MODERN USAGE: If it wasn't for nuclear weapons there'd be no nuclear shelters

To optimistically seek to see benefit in the most exacting of circumstances; to see history as a series of unrelated incidents.

'If it wasn't for Thatcher we wouldn't have had Blair.'

MODERN USAGE: Like a politician fighting for justice

To make little effort through laziness or more acutely, a conflict of interest, as in:

'The estate agent asked if I could send him the cheque before the end of the week: I told him first thing tomorrow I'd march into that bank like a politician fighting for justice.'

Variations; as an MP fights injustice. Modified to include all politicians, everywhere.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

I'm a bit pissed, and the season of goodwill has overcome me.

Really, happy Christmas to everyone. I could cry when I think of all the suffering and poverty... but that's champagne for you.

Love,

The Watcher.

TV: Channel Four's going down the saucepan Part 2

PART TWO. (Part one here)

The first part of this post was a right old rant about Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey. Not them, you understand, but their TV output and their swearing and the illusion of pressure they like to create so that they can swear like Billy-O before 9pm.

I mean, I don't mind swearing. I don't even mind gratuitous swearing you stinking fucker! See? What I don' t like though, what gets right up my hooter, is the creation of a fictional need for swearing, and Channel 4's complicity in the fictionalisation, the narrative-lisation, of just about every form of telly bar the news. We dumb viewers, we can't watch the box if there ain't no story can we, 'cause you know that's really boring like. We get bored, don't we?

I don't know when this started, this Where's The Story shit, but, to keep in the genre, I remember feeling, as a younger man, slightly uneasy at some of the banter between The Crafty Chef and Chris Kelly in BBC2's Food And Drink (Not their right names? I could care less! Or not. I'm fucked if I understand what that means to an American).

Fans will remember that at the end of the show, Mr Huff and Puff the cook would just finish adding cream to a big frying pan of something when the bloke from Clapperboard would appear on his shoulder, looking for a taste.

"Hello," the Crafty Cook would say, "here he is," with mock exasperation. As if to say 'No sooner do I finish adding a knob of butter to gloss the sauce before old fucking greedy guts turns up wanting a slobber off my spoon.' You're not wrong Crafty, he does do it and every week too: that's because it's the same show every week, with the same joke, and the same fucking format, and it's a food programme for fuck sake, he's bound to want a fucking taste!
This continued right through Food And Drinks re-invention, when they used to film it round Anthony Worral-Thompson's gaff (name incorrectly spelled? Really, I couldn't give a monkey's.)
AWT, as he styles himself, would be at the window of his giant kitchen when the wine-bloke off the old Food And Drink (the one who made Jilly look gorgeous) would arrive on his bike.
"Here he is," AWT would squirt, sounding a bit peeved that baldy's turned up.
Well of course he's turned up Anthony, you planned it six whole weeks ago, he works on the programme too, don't you fucking remember?
So all this, all this food and make believe brings me to all things River Cottage; The View From The River Cottage; River Cottage Forever; River Cottage Needs A New Roof; River Cottage: Pig Hunt!

Here's a slice of rural life, and here's plucky Hugh making cakes for fifty peasants in the annual village gypsy hunt cake competition. Hugh spends so much time entertaining so many hundreds of the feudal poor, with a few toffs stuck in for balance, it's a wonder he's got anytime for making jam, let alone selling it!

But phew, worry not. Looks like Hugh's roadside berry marmalade has been a great success and he's only gone and managed to sell out the lot again! That'll keep River Cottage warm over winter, that's for sure!

Yes, when he's not slaughtering his own animals, or shooting wild ones, there's nothing Hugh Fearnly Wittingstall (see above) likes better than making a tidy sum at a local farmers market, selling his crafty and frugal homemade soups, jams, conserves, pickles, burgers, fishcakes, whatever and everything: you name it, he'll fucking sell it.

It's a hard life being a small-holder, but Hugh has clearly demonstrated that if you work hard, use every natural resource available to you, especially the free food that is nature's bounty, it is possible to eat well and to eat from local suppliers, thus helping the environment and the economy in a oncer.

Of course when it comes to selling jam, it doesn't half help your sales if there's a TV crew filming you. Yes Hugh, I admire you your ability to turn tidy profits at fun fairs, village fetes, harvest festivals and badger-baiting, but it's all a bit of a lark really isn't it?

Hugh, let's be honest. It doesn't matter if you sell a gallon of nettle soup and make £30: you're getting paid thousands and thousands for being on telly, and for your books, and your newspaper stuff, and River Cottage is probably a tourist attraction, generating more and more money, and Channel 4 probably have a whole channel set-aside for you and your curly-locked money making antics so you can make more and more money pretending to be so very concerned not to waste a single penny that all your mates got pig-cock pipes for Christmas last year.

Let's stop pretending; let's all just stop it. Channel 4 and their cash-happy chefs think we're fucking fools and we just can't take it any more.

SPELL-CHECK Dying from = £10

This is a bit Private Eye I suppose. I should have sent it there and got a tenner. If you send it to Private Eye you owe me a tenner fuck.

Or maybe this isn't a mistake at all and that's the cost of life in Manchester. It's a good sign regardless, like E-Claris, for the unnecessary equals sign and the way it looks like it was found in a puddle.

SPELL-CHECK Smooties

Clearly this is no E-claris, but is included here for two reasons.

Firstly, I like the sounds of 'smooties.' It's a word we should be using.

Secondly, it reminds me of something that happened in my first year of secondary school.

Towards the end of the year in English class we had to produce a project: mine was WAR! I wrote about the history of war ("from the first time man picked up a stone and threw it at another man, man has been at war"), and the future of war (endless riots, like Brixton.) My project was a pretty slap-dash effort if I'm frank, (missing out, as it did, all wars ever) and even a well drafted V2 rocket on the front failed to impress my teacher. She wasn't even impressed by my lazy-journalist/academic technique of starting and ending in the same place: stone-throwing (cavemen, riots, see what I did there?)

Anyway, a girl in my class (probably one of the umpteen Suzannes) had decided to do her project on fashion. Her title page was a wonder to behold and was the sort of thing that would have taken most of the weekend and all of the felt-tips to complete. She'd written the word 'fashion' in a big angular way, then texturalised this word by writing 'fashion' again and again inside her original 'fashion' using every colour she could find, in the tiniest writing she could manage, until she must have written 'fashion' a couple of hundred times. Girls are so extra aren't they?

Except she'd written fasion and the whole lot went in the bin.

The lesson here to my young mind was never invest too much of your weekend fucking around with felt-tips, especially if it's anything to do with school.

CULTURE: The Fall of Golden Wonder

As a child I liked two kinds of crisp: all the crisps I'd eaten and all the crisps I was yet to eat.

Please don't think this food is entirely food related (although it is at the moment), I'm not a net version of Nigel 'A funeral simply must have vol-au-vont' Slater (his turn's coming though).

The fall of Golden Wonder isn't merely a perfect modern rendering of the fall of Rome, it tells all about us.

As I was saying, I loved crisps as a child. I didn't get nearly enough crisps as child, or 'cwips' as I called them when very young and button-cute, and rarely reached the nirvana of meeting all my basic food needs at once: Coke, crisps and a bar of chocolate. Man-alive I was happy if I got all three. It caused a bit of juggling: you had to hold the Coke between your bare knees and tip the crisps into your up-tipped mouth, looking like you're doing an impression of a wolf.

These items were important. The Coke might sometimes be a can of R White's, or a Tango, but - other than a brief obsession with Quatro (was it called that? That was better than Blade Runner!) - I most times went for Coke. Ice-cold Coke, lovely ice-cold, headache inducing, Coke. You took your life in your hands didn't you? Sometimes you had a mini-stroke, other times the Coke would cause instant heartburn. The worst thing was getting the shit coming out of your nose and making your eyes water. To think I spent my Mum and Dad's money on tooth-rot.

Chocolate? Twix. It had to be. The two fingers offered four things to eat, the caramel and biscuit on each. Drifters were in their infancy then, and I remain, as I was then, sceptical of the merits of that confection. I quite liked the odd Banjo, but felt the toasted coconut version to be a touch adult. Other bars had little chance, especially the fancy-Dan Topic, which was only attractive because of it's pricey-ness. A Bounty might creep in, but not if I'd bought a Lilt: that's too tropical. Fuck, I am Nigel Slater.

Anyway, the crisps I'd choose would be Golden Wonder.

It was an orderly world then. Crisps came in pretty standard flavours; Ready Salted (the meaning of which escaped me for years), Cheese and Onion, Salt and Vinegar, Beef and variations (e.g. Beef and Onion, much missed), Chicken, normally Roast, Prawn Cocktail, Sausage and Tomato, and something bacon-based.

This is a good description of Golden Wonders range at the time. They also did bigger bags, which looked identically to the smaller bags so allowing you to pretend that you have shrunk, but that was it, in the Crisp range.

They did other things. I may be the last person to remember the Rock and Rollers advert and the lyrics of the song, (save for the composer perhaps, who sat back in the summer of 1970-something and waited for the royalty cheques to come a-rolling on in. Until the autumn of 1970-something, when Golden Wonder pulled the plug on the whole sorry venture, and sacked the guy who thought the company needed Glam Rock crisps) and appreciated Wotsits and other light-as-air fuck-all-in-'em snacks, but I never strayed far from crisps and hardly ever away from Golden Wonder.

They were supreme. I only saw other brands in pubs, which was KP-dominated (blimey they punched a cheese-hit right in the hooter) and in supermarkets, which, comically enough I thought, made their own crisps! Every newsagent and off-license, the main satisfier of local crisp need, was stuffed with Golden Wonder. I reckon that 9 out of 10 bags I ate back then (that was a great party) were Golden Wonder.

Which was strange, really, as Golden Wonder were a bit suspect.

First thing: packaging. It wasn't at all rare for the first crisp in your mouth to reveal the ugly truth that the entire bag was stale thanks to a split in the seam. That was a hard bag to get through.

Next: green bits. Golden Wonder was notorious for having plenty of green and uneatable crisps in your pack. You didn't just eat them all, and expect them to all taste nice. You inspected them, made sure they weren't green or that super nut-brown that was really hard eating.

Third: variable flavouring. Golden Wonder must have had a bloke with a shovel chucking heaps of flavouring over skip loads of crisps. Nothing mechanical could have produced the huge variety of flavour Golden Wonder would ascribe to a crisp.

At one end of the vari-flavour system, you had to read the front of the packet to make sure that you had indeed purchased Salt and Vinegar, and that you had not, in the gloom of the shop, confused your blues and bought Fucking Ready Salted instead. At the other end, a heavily flavoured packet of Cheese and Onion was as filling as the sandwich. If you found a really good bag of Golden Wonder, you might go to the same shop for the next pack, like a Guinness-man who's found a good pint, but eventually that supply would run dry, and it'd be back to chomping them nasty green rotters again.

Golden Wonder, like the Roman Empire, dominated the crisp market, like Europe.

And like the Romans, who got so rich they couldn't give a shit, Golden Wonder allowed this empire-of-crisps to be smashed to pieces. Smashed to pieces in exactly the way some people liked to eat crisps back then, by smashing the bag with a fist and pulverising the crisps, so that you could near breathe them in.

Golden Wonder was a big company, but it was out of shape. Golden Wonder knew their Cheese and Onions (if not what thoses things taste like) and knew that there was no crisp-maker of note that could compete with them.
They gave the quality control guy early retirement. They got distracted by Pot Noodle. Who knows?

Walkers came along and fucked them right over, we know that.

How did Walkers smash Golden Wonders empire to Smash? They did something real radical. Real maverick, something straight out of left field. Something, you know, the ad agency thought they might be bold enough to go for. Or maybe it was something two blokes thought up in a pub. Walkers bold moved, designed to snatch hold of the crisp market, was to swap the colours of the Cheese and Onion and Salt and Vinegar.

Now younger readers might be thinking, what, what colour, what you talking about, don't talk shit. Before Walkers, because of rules passed down during the war to allow illiterate soilders to pick crisps appropriately, Cheese and Onion crisps had always come in green bags and Salt and Vinegar came in light blue ( to avoid Fucking Ready Salted, which was dark blue.)

Walkers gave the old rules a right tump, and put Cheese and Onion in blue bags and Salt and Vinegar in green ones. I had to buy a bag to check out the craziness of it. It was as mad as putting milk in Coke cans, and must have caused years of unnecessary 'I asked for Cheese and Onion' heart-ache.

This wasn't they're only strategy. I'm sure the reps would have worked especially hard, probably beyond the job description, to encourage shops to take Walkers alongside Golden Wonders. They had quality control, and every Walker's crisp you had tasted the same, something Golden Wonder couldn't manage in the same bag.

That's why I won't eat Walkers now: they're too predictable. That and the snack-crack MSG and hydrogrenated vegetable oil.

Still, nothing stays the same and GW may rise again. Look here for an insight into the crisp market in Britain and Golden Wonder's plan to take on Walkers.

There's no moral to this story (because I'm the editor, that's why), but I would say: let's just stop eating American crisps. And let's change the name of junk food to shit food.

And for nostagic reasons, let's all eat Golden Wonder and tell Pepsi Co, the owners of Walkers, to fuck right off.

Here's to shit crisps! Here's to the 70's: golden land, green crisps. Here's to headache inducing experiments with melting crisp bags under the grill to make badges. Honestly, them badges were cool.

By the way, have I told you how much I like Jubblies?

SPELL-CHECK Chocolate E-claris

You have to wonder what's harder to spell: chocolate or eclairs?

I'm not a terrible pedant, and I don't laugh at green grocers putting a possesive apostrophe in plurals, but I had to capture this mis-spelling forever. It's a declaration, it makes the case for contrast, for light and shade: it's a work of art!

CHOCOLATE - so carefully wrought, so carefully assembled. Whoever wrote this card didn't even have to crush all the letters together at the end of the word to get it all on.

E-CLARIS - have this, fuck it, who cares!

Could you spell eclairs more wrong?

It's the dash isn't it? The dash makes it a work of art, and the fact that only two letters are transposed yet the word makes no fucking sense at all. Genius!

Incidentally, I hate English Bloggs that perpetuate idiot-hunts, so I'm not doing that. I just admire this wonderful bit of spelling. It's rebellious, it's radical! Fuck that dictionary fool, I'm spelling free-style. And I'm taking grammar with me!

This could c-acht/o-n!

LIFE: We Ain't Getting No Cat

'When you're older,' my girlfirend said to my son last night, 'we'll get you a gerbil.'

'Yes', I said, 'so you can learn the meaning of death in just two years'.

My ears are carefully tuned to listen carefully to anything my girlfriend says regarding pets. By telling my son he could have a gerbil, she was telling me that we ain't getting no cat.

When it comes to pets I have one rule: they have to be self-managing, shit-wise. That means a cat and nothing else. Rodents, fish, birds and lizards all need much too much waste management for my taste, and dogs are four-legged shit factories, shitting everywhere. Eat, shit, sleep, stink and lick balls, that's a dog for you. Cats, on the otherhand, like to keep all toilet matters to themselves, something you can plainly see when observing a cat in a litter tray. Don't they look embarrassed?

I pretended not to hear what she was really saying, taking instead her statement as an invitation to talk about pets in general.

'Or we could get a lovely cat,' I said, my voice bristling with excitement. My enthusiasm for cats gets cranked up by her opposition to them.

'We're not getting a cat - ever,' she said, flatly. That's that then: she's stated the case, laid down the law. She raised one eyebrow. In Roger Moore this looks quizzical: in her it's a full-stop, a salute to her statement. How do you like them apples? I don't care if you don't. It's a happy-go-fuck-yourself face if ever there was one.

She likes, every now and then, to bring up a subject of previous dispute just to make sure that we're both still singing from her hymn sheet. I don't know why cats swam into her concious and out through her mouth that night, but there's probably a rhythym there somewhere. She may be worried that if she doesn't express her opposition to cats at regular intervals, I may get the impression that she know longer cares and come home with a bag of kittens.

'We might...'

'We won't, not ever, we're not getting a cat.'

'Listen,' I said firmly, 'don't start writing the constitution before we're out of the valley.'

'What do you mean?' she asked.

Naturally I know better than to simply tell her what I mean. 90% of the time we both know what's meant by everything we say, but if I tell her what I mean, without finding out what she thinks I mean, it may turn out that she thought I meant something entirely different, so we'd have two things to disagree about. I meant, in this case, don't be such an old bossy-boots, laying down the law. So I said 'what do you mean, what do I mean?'

'What fucking valley?'

So you see, I'd missed the meaning of her 'What do you mean?'

'I mean... the valley of our relationship, the land we're in.'

'And?'

'And we're on a long journey, to the promised land, our life together.'

'So we're still on a journey, we haven't arrived?'

How do you think this'll turn out?

Find out in part two...

ADSENSE: My first Adsense

I've had my first Adsense advert! It's for sausage making and I can't recommend it highly enough http://www.sausagemaking.co.uk/.

Here are some testimonials, so you can see I speak the truth.


Just to say I made around 20 sausages both pork and lamb ones. - BRILL.....in every way from start to finish and taste !
P. Hay

No shit P. Hay, there's only two things that matter in the sausage: the taste and the start to finish.

We have made lots of Boerewors. Finding it great! Will be ordering more casings and spices soon.

L.Giglio

I think you'll find that's Boer War, and history tells us it was a right bad do. Have you tried our Battle Of The Somme All-Pork spicy Bangers?

So far we have had spectacular success in our sausage making enterprise, purely for home use. Everyone who has been served with quite a variety of mixes have been more than satisfied with our efforts so we shall continue to experiment.

M. Heritage

And you ain't seen fucking nothing yet M. Heritage! Keep experimenting with your home use sausage enterprise and let us know how you get on.

I use your skins for sausages and savoury puddings. I find them versatile and they cook quite well and brown nicely. They don't rip or burst easily when filling either. The best thing about them is that they are dry and store easily. I would like to see you do a "cocktail" or chipolata skin though.

D.Wailes-

Would that there was the technology D.Wailes, would that there was that.

I am an expat living in Norway and it has always been a problem getting a good old English sausage until I found your web site. The products I ordered from you were perfect to make my own and now half of my freezer is full of different types of sausage. Keep up the good work and I will be ordering from you again.

P.Nygaard

There's fuck all to it P.Nygaard.

We are delighted with the quality we obtain with our sausage making. The skins we obtained from you are very acceptable! Keep up the good work!

J.McCormick

Very acceptable! You're damn tootin'.

I have made some very good sausages. The skins are fine, and I will re-order in due course.

C.Sansbury

In due course, Mr Sansbury.

TV: Channel Four's going down the saucepan Part 1

PART ONE

A trailer for The F Word on Channel 4 just made me think: enough's enough! We all like food, we all like good food, but Gordon Ramsey's a big prick and no amount of acting hard is going to change that. And no amount of blue-mouthery either Gordon.

Gordon knows that being a chef isn't quite like playing for Rangers, but he's determined to toughen himself up by swearing as much as he can. Because we all know that that's the measure of hardness, true hardness: you ability to swear at underlings. Yes, here's a junior would-be chef. He likes mushrooms, making gravy and baking cakes. Quick Gordon, call him a fucking cunt! That'll sort him and that'll sort you too, you big hard-as-fuck chef you, you big 'look at me shouting at the £4- an-hours' ugly Easter Island-faced loon.

This isn't Gordon's fault though. He may be an ugly, sweary, brute of a bully-boy, but he didn't ask to be on telly: no, someone asked him! And who asked him, Channel 4.
Yes, pity the loss of Channel 4.

How highly we once held Channel 4, how highly I held it myself: yeah, this is radical stuff I thought, stuff my Mum and Dad might not get. Stuff that boiled the blood of Daily Mail readers. Lesbian sitcoms. Controversial disabled musicals. You name it, Channel 4 didn't have it: they had something more curious and other instead.

What have they got now? Jamie Oliver in a camper van, kiddy-loving little prick that he is. Jamie, I admire your drive to improve school food, but do you have to swear so much at 8 o'clock on a school night? If you make a mistake and swear while recording your programme, can't the editor earn his salt and cut it out, or can't the director ask you to do it again, without the f-bomb? Does everything have to be so fucking pressured?

I mean, I can see why he swears though. He's got to drive all the way to Sicily in that old VW for a start, you know, and he doesn't know if he can make it, or where he's staying the night, or if he can do it without Jools and the kids. I mean, this never happened to Keith Floyd. He got the production company to arrange things in advance so that the trip went smoothly and he could relax with a few drinks, know what I mean? You don't see old Rick Stein pulling his hair out because his fucking barge has sprung a leak. No, you don't, and you don't because they plan their trips carefully and they know that they're the talent and if they don't get treated right then there ain't gonna be a show and the TV company can stick that up their arse. You should take a leaf out of their book Jamie. Then you wouldn't have to swear so much because the fan belt's gone or something like that.

Hang on! I think Jamie's making a chump of me and I think he's making chumps of all of us. If his van breaks down surely the blokes with the cameras will give him a lift. Don't you think they do? Do you think? Well do ya, punk?

You see, Channel 4 likes swearing, almost as much as I do, but you can't swear before the watershed unless you're under a bit of pressure, you know, like you've got a lot of puds to make quick-sharp, or one of your milk pans has bubbled over again and you've just cleaned the fucking hob! So Channel 4 treats us all like numb-skulls, stupid ones, and says: Ooh, let's pretend Gordon's running a real restaurant! Ssshh, why don't we make like Jamie doesn't know when he's going to see Buttercup and Tinkerbell again, you know like he's in the fucking SAS or something, rather than actually being paid a fucking cash mountain to ponce over to Italy and fuck about with tomatoes, before coming home and counting his wallop with Lady Jools.

And so you see, it's not that great twat Gordon Ramsey who offends me (yeah Gordon, show how much better a chef you are than all that other lot on TV by going on and on and fucking well on about them like you've got nothing else to think about in the world, like the clearly small-cocked, insecure pseudo-Jock you are) or money-bonkers Oliver (although I do think he should stop pretending so much, as it only works if he's presuming we're all fucking nuts, and I don't like that, no siree) but Channel 4.

If it wasn't for Peep Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Channel 4 news, and well, alright, a few other programmes too (but not that many) I'd block your vile celebrity-loving, property-selling, working class-hating, Nazi documentary-making blue-tongued shit from ever entering my eyes.

And I haven't even mentioned Ghost Squad yet. Oh fucking hell, can't wait.

Part Two