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.

Sweet Charity

Charity has changed over the years. It was so simple back in the day. Well-meaning people rattling tins on the street corner; a plastic dog with a slot in its head; the occasional raffle, with a family tin of Cadbury’s Roses as the third prize; a single Oxfam shop on the high street, selling your old shoes and a Val Doonican LP.

But those days of innocence are long gone, and I'm not sure we're any the better for it. Chariddee has become big business. Go to Oxfam nowadays and you could easily mistake it for a ‘boutique’ with its quality merchandise and prices to match. The trip to the charity shop to get rid of (or buy) worn out jeans and that corduroy jacket that has got just that little bit too threadbare is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. No more offloading all those Barbara Dan Jeffrey Taylor Brown Archer Bradfords that have sullied your shelves for so long (but which, let’s face it, you rather enjoyed, or you wouldn’t have had so many of them). Nowadays you’re more likely to go shopping in an Oxfam to pick up an Alexander McQueen outfit or a signed copy of Nigel Slater’s latest.

When it comes to raising money yourself, just going on a sponsored walk, as was the case when I were a lad (it were all fields round ‘ere, an’ all) simply isn’t enough. Nowadays it’s all about the eccentricity or extremity of the act. If you're not prepared to dress up as a kangaroo and roller skate up Mount Kilimanjaro to raise £1000 for Muscular Dystrophy, or run the marathon backwards while playing The Brotherhood Of Man’s greatest hits on a euphonium in aid of Cancer Research then you might as well not bother.

As for regular ‘giving’, it's not possible to walk down the road any more without being assaulted by nauseatingly cheerful young people with clipboards, whose blondness and affability are carefully designed to make you feel guilty for wanting to push them in front of a bus. You see the telltale red bib fifty yards off and start veering to the left. They see you seeing them and dance a cheerful little “give it up, little man, I have you in my sights” dance. You see them seeing you seeing them, and execute the five-second mime that tries to say “I’m so sorry I really don’t have time for this I actually do give quite a lot to charity I mean there’s the fiver a month to Age Concern and of course I gave fifty quid to the Pakistani flood victims and don’t forget the Bolivian child I’m sponsoring and that wonderful African AIDS charity ooh is that the time my train leaves in six minutes I must dash so sorry”.

But you know it is futile.

“Hi, do you have a minute for Save/Help/Patronise The Children/Aged/Disadvantaged (delete as appropriate)?”

“Move aside, blond(e) person,” you reply, “or I will render that clipboard unusable in a novel and painful way.”

This merely serves to amplify the wattage of their grin.

“No problem! Have a good life!”

You give in, as you both knew you would. Your Steely Resolve is no match for their particularly sadistic brand of geniality and niceness. There goes yet another £5 a month.

And then they send you a biro for no discernible reason other than to make you feel guilty when you throw it away.

Guilt at every turn.

Please don't misunderstand me - I’ve done my share of quasi-pointless fundraising activity (you think I conducted all the Tchaikovsky symphonies in a day for fun?) and know that dozens of you have raised serious money for many genuinely worthwhile charities.

But with over 180,000 charities in England and Wales, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for any of the smaller ones to make themselves noticed, and likewise very hard for the well-meaning but ill-informed individual (that’s me!) to sort it all out. Donation fatigue doesn’t help. Nor does the apparent perception of some charities as ‘sexier’ than others. And is it just me, or are some of the larger charities now spending so much money on advertising and other overheads that it is difficult to know exactly how much money actually gets to the intended recipient?

It is beyond the scope of this blog to give detailed information on the complexities of modern-day giving. It’s a massively complex subject and I am, as I think I mentioned, well-meaning but ill-informed.

But let’s go easy on the kangaroo suits, shall we?

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)

Spawny Gits

Dennis Hopper - the one that got away.

Do you remember Frogger?

Great game. I was addicted to it when I was 16.

But then I was addicted to everything when I was 16. Except any form of academic work.

My favourite was Space Invaders - the original, classic version. Asteroids was good too. And I fell briefly under the powerful spell of Missile Command. It had a trackball - need I say more?

I’ve got off the point already. Please don’t let me do that.

Frogs. That’s what this is about. Bloomin’ frogs.

Seems like there’s more of them this year. Especially in our kitchen.

The day after the above photo was taken, there occurred what shall henceforth be known as ‘The Unfortunate Incident’. Dennis (or it may have been one of his cousins) reappeared in our house, looking, let’s be honest, a little less perky. That tends to be the way when you are clamped in the jaws of a hungry felis catus (the one on the left).

Poor Dennis. I gave him as dignified a burial as I could.

Since The Unfortunate Incident, we have kept pretty close tabs on said felis catus, with reasonable success. He hasn’t brought any more frogs in as little presents.

Just spawn.

Great big mouthfuls of it, dumped on the kitchen floor. Semolina with twigs.

This can’t go on, we thought. We must nip it in the bud. Or buy some garlic and a French cook book.

We have a little pond in our garden. Quick-thinking and on the money as ever, The Flame-Haired Temptress deduced that this must be the source of the frogs and their spawn. Sure enough, when we went to investigate, we found a scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of Dr. Who c.1975.

As well as some ill-looking reeds and leaky pond-liner, there was a mass of frog spawn, resembling nothing so much as a heaving soapy mass of flatulent bubble wrap.

What to do? We’re essentially animal lovers in the Runny household. I don’t know what the pro-frog-life lobby would think of us doing away with a bathful of spawn in a frogocaust of unprecedented proportions. I had visions of being bundled into a squad car while being spat on by protesters waving ‘Kermit Murderer!’ placards.

On the other hand if we do nothing...frogs in the kitchen, frogs in your bed, frogs in the bathroom, frogs on your head...

So we started plotting. Where’s the nearest pond? Have we got a bucket? Off we go then.

Only one snag - said pond is surrounded by head-high railings.

We might have to resort to a drive-by spawning. It’s either that or Exodus 7:25 - 8:11.

Cheap and dirty

I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m a food ponce.

Well, I am. I’m never happier than when complaining that my chenin blanc is half a degree too warm, or doing vertical tastings of artisanal balsamic vinegars. But sometimes all any of us really wants is instant, cheap, and frankly rather shameful satisfaction.

And where better than here?

Yes, the other day I had it my way. Just this once.

There was a time when I regarded the burger as the gourmet option. I still mourn the passing of the incomparable Bret’s Burger Bar - this bastion of 1980s Oxford life (a tiny shack parked fifty yards from the station) presented you with a slathering pile of red meat covered in twenty kinds of relish that filled the gap between getting off the train and arriving home for supper half an hour later.

But age brings wisdom and after a while I was hit with the stark realisation that maybe this wasn’t the healthiest lifestyle choice I could make.

Sometimes, though, nothing else will do. Because when you’ve been on the road, and it’s raining, and the alternative is a dried-up ‘all-day breakfast’ sandwich, well, you know what?

It’s BK time.

But then, in a tactical blunder of an enormity not seen since General Custer won the toss and asked England to bat on a belter, I let my ‘better’ self take over.
So instead of the logical choice (Whopper, large fries, extra saturated fats in a bucket, Coke the size of Hampshire), I ordered the ‘healthy’ option (some sort of chickeny thing wedged between a couple of slices of polystyrene, microscopic bag of chips, tasteless piece of limp rag calling itself lettuce).

Schoolboy error.

What on earth possessed me? It was the equivalent of going on a stag weekend and sitting in the corner of the lap dancing club all night with your gaze averted, nursing a half of Kaliber. Or finding yourself on a double date with Michelle Pfeiffer and Jamie Lee Curtis (showing my age there) and leaving early because QI is on.

As soon as I ordered the ‘food’ from the ‘waitress’ I knew the whole enterprise was doomed.

And so it proved.

I chomped my way balefully through the alleged meal, staring out on the service station car park of despair, and made a decision.

McDonald’s for supper.

Jerusalem Artichokes

Grape Nuts with a banana, as usual. Must do something else for breakfast one of these days.

Lunch took me by surprise. Which is a bit silly really because it tends to come round at pretty much the same time most days. But you know how it is.

So it was goat’s cheese and pitta breads and some hastily-grated cabbage carrot and apple, just like the other day. Except it’s never quite as good the second time round.

Goddam healthy though.

And I sort of did the same thing in the evening, too. But I realised just in time (working to a deadline as I had to go out) and grabbed my oldest cook book. Not oldest per se (that’s probably Connie Spry - one of those books that you feel you should have if you’re interested in food, but rarely use. But when you do use it you realise how good it is.) But the one I’ve had the longest.

My mum gave it to me on December 23rd 1987. It was intended as a Christmas present for a young man who was just about beginning to show signs of interest in cooking (I was 22). Wrapping presents wasn’t really high on her agenda as my dad was in hospital after the second of three heart attacks. The third one killed him the next morning.

I’ve cooked most of the recipes in the book in the intervening twenty-two-and-a-very-little-bit years, (it’s Eating In by Fay Maschler, incidentally), some of them dozens of times. It has in it a recipe for one of the most illogically-named dishes I can think of.

It’s Palestine Soup.

Now stay with me.

It is called Palestine Soup because its principal ingredient is the Jerusalem artichoke.

We’re already in political hot water, aren’t we?

The plot thickens (unlike the soup, which is silky in texture). Perversely, the Jerusalem artichoke has absolutely no connection with Jerusalem. The name is supposedly a derivation of girasole, the Italian for sunflower, which the plant resembles. If you must, here is the Wikipedia article about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke.

Further, it’s not even a bloomin’ artichoke.

So we have a vegetable whose name has nothing to do with its actual derivation; and the name of the soup, at the very least, tells only part of the story. Perhaps it should, for the time being and to soothe feelings on all sides, be called The Soup of the Holy Land.
It’s actually rather delicious. I didn’t do it as described by Fay Maschler. I didn’t have any celery, cream or hazelnuts, and I peeled the chokes raw, chopped them roughly and bunged them into some melted goose fat (the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving), soon after the onions; she recommends blanching them whole, letting them cool and then peeling them.

Whichever, the combination is simple and goes for loads of similar soups: onions softened in fat, main ingredients chopped and added shortly thereafter, stock defrosted (in this case) and added to simmer for fifteen minutes or so, blender deployed, bread toasted, toast buttered, bowl filled. If you have lots of vegetables and not much stock, it’s a thick soup (and you can always add water if it clogs your blender); if the other way round, a thinner, silkier one. You can add cream, or milk, or even Greek yoghourt (although that tends to display the more English quality of disintegration on exposure to heat). This particular soup does very well with some chopped hazelnuts sprinkled on top, but survives perfectly nicely without it. I fried a couple of rashers of bacon and sliced them into the bottom of the bowl before adding the soup. If I hadn’t known about them already, they would have been a nice surprise. Unless you were a vegetarian.

I don’t know whether Fay Maschler’s book is a great one or not. I’m sure there are some dodgy recipes in there, but it will always be very high on the list of my favourite cook books.

Thanks mum.