pumpkinstrokemarrow

Then in yesterday's DT I was interested to read that the hooligans had a cause, that they were not just mindless louts; they were protesting against those very rich people who had managed to avoid paying very large amounts of tax. It seems that they thought that whoever owned Fortnum & Mason was one of them. The line being that if the rich people paid their dues then not so many low paid would be out on the streets because local government could afford to employ armies of litter pickers from among the unqualified disaffected youth of our bog-standard, housing association, social housing estates. I am not so sure. OK so it is annoying that lots of rich people make cunning and usually legal arrangements not to pay lots of tax. But point 1, lots of not so rich people just don't pay. And point 2, squeezing the rich will not be enough to save the bacon.

Amused that I had to read the DT to find out about the cause - but am nevertheless quite sure that, in the round and to the extent that the hooligans were trying to achieve something other than mayhem, they have shot themselves in both feet. They have also provided the securocrats with one more reason to monitor traffic on mobile phones.

I wonder in passing about the origin of hooligan. The word in missing from my elderly OED (umpteenth impression of the first edition) but is present in my large biography of Churchill. It seems that in his youth he belonged to a rather exuberant dining club called the 'Hughligans', or some such, after one of the leading lights, Lord Hugh Cecil, or some such. They were referred to in the press of the day as the hooligans, with the word being used in much the same sense as it is today, but that did not stop them having the pull to have most of the leading politicians of the day to dinner, one after the other.

Sadly, further delving reveals that Churchill was not the origin of the word after all. The rarely consulted supplement to my OED does contain the word, said to be of vaguely Irish origin and certainly used in an English music hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family.

Polished off the orgo chicken yesterday in the form of soup. Strip remains of chicken and boil carcass for five hours with a few carrots and onions. Strain, add 8 ounces of red lentils & 4 ounces of left over boiled potatoes (entire, not mashed) and leave to stand for six hours. Bring to the boil and stand for a further two hours. Bring to the boil again and allow to simmer. Half an hour before the off add one diced chuchu and the diced chicken. We managed the whole lot - maybe five pints between the three of us - in one sitting.

The chuchu was a surprise extra for the BH on her birthday, sourced from Tooting market and wrapped in special paper from W. H. Smith. A sort of knobbly green pear in appearance which two independent sources asserted was properly used to make chicken soup - and I already knew that roast chicken was on the cards for the Sunday following. Investigating further with Google, I discover that the thing is actually a form of cucumber, originally from Chihuahua in Mexico, but now widely grown in hot countries generally. We tried some raw to find it something like a mild radish. The stuff would do well sprinkled in a salad. In the soup it had the texture and taste of cooked marrow, not really surprising in a relative of the cucumber, but not what I had expected: one of the independent sources had said that one uses the thing like a carrot, so I had expected, quite wrongly as it turned out, a carroty taste or texture.