Runny Thoughts

Hallo Pumpkin

Ah, Halloween. Traditional in England since...er...a few years ago.

I may be in the minority, but we didn't 'do' Halloween when I were a lad. Maybe it was the proximity to Guy Fawkes, with its soggy catherine wheels, short-lived sparklers and half-baked potatoes; maybe we hadn’t yet recovered from the breathless excitement of Harvest Festival; maybe it was simply not in our consciousness except as an annual episode in Peanuts cartoons.

That is how I knew about it. If it hadn’t been for Linus van Pelt and his attempts to lure the Great Pumpkin to his achingly (nay, eye-wateringly) sincere pumpkin patch, I would have grown up not knowing about Halloween at all.

Poor Linus. The thought of his forlorn annual vigil still gives me a hollow feeling in the stomach. Never mind Charlie Brown’s regular attempts to kick the football or to steer the latest in an endless series of kites away from the clutches of the rapacious kite-eating tree. Sad though they were, those failures epitomised Charlie Brown’s lot in life. You could almost say they validated his existence. What use, after all, is a failure who cannot fail?

Linus, though, was erudite, well-read, refined. He could look at a cloud formation and see a map of British Honduras or the profile of the sculptor Thomas Eakins, where Charlie Brown merely saw a ducky and a horsey; he was prone to quoting the Gospels, and saying things like “there is no heavier burden than great potential”; for ‘show and tell’ he hand-drew facsimiles of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ok, so maybe he was a bit pompous, but this tiny failing was offset by his attachment to his security blanket, and especially by his touching belief in the Great Pumpkin. The annual pumpkin patch episode became part of the Peanuts canon, as indispensable as Beethoven's birthday, Joe Cool, or Lucy's psychiatrist's booth. One year, Linus was the runaway leader in the polls for Class President, only to blow it in his final speech, which opened with the words "let me tell you all about the Great Pumpkin".

If the romance of the Great Pumpkin made Halloween a more attractive prospect to this eight-year-old, trick or treating left me stone cold. Don’t get me wrong. The greed I displayed at Christmas (to take a small representative sample) would have qualified me for a career as a merchant banker or Premiership footballer, but at least there was the pretence of reward for good behaviour.

Trick or treating, on the other hand, seemed to me extortion, plain and simple.

Now I’m all grown up and everything, and at least partially responsible for the ethical moulding of a little person who is cast disturbingly in my own image, I’ve started examining these festivals, as far as is possible, from the child’s point of view. So I started thinking “what exactly is the message we send the younger generation on our annual holidays and festivals, especially now so many of them have lost touch with their religious or secular origins?”

The results are quite revealing:

New Year: celebrate new beginnings and reassess your drab, worthless life. Preferably do this when hungover. Join a gym for a month.

Valentine’s Day: if you are not in a relationship, you are sad and lonely, quite beyond redemption. If you are in a relationship, and do not allow yourself to be ripped off to the tune of forty quid for a bunch of roses, and eighty for a substandard ‘romantic meal for two including bottle of wine and mid-meal serenading by an out-of-work gipsy violinist’, followed by another seventy for a pair of tickets to a Valentine’s Day concert ‘including a rose for every lady in the audience’, you are an abject apology for a human being.

Mother’s Day: assuage your guilt with a phone call and a bunch of daffs.

Easter: commemorate the death and miraculous rebirth of the one who is the embodiment of goodness and universal love, the Easter Bunny. Consume a quantity of chocolate the size of Basingstoke.

Father’s Day: boys - watching sport on the telly all day and not lifting a finger to help with the housework is fine for limited periods. See if you can make such periods last all year.

May and August Bank Holidays: random days off are fine when, for no known reason, officially sanctioned.

Harvest Festival: give out-of-date tinned peaches to old people.

Halloween: form gangs and roam the streets extorting goodies from innocent householders with scarcely-veiled threats of unnamed violence.

Guy Fawkes night: down with terrorism, especially when it’s incompetent.

Christmas: generosity, forgiveness, peace on Earth, goodwill to all men. Never mind all that touchy-feely rubbish: spend money you don’t have on stuff that will be jettisoned by the recipient within a week; buy industrial quantities of food and drink that you wouldn’t consider consuming during the rest of the year; eat until you resemble a barrage balloon that’s won a ‘best Mr. Creosote impersonation’ competition; pretend that staggering to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk is ‘walking it off’.

Well, there it is. Annual holidays holding a mirror up to modern society. Inspiring, isn’t it?

Short and Wurlys

I regard myself as a pretty open kind of guy, prepared to see the best in people, as I hope they would in me.

But over the last ten days I’ve found myself increasingly involved in furtive behaviour.

It’s my own fault. Who would have thought that a simple blog post on confectionery would spark off a national debate, local uprising, bit of a chat on Twitter and a dozen or so comments here on this blog?

Deary me, the outrage I caused. Well not so much outrage as cheerful disagreement, to be honest. But thanks to everyone for sharing. It seems that chocolate is a much more unifying subject than, say, religion or politics, for the simple reason that more people are interested in it. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Never mind the Tea Party, how about the Chocolate Party?

(Sidebar 1 re Tea Party and the deliciously awful Christine O’Donnell: this is the story of the week, hands, as it were, down)

Back to my shifty behaviour.

Buoyed by people’s interest, and always open to new and exciting experiences, I’ve taken a fresh look at the confectionery counter in the last few days. And this is where the furtiveness comes in.

Overwhelmed by choice, I’ve spent so long examining the wares on display in a variety of local emporia that I wouldn’t be surprised if shopkeepers replaced their “no more than four scool chilrden (sic) at a time” notices with “no more than one minute looking at the sweetes”.

(Sidebar 2: my all-time favourite newsagent sign is “the magazines are not for reading”. You know what they mean, but...)

It shouldn’t be that difficult, should it, to make a decision on which chocolate bar to buy? Usually it’s straight in there for a Toffee Crisp or a Twix, maybe sometimes a Crunchie if I’m feeling particularly ill-disposed to my teeth. Occasionally, when they’re in season, a Creme Egg. But all this counter-talk of Drifters, Twirls, Penguins and Topics has led me to, well, drift off-topic, like a...twirly, um, penguin...

Yeah, sorry about that.

Anyway, there are a few amendments I need to make to last week’s post, and then I’ll leave the topic subject alone.

Firstly, I made a couple of heinous omissions from the original list, highlighted by some of the commenters:

Toblerone: How could I possibly have missed this one off? The only sweet ever made that is designed specifically to cause injury to the roof of the mouth. It’s a little-know fact that the Toblerone was developed by Swiss army scientists during WWII - they were afraid that their knives would be too obvious a weapon and were looking for something that would incapacitate half the Western world by stealth in one go. Swiss neutrality - yeah, right.

Fry’s Turkish Delight: doesn’t really count. Too pink in the middle, the chocolate coating merely an afterthought.

M & M’s: deliberately omitted, I confess, because not ‘native’, but I suppose established enough in this country to warrant a comment. They go into the ‘Modern Pretenders, But Pretty Darn Good Ones At That’ category AND the ‘Down In One’ category. I don’t hear anyone disagreeing.

Star Bar: straight in the ‘Sorry, Repulsive’ category. Wrong, just plain wrong.

The book is now closed.

Secondly, not only is a finger of Fudge just enough, it still only costs 17p.

17p!!

Nothing costs 17p any more. Except, obviously, a finger of Fudge. There’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about that, as if I were walking down the street in the middle of December and saw a young boy with a pudding bowl haircut and the Ready Brek glow.

Thirdly, and this is (or rather, isn’t) the big one: the Curly Wurly. The thing that started this all off in the first place.

Well, I searched high and low in our area, and was beginning to come to the conclusion that West Norwood is too high-class to stock them, as if the area as a whole was sniffing disdainfully at the thought of anything so, well, YOU know, my dear.

Then I found one in West Hampstead, and realised I had it the wrong way round. The Curly Wurly is a magnificently classy snack, available only in the better parts of town.

But the thing about the Curly Wurly that most struck me was this: delicious as it was, it was TINY.

Now I know I’ve grown since 1975, but even so.

TINY, I tell you. Finished in three bites. The Curly Wurly of my youth was a meal in itself, like a pint of Guinness. Not as rib-sticking as a Mars bar, to be sure, but, unlike a Milky Way, you could eat it between meals and ruin your appetite.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

But, it has to be said, even though it was smaller than an Oompa-Loompa’s toenail, it was completely scrumptious.

I need more. Lots more.

So if you’re thinking of buying a Curly Wurly in West Hampstead this week, you might want to do it before Wednesday. That’s all I’m saying.

Hello Sweetie

Regular readers will know that I am not afraid to tackle the big subjects on this blog.
Politics, classical music, literature, food, ecology, social networking, technology...the list goes on. You name it, it’s probably been subjected to my ill-informed and unthinking scrutiny.

But I realised the other day that I have been remiss. There is one burning issue that remains undiscussed here.

Reader, I apologise.

All I can do is rectify the situation without further ado.

It started with an innocent tweet in my timeline.

The mere mention of the word ‘curly’ in conjunction with its natural rhyming partner was enough to send me down memory lane. I don’t know why, but some sweets belong firmly in my childhood. It’s almost as if they stopped making them in 1979. And even though the taste of curly-wurlys (wurlies?) eaten in my innocent youth remains with me still, I would no more buy one now than Sarah Palin would conjugate a prefixed imperfective verb of motion in Russian.

Or English, come to that.

Why is this?

They are still making them, those cheeky monkeys who call themselves Cadbury UK. They’ve been making them since 1971.

So why did I stop eating them about seven years later?

It’s got nothing to do with ‘growing up’, a pernicious process that I have managed to avoid with dextrous ease for forty-five years now. Oh no, I still eat confectionery on a quasi-daily basis: Mars, Twix, Wispa (plain or Gold), Crunchie, Kit-Kat (don’t get me started - just bring back the foil), Flake, Maltesers and on and on and on. I eat them all with a childish relish that makes my five-year-old boy’s innocent pleasure at the sight of a party pack of chocolate buttons seem debonair and sophisticated.

(Obviously I don’t let him have chocolate very often. Bad for your teeth, you know. Now pass me that King Size Twix.)

It’s just one of those mysteries of life, I suppose. I may have to try one soon, just to see what I’ve been missing.

Now, time for some interactivity. What I’m about to do will no doubt please some people, while enraging and alienating others. (I have already discovered, to my cost, the folly of extolling the virtues of cre*e e*gs in certain quarters.)

The fact is, people take their confectionery very seriously. Yet impassioned debate is entirely missing from the public forum. National news outlets, obviously, have to shy away from any accusations of product placement, which is why Charlie Brooker never writes his 800 words on ‘Why I Hate Lion Bars’.

Food bloggers, by contrast, probably could write about individual candy bars or brands, but are too busy doing vertical comparisons of single-estate Argan oils or writing impassioned and purple prose on the subject of their favourite root vegetable.

So to fill this gap I present below a vaguely categorised list of chocolate-based confections (there is one exception, but I couldn’t leave out Caramac, could I?). It is an entirely personal list - so even though you may disagree with me I will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says I’m ‘wrong’ or ‘deluded’ or ‘in league with Satan’. But I give it to you in the hope that you, in return, will embellish it with vigorous and informed debate.

As long as you don’t diss my creme eggs.

The Classics - Timeless, irreplaceable
Twix
Kit-kat
Toffee Crisp
Mars
Crunchie
Flake

Great When I Was Ten, But Inexplicably Don’t Eat Them Any More
Curly Wurly
Rolo
Caramac

Good Solid Stuff, But No More Than Once A Month For Some Reason
Minstrels
Galaxy
Aero

‘Modern’ Pretenders, And Pretty Darned Good Ones At That
Yorkie
Wispa
Wispa Gold
Dime

Down In One
Smarties
Maltesers
Buttons

Not As Big As You Want Them To Be, But Any Bigger And You Would Probably Feel A Bit Sick
Milky Way
Milky Bar
(Finger of) Fudge
Creme Egg
Ripple

‘Grown-Up’ Chocolates That You Just Wanted To Cram In Your Mouth But Were Only Allowed One At A Time
After Eight
Matchmakers

Passed For Sophisticated In The Seventies But We All Know Better Now
Bournville

Nice Try But We’re Not Falling For Healthy Stuff In Our Chocolate
Fruit ’N Nut
and especially
Whole Nut

Always Somehow Disappointing
Revels
Club
Penguin

Just Somehow Never Fancied Them, You Know. Perfectly Nice, I’m Sure, But...
Topic
Picnic
Boost
Twirl
Time Out
Double Decker

Can’t Imagine Why Anyone Would Want To Eat Them
Lion Bar
Drifter

Sorry, Repulsive
Walnut Whip
Wagon Wheels
Bounty
Marathon (and no I will not call them Sn*ck*rs even though that’s been the name for at least thirty years)

It's a mad world. No, really.

I don’t get political very often on this blog. But here’s a brief rant. I’m afraid those of you who have come to expect writing of a comedic and trivial nature here will have to wait a bit longer (those who think my writing is more laughable than funny should, on the other hand, feel right at home).

The papers, blogs and social media were abuzz yesterday with the story of the cat and the wheelie bin.

If you missed it, a lady in Coventry was caught on CCTV stopping to stroke a cat before whipping open a handy wheelie bin and popping the benighted moggie into it.

It’s ok. The cat (Lola) survived. It is possible that the lady (Mary) won’t, given the level of vitriol that has been spat her way. The inevitable Hatebook pages have been started up etc etc.

Disclaimer: I love cats. There is one sitting next to me as I write. It is slightly damp from an ill-advised jaunt into the rain, but I love it still. And along with many people I was disgusted and fascinated by the thing wot that lady done. It weren’t right, were it?
But people, please. If we’re talking animal welfare, let’s turn our attention towards battery farms, shall we? Organised cruelty on a massive scale, not just a random and slightly mad act of temporary incarceration.

And if we want real perspective, how about going here and giving all you can afford to the flood victims of Pakistan?

The world has gone mad. Mad, I tell you.

Ok, rant over. I promise I’ll be trivial again soon.

I #heart @Twitter

It’s been quite a week for Clare Balding.

She joined Twitter last Tuesday, with the specific intention, or so it seemed at the time, of calling AA Gill a twat. This wasn’t, I should add, a random act of abuse, merely a response to an article in The Sunday Times in which Gill referred to her as a ‘dyke on a bike’.

Now I don’t intend to take sides on this. All I will say is that The Sunday Times doesn’t seem an appropriate place to display childishness, homophobia and ignorance.

We have The Daily Mail for that.

It does seem, though, as if Mr Gill has aroused the ire of quite a section of society. The row has escalated to the extent that John Prescott joined the fray, referring to Gill as a sh**. (Either the asterisks refer to an erudite footnote and AA Gill is a ‘sh’, or he meant ‘shit’.)

Pithy though the epithets ‘twat’ and ‘sh**’ are, they are no more than ‘sixth in the semi-final and hoping to be one of the fastest losers’ when compared to Emma Kennedy, who in a flash of Usain Bolt-like inspiration branded the Sunday Times journalist ‘a cockjuggling thundercunt’.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is championship-quality swearing. Hats off. With form like that Kennedy will surely have a chance of glory in the Potty-Mouthing event come 2012.

Swearing, enjoyable though it may be, is not the point of this post, however.

The blogosphere is littered with invective concerning the joys (hurrah!) or perils (boo!) of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Hobnob (made that one up) and other forms of ‘social media’.
While I am an avid user of at least one of these, I am interested by the use of the word ‘social’ in this context. It is a curious way of describing a phenomenon that encourages people to spend more time interacting with their myriad computing devices than with their families and (real) friends.

Be that as it may, these sites do have their uses. Where else would it be possible to be ignored by so many celebrities simultaneously? Or gather ‘followers’ who wouldn’t recognise you if you trod on their toes?

There are those who poo-poo Twitter. Well, at the risk of plagiarising Blackadder, I see your poo-poo and raise you another poo-poo.

One of the joys of Twitter is that it can be what you make of it. Faced with the limitation of 140 characters, and the opportunity to reach thousands of people without actually having to go anywhere or meet any of them, there are those who have decided to use it for professional development and ‘reaching a wider audience’.

Others see at as a way of sharing stuff they’ve seen on the internet, a development for which I am profoundly grateful. If it hadn’t been for them I wouldn’t have thought to revisit Dave Allen, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper, Cheers and many others.

And while the days of tweeting such things as ‘I am now going to go upstairs and brush my teeth’ are thankfully long gone (mostly), there are still others who spend most of their time bantering with their mates, passing wry comment on the passing world and generally wasting time. So much cheaper and less debilitating than going to the pub.

In many ways, Twitter is (or at least feels) liberating. Other people’s banalities are mercifully short; and your own are quickly lost in the swirling maelstrom that is the Twitter timeline. If someone likes it, they can prolong its life it for a few more minutes with the blessed Retweet. If it’s rubbish, it’s gone in an instant.

Well, apart from being preserved for ever in the Library of Congress, which for most people probably isn’t as scary as it sounds (“Aagghh! Future generations will know what I had for breakfast on January 29th 2010! I’m ruined!”).

For my part, I use it as a relatively harmless way of offloading the ridiculous and juvenile thoughts with which I would normally torment my family (although of course it doesn’t stop me from sharing with them as well. Lucky things.)

This may explain how a simple tweet about the cricket the other day developed into a tweet exchange that culminated in a potential surrealist sitcom starring Martin Clunes and Salvador Dali and featuring a euphonium-playing fish.

All you have to do now is wade through twenty billion tweets to find out why.

Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome

It is about 10pm on Sunday 27th June, 2010. At about 6.00 this afternoon, I had the beginning of this post all worked out.

This is what I was going to write:
"Today saw a dismal performance from an over-rated team full of their own self-regard, crowning one of the most inept sporting displays on foreign soil since the passing of the Inept Sporting Displays Act of 1853.

But that's enough about the Australian cricket team."

I hope you see what I was trying to do with that.

If you don't, you are clearly not an English sports fan.

Congratulations on both counts.

Anyway, regardless of whether you are a sports fan or not, I'm sure you'll be interested to know that this afternoon saw the first known occurrence of a phenomenon I am choosing to call Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome (you can work out the acronym yourselves, I'm sure).

I invented it, so I get to name it, OK?

Briefly, what happened was this:

England (football) were, to quote the magnificent Malcolm Tucker, about as much use as a marzipan dildo in their footballing contest with Germany.

England (cricket) on the other hand, were, as is their recent wont, progressing quite nicely against another 'old enemy', Australia, who have performed as disappointingly in the last week as the perennially under-achieving Rain Gods of Wimbledon.

They then contrived to turn a facile victory into a cushion-munching, finger-slicing-while-chopping-onions, beer-all-over-the-kitchen-throwing near-defeat that had me, well, you know, munching cushions and so forth.

I have a theory. And it's one that makes those no-hopers at CERN look like amateurs.

The footballing no-contest in Bloemfontein, South Africa ended at approximately 4.50 our time.

England (cricket) were playing in Manchester, England and started imploding at approximately 6.00.

The distance between the two towns is 5934 miles.

Until 4.50, the England football team had possession of the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude.

At the final whistle, no longer having use for it, they tossed it aside like a used up tube of toothpaste, whereupon it pricked up its ears (yes I know mantles don't have ears), sniffed the air (yes I know that even if mantles had ears they wouldn't use them to sniff the air), and hot-footed it (yes I know etc) to Manchester with all possible speed.
84 miles per minute, to be more or less precise.

Speedy buggers, these Mantles of Ineptitude.

Upon arrival in Manchester, the Mantle headed straight for the England (cricket) dressing room, where its mystical powers caused them to lose six wickets for eighteen runs.
Rumours that exceptional pace bowling from Shaun Tait and Dougie Bollinger were also involved are scurrilous and not to be believed.

Luckily for the spirit of English sportiness, Tim Bresnan, who was batting at the time, is blessed with the elusive ingredient that is crucial to any sporting over-achiever: Self-Belief. This is not to be confused with Self-Regard, for which see England (football) above.

Bresnan's Self-Belief gave the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude a withering stare and told it to sod off, enabling Bresnan to hit two of the last three balls for four and secure a series-clinching victory.

The Mantle was last seen on the M1, heading South. It is expected to arrive in South-West London late tomorrow afternoon.

Come on Andy!

Strictly for the birds

Yesterday, one eye on the weather (that’s a quarter of an eye each, as there were four of us), we visited a miracle.

This is where I get evangelical and stuff.

You must visit the London Wetland Centre.

It doesn’t matter where you live or what your level of interest in wildlife is: go there.

Birdwatcher living in Barnes? It’s on your doorstep. Go there.

From Fremantle, Western Australia and don’t do outdoorsy stuff or nature of any description? Go there.

Live on the moon and enjoy hunting birds until they’re extinct? Go there. But don’t bring your gun.

Seriously, that a place such as this should exist anywhere is good enough, and proof that amidst all the earth-plundering insanity that overwhelms modern life there are people who are quietly doing the right thing in an unpreachy kind of way. But the true miracle is that it’s right slap bang in the middle (ish) of London. A short bus ride from Hammersmith tube and you’re immersed in forty-two (Douglas Adams would be so happy) hectares of twitching paradise. Eider ducks threaten to trip you up as they take the kids for a walk; red-breasted geese honk en masse as if to compensate for their weird anatomical-drawing like appearance; tufted ducks dive obligingly for between twenty and thirty seconds, just like what it says on the laminated sheet. And much more besides.

If you’re not interested in the minutiae, it’s just a brilliant walk with a convenient shop and cafe to anticipate.

But if ornithological trivia is (should be ‘are’, really, because trivia are plural) your thang, I have news.

Apparently there was an American Golden Plover on site yesterday.

Now although I was once a junior twitcher of almost unparalleled spoddiness, I wouldn’t know an American Golden Plover from a speck of volcanic ash on my binoculars, which is generally what birds look like in real life. I know what a regular (or, as I discover, Eurasian) Golden Plover looks like. Or at least I do as long as it’s sitting on my desk with a big sign saying ‘I am a Golden Plover’ round its neck. But put me in the wild and I am reduced to ridiculous and ever-more-fanciful guesswork.

“Cranes,” I murmur, as a pair of suitably-wide-winged birds take off half a mile away on the other side of the lake. I say it just loudly enough for my family to be impressed, but too quietly for the bona fide twitchers standing two yards away from me to hear. For if they do, I am undone, the gossamer fabric of my expertise unravelled like an Andrex roll fleeing an overexcited puppy.

Tactical game, birdwatching.

I came over a touch Fotherington-Thomas as we walked round, marvelling at nature in the raw, at one with the awesome delicacy and beauty of the planet, and as near as dammit wept when I saw a mother coot with its two fluffy chicks doggy-paddling (cooty-paddling?) into the reeds. How wonderful, I thought, that in stark contrast to the general mood of things these days, there are people who really value nature, devoting themselves to the preservation of habitat and cherishing the lives of the birds as they might their own children.

How inspiring, I thought.

We nipped into a hide, to shelter from one of the brief but violent showers that are the hallmark of any self-respecting Bank Holiday Monday. Scanning the horizon, binoculars glued to my eyes, I fielded questions from both sides, as my family tried to ascertain firstly what that brown bird bobbing up and down on the water was, and secondly what sandwich or tortilla wrap I would prefer for lunch.

I blanched a little as I realised the answer to both questions was ‘duck’.

I like my hypocrisy with hoisin sauce.