips.
Of course, some see chips simply as the enabler of the main event – salt and vinegar.  Salt is of course essential for human life, as without it food would be bland, leading to the sort of ‘what’s the point’ ennui that may not be destructive on its own but, when combined with floppy hair, poetry and the ready availability of laudanum, can prove disastrous.
The chief role of vinegar as a dressing is to be sluiced over hot chips with the resulting cloud of scent wafted into a confined area, making everyone in that area want chips.  Now!
As a result of being deeply fried, chips formally cease to become vegetables and are granted honorary ‘actual food’ status.  But we should acknowledge that vegetables do have a part to play in the world of dressings and sauces.  That role is to assist delivery of thousand-island and other brightly coloured, tangy, vegetable-taste-disguising dressings.  Naturally, certain protocols have to be observed.  Stood at a salad bar with a spoon, wolfing down ranch?  Freak.  Stood at that same salad bar using a stick of celery to scoop and swallow?  Better.  But do remember to bite the end of the celery off rather than sucking the sauce off of the end and going back for more.  Such double-dipping can result in lifetime bans, even from a Harvester.  At a Berni Inn, it simply results in a good shoeing ‘out the back’.
Cooks occasionally get bent out of shape when a customer salts their food before even tasting it.  They should of course realise that this is infinitely preferable to the strangled cry of ‘agggh, this is shit!’  >sprinkle sprinkle< ‘Mummmm, much better.’ from the dining room.  If salt wasn’t so important we wouldn’t have fought wars over the stuff, and Waitrose wouldn’t sell seven different varieties of what is, at the end of the day, tasty aggregate. 

There’s nothing wrong with prepping your plate in anticipation of your meal.  Any sort of meat dish requires mustard, of course.  Coleman’s English Mustard to smear on the edge of your plate, French wholegrain to remain securely in its jar until the end of days.  Lamb is a game-changer, as you are now able to add mint-sauce to your greens to taste.  That taste should be ‘largely mint sauce’.
Pepper is an oddity.  The place for pepper is usually in the preparation rather than the consumption.  Back in the seventies pepper came in the form of a dust so fine it was one step away from being best applied by aerosol.  A spirited session with a pepper shaker could produce a cloud of the stuff that, if inhaled, led to the sort of reaction unseen since the Regency period when a new consignment of ‘Stonkers’s Very Strong Gentlemen’s Snuff’ landed on the docks.  Now pepper comes in chunks as folk wrestle with their grinders before giving up and reaching for the salt.  The only place where pepper is successfully served is in certain restaurants, where a man with, usually, tight trousers will sidle up to you and, holding an object which if it were coloured pink would see him arrested for indecency, will discretely grind to your satisfaction.
In an age when food manufacturers seek to pre-load edible excitement by helpfully including 125% of our daily salt, fat and sugar requirement in one portion of ready meal, we still love a dollop of sauce.  That’s why I live in hope of one day being offered the sauce menu when taking my seat in a restaurant and, when deciding on ‘the Daddies’, having the waiter murmur ‘excellent choice sir’.

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.

Gentleman's (and Poacher's) Relish

Gentleman’s Relish!  It sounds more like the title of an erotic serial publication (‘porn mag’ to you) from the seventies than a spread.

 

Just as Poachers Relish sounds more like a nocturnal knee-trembler with a milkmaid up against a stout oak that a tasty toast topping.

Both sound more like foodstuffs likely to be encountered in literature published in the 1920’s than encountered, never mind consumed, in real life.  However, they are available in real life, via Fortnum & Masons food hall.

And both are pleasingly tasty, but then I’ve always been the sort of chap that favours the savoury – a pickle, a pork pie and a smile, that’s me – over the sweet (although obviously the glove compartment of the car is stuffed with confectionary).  The Poacher’s Relish, essentially ground game, was something of a pokey surprise, like essence of mince.  Gentleman’s Relish is the piscine alternative, a spiced anchovy paste and an excellent way of bolting fish like a pelican, or accessing anchovies if you are tired of pizza.

Both come with cultural baggage.  Consuming either, spread thinly on toast, gives one a not unpleasant sense that you are setting yourself up for a day that is going to involve a pregnant maid, a butler out of control in the pantry, trouble at the hunt and, probably, the baffling murder of at least one houseguest, precipitating the arrival of an eccentric detective. 

You don’t get that with marmite.

It’s good to overcome class prejudices and try new things, even if a trip to the penguin enclosure is inadvisable following consumption of anchovy paste.  There are certain foods associated with certain groups and we shouldn’t be afraid of trying pies just because they are consumed by footie fans, or fried chicken just because it’s – based on my observations of the clientele orbiting the various chicken franchises at the rough end of town, not to mention an entire routine by teevee funnyman Mickey Flannigan – favoured by delinquents.  And I’ve been known to involve a kebab.  They are very tasty, you don’t actually need to drink for seven hours beforehand to appreciate a good kebab.  Obviously you do if you want to enjoy a bad kebab, but those are the rules.

Some foods just have a class association, there’s no getting away from it.  Anything served by a footman, killed (intentionally) on your own estate or pulled from your own river, or indeed all three, and it’s probably upper class nosh.  Anything served in a wrapper, probably not so much.  Of course there are foods that defy classification, anything grown in the garden or allotment is surely fit for a King, every Englishman’s home being his castle, so every Englishman’s garden is his estate and every Englishman’s allotment is…well actually it’s a place to get away from the wife and to stash porn in the shed while cultivating carrots, but for the purposes of this metaphor let’s describe it as his small place in Tuscany.

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.