Thursday, June 07, 2012
The daily tripe
Greatly entertained by a piece of serious tripe over breakfast, spotted in the Guardian, opposite a far more solemn piece about unpleasant goings on in Sri Lanka.
Apropos of someone digging up some bardic theatre, one D. Drumgoolies was moved to say 'I love the fact that we are excavating London, and slowly clearing away the miserable piles of Victoriana and Empire, and revealing the anarchic and joyous London which is lurking beneath'. What complete and utter twaddle. Cynics might say that all of a piece with the pantomimes that he, as artistic director, sees fit to put on on the Globe. He might at least be grateful for the originally Victorianic & Empiric wealth which makes ventures such as that at the Globe possible.
The more solemn piece led me to wonder how far one's duty to provide asylum should go. As I understand things, we provide asylum to anyone who turns up at our borders who can show that he or she will be mistreated if returned to their country of origin, an understanding which looks to be confirmed by a page on the UK Border Agency web site which says that 'The UK adheres to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents us from sending anyone to a country where there is a real risk that they will be exposed to torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'. Clearly the decent thing to do, but could we take the strain if hundreds of thousands of such people started turning up on our doorstep? Which is more or less what happens to countries, such as Turkey, which have the bad luck to be neighbour to countries which are falling apart. I suppose we should just be grateful that we are a peripheral island, a long way away from anywhere with serious troubles and do our bit for those few souls that manage to make it to our shores. Excluding economic migrants hanging off the bottom of lorries coming across from Calais, naturally.
Pink sausage went down very well, lightly fried, while all these thoughts were whizzing around.
And yesterday saw an excellent beef stew. 1.3lbs of stewed steak, cut into pieces maybe 0.5 by 0.75 by 1.5cm. Fry in a little lard. Add some chopped celery and onion. Add a little water, maybe half a pint. Simmer for 2.5 hours, by which time the fluid had become properly gravy like, this without any fortification in the form of corn flour, wheat flower or gravy browning. Meat lumps cooked while retaining enough texture to tickle the palette. It all went down well with the traditional mashed potato and crinkly cabbage.
Apropos of someone digging up some bardic theatre, one D. Drumgoolies was moved to say 'I love the fact that we are excavating London, and slowly clearing away the miserable piles of Victoriana and Empire, and revealing the anarchic and joyous London which is lurking beneath'. What complete and utter twaddle. Cynics might say that all of a piece with the pantomimes that he, as artistic director, sees fit to put on on the Globe. He might at least be grateful for the originally Victorianic & Empiric wealth which makes ventures such as that at the Globe possible.
The more solemn piece led me to wonder how far one's duty to provide asylum should go. As I understand things, we provide asylum to anyone who turns up at our borders who can show that he or she will be mistreated if returned to their country of origin, an understanding which looks to be confirmed by a page on the UK Border Agency web site which says that 'The UK adheres to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents us from sending anyone to a country where there is a real risk that they will be exposed to torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'. Clearly the decent thing to do, but could we take the strain if hundreds of thousands of such people started turning up on our doorstep? Which is more or less what happens to countries, such as Turkey, which have the bad luck to be neighbour to countries which are falling apart. I suppose we should just be grateful that we are a peripheral island, a long way away from anywhere with serious troubles and do our bit for those few souls that manage to make it to our shores. Excluding economic migrants hanging off the bottom of lorries coming across from Calais, naturally.
Pink sausage went down very well, lightly fried, while all these thoughts were whizzing around.
And yesterday saw an excellent beef stew. 1.3lbs of stewed steak, cut into pieces maybe 0.5 by 0.75 by 1.5cm. Fry in a little lard. Add some chopped celery and onion. Add a little water, maybe half a pint. Simmer for 2.5 hours, by which time the fluid had become properly gravy like, this without any fortification in the form of corn flour, wheat flower or gravy browning. Meat lumps cooked while retaining enough texture to tickle the palette. It all went down well with the traditional mashed potato and crinkly cabbage.
# posted by Jim @ 1:37 AM 
