Day 5769: Marmite Wars are Merely the Beginning

Monday:


Today Captain Clegg launched his third pamphlet on the challenges facing the UK due to Brexit. This one is about food and drink.

Nick Clegg at the National Liberal Club

If you’re still watching POLDARK on the BBC you will know it’s a tale of noble-but-impoverished workers of mine and land, ground down by the machinations of sinister bankers who manipulate the laws and the local dimwit Tory MP for their own ends, and so must turn to smuggling to get goods past the exorbitant import tariffs.

What you might NOT realise is that this is a BOLD sci-fi drama set in the DISTOPIAN post-Brexit FUTURE! With occasional topless scything.

And the reaction was basically terrifying. (To Brexit, not the topless scything!)

That’s not the position of Captain Clegg – who was at pains to point out that we should definitely be trying to save people from their fears by at least agreeing a Norway-style EEA agreement that maintains our trading links.

No, the fear was present in the questions arising, questions from small farms, from small retailers – corner shops and newsagents – who are all already staring down the barrel of disaster as the collapse in the pound sees their prices soar; the sort of everyday working folk whose concerns for their businesses and livelihoods and families are dismissed from the ivory towers of Conservatories like Jacob Rees-Mogg who’s never had to do a day’s work in his life and puts down the questions of ordinary people as “just more Project Fear”.

And another very good question came from the Commonwealth countries who can see their gateway deals to the EU via the UK collapsing and WTO trade tariffs of 40% on chocolate or 50-60% on beef and lamb being imposed by the careless diktat of Liam “Fantastic Dr” Fox, disgraced former Defence Minister and not-yet-disgraced (‘96 days and counting’) International Trade Minister.

Across the continent, the papers are not full – as Cap’s Nick put it – of the cunning of Mr Fox, the honesty of David Davis or the diplomacy of Boris Johnson. No, our friends and allies are instead AGHAST at the language and occasional downright xenophobia coming out of this chaotic Tory government, particularly things like the conference speech of the “Go Home” Secretary, Ms Green Amber Rudd. Less of a dog whistle; more of a traffic light stuck on stop!


Prime Monster Theresa May (or May Not) holds out against delivering ANY answers beyond Brexit means Brexit means a slap on the wrist for ministers who dare to speak the unspeakable, but insists that she has the power to Invoke Article 50 without taking a vote in Parliament. Talk about “taking back control!” Will those Tories – David Davis, John Deadwood, Peter Bone, Rees-Moggy? – who made such a BIG THING of Parliamentary Sovereignty call her to account? Or will they sell their principles in a heartbeat?

MPs were EXPRESSLY told that the Referendum would be only ADVISORY – or else they might have voted for more stringent checks, such as a two-thirds majority, or other thresholds – and those Brexiteers who are trying to say that in passing the referendum BILL Parliament has already voted on Brexit are clearly trying to take away the democratic and sovereign rights of Parliament.

Noted thinker A. C Grayling is writing to every MP to ask them why they are allowing this, and that they should demand a debate AND VOTE on the issue.

It is, after all, their DUTY to “take back control”.

It is clear that unchecked, Mrs Maybe’s unelected administration will see us BOUNCED into the most CHAOTIC TORY BREXIT!

Unilever and Tesco may have come to an accommodation that sees the Marmite back on our shelves, but that’s far from the end of it.

We currently SELL more than £18 billion of food abroad, one of our biggest export industries, and two thirds of that goes to the EU. Tariff and other barriers, like regulations or defining chocolate to be only high cocoa solids, that would exclude British chocolate altogether, will more than eliminate any benefits of the cheaper pound. And THEN we have to compete with the highly subsidised EU food production because THEY’LL still have the much-derided Common Agricultural Policy that WAS pouring billions into OUR farms.

But also we EAT more than we can GROW, so we have to BUY IN more than 25% of the food we need, and more than 70% of that is from Europe.

Companies importing food are going to face a choice of three options: put up prices – difficult in a cutthroat market with discounters already at their heels; cut into their own profits – which are already very tight, especially for small firms that import ingredients to make into prepared foods; or stop stocking certain lines altogether – the Marmite option.

For the moment, big importers will have their prices protected – either by long-term agreements with their suppliers or by insurance (called “hedging”) that will cover the higher cost of buying stuff with a pound that is worth up to 18% less.

But small companies who can’t afford big insurance are being hit with those choices already.

And even the bigger companies, their contracts will run out and, as Tesco discovered, new agreements will need to be made; those insurance policies are to smooth out short-term the ups and downs of the currency markets, not to protect long-term from a major devaluation. And then the higher prices will have to be paid.

In the next year to two years we will see a (first) big spike in food inflation, and that will hit the least well off the hardest.

We need to work RIGHT NOW to protect against an even bigger hit from collapsing out of the Single Market.

As Master Yoda so very nearly said of Bojo’s foreign policy: Victory? There was no victory. Begun, this clown war has.

Steve Bell in the Grauniad

Day 4735: If the Economy Is Getting Stronger Why Are the Queues at Food Banks Getting Longer?

Wednesday:

The latest figures show that unemployment has fallen to 7.4%, the lowest since 2009 (i.e. now lower than Labour left behind), and an email from Mr Danny Alexander arrives to celebrate that there are now thirty million people in work.

Inflation, down to 2.1% is also at a four year low.

So “Yay!”

But there’s also been a huge rise in people getting emergency food from food banks – as highlighted in today’s Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons.

We need to cast some light on this debate; we need some understanding of what’s driving this increase.

At the moment it’s all too easy for the Left to cry “Evil Tory Government” as though that was all the explanation necessary (and for some of them, all too often, it is); while the Right respond with “poor people have made poor decisions”.

(In fairness to Gove, he actually said “…so we need to help them”; that is, he meant to be patronising, not dismissive.)

The Tory responses in the debate – essentially to blame it all on Labour – won’t wash. Worse, they’re a cowardly approach, denying that the Coalition has changed anything.

The actual cold, hard, statistics – employment, inflation, interest rates, or my personal favourite the gini coefficient that shows that for the first time in thirty years, and uniquely among Western nations, inequality in the UK has actually fallen (as a result of the Coalition’s changes to taxes and benefits pushing the tax burden up the income scale) – all point to the UK having worked well together to mitigate the harm of the recession and to be moving into recovery.

But people don’t believe statistics.

Or rather, they’ll believe a statistic that says the use of food banks has trebled, but not ones that say the economy is growing.

And with inflation still running ahead of wages it’s easy to see why: a lot of people still have to live with their pay frozen – yes, including MPs’, despite what you’ve heard; IPSA’s recommendation still only being a recommendation so far, but massively unhelpfully adding to the prevalent (and probably untrue) “them and us” narrative. By spreading the pain so broadly we’ve avoided the horror of huge spikes of unemployment that the recessions of the Eighties saw – unlike the Thatcher governments, the Coalition hasn’t “written anyone off” – but at the expense of a whole lot more people feeling the impact of 2008’s economic disaster.

This is why Labour get traction from their “cost of living crisis” rhetoric. It’s a cunning way of turning the Coalition’s “we’re all in it together” into “we’re all hurting” (particularly when tossing in the odd sly reference to the “1%” who somehow aren’t in it together), while stealthily dropping that “Plan B” that they’ve been banging on about since 2010. (And how has borrowing more and super-taxing the rich worked out for France, by the way, Mr Balls?) What it doesn’t disguise is that Labour still only have one policy and that it won’t work. (Hence Ed’s… er… difficult time responding to the Autumn Statement.)

Hysterical commentary from Labour supporters, cherry-picking this food bank statistic and saying “we haven’t had food parcels since the Second World War so things are worse than they have been since the Second World War” simply is not credible in light of the overall picture. We can’t compare the use of food banks now to how they were used in the recessions of the Eighties (or Seventies) because they simply didn’t exist then. In fact, as an extra-governmental route for the “haves” to help the “have-nots” they’re a perfect example of Mr Balloon’s “Big Society” (though the Conservatories have dropped that as quietly as Labour dropped Plan B).

But we cannot in conscience ignore this evidence either.

It’s no good denying that some of the decisions of the Coalition government have caused genuine hardship, either directly by cutting people’s benefits (through the benefit cap, through the second room bedroom tax, through continuing to employ the evil of ATOS) or indirectly by the increase in decisions to freeze or stop payments (decisions often later overturned).

Actually, Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve’s DWP (the Department of Workhouses and Prayer, a ministry well known for their accurate use of statistics) does deny that decisions to freeze or stop payments have led to more people using food banks. Which comes back to begging the question: what does?

The most urgent question has to be are more people in poverty?

(Let’s not mess about with terms like Food Poverty and Fuel Poverty as though people have a meaningful choice between the two; if you’ve not got enough to meet your basic needs you’re screwed one way or the other so what’s the difference.)

There are a number of fairly hefty policies in place that are supposed to stop this: Labour’s minimum wage and tax credits; the Coalition’s triple lock on pensions; Liberal Democrats also managed to strong-arm the Chancellor into indexing benefits in line with inflation through the difficult years when it was highest.

So are these failing? If so which, and how, and how do we stop them failing?

How much of this increase in food bank use genuinely reflects an increase in poverty? Is it possible that there are other factors? I can think of a couple of alternative, not to “explain away” the rise, but to try to think about there being more to the picture.

The most obvious would be people who were previously choosing “eat” over “heat” now have another option: instead of deciding that they must have food and then shivering under a duvet, they can now pay for the heating bill and go to the food bank and get some emergency supplies. What has happened is that an “invisible” poverty has become a visible one.

Another is what you might call the “NHS” effect. If help wasn’t there, people wouldn’t use it. Since its inception, NHS use has grown almost exponentially even as the nation has become fitter and healthier. Similarly, as more food banks are introduced, and more people become aware of food banks, so more food banks are used by more people.

It’s possible that that interpretation is even supported by the authors of that “use of food banks has trebled” statistic: the Trussell Trust, a food bank provider – in fact they describe themselves as “a Christian charity that partners with local communities to provide practical, non-judgemental help to people in crisis”. (Although that’s not an interpretation they would put on it as they’re not as non-judgemental about the Government, whom they blame for the “scandal” of their own success.)

Their accounts (available on the Charity Commission website) say that they’ve demonstrated that their franchise model is “scalable and sustainable”, which suggests that they’re not so much answering an acute need as having found a necessary niche.

(Incidentally, almost all the stories of food banks seem to stem from an October press release of theirs. Though oddly, in researching this, I came across virtually the same story – same source, the Trussell Trust, same number, 350,000 people needing food parcels – but from May relating to 2012.

I’m not saying it’s wrong; it looks a bit weird but it’s probably just a coincidence when the October story compares April to September 2013 with April to September 2012, while the May story is comparing April to March 2012 with April to March 2011. As they say: they helped as many people in six months this year as they did in their whole 2012/13 year. I’m not surprised they have to help more people in Winter when the choice between heat and eat becomes acute.)

Stories about the increase in the use of food banks serve as publicity for food banks; so the Trussell Trust’s press release is not just impartially informing us of the situation, it’s also advertising their product. (Indeed, Tesco, for example, are now encouraging people to donate a shop – at Tesco of course – to the food bank, so turning them into advertising for Tesco!)

You could also say that if people in need are discouraged by shame from looking for “hand outs”, hearing that many more people are using the food bank reduces that disincentive, in a way “permitting” the people who need the food to go and claim it.

Let me emphasise though that just because I can hypothesise alternate explanations for some of the rise in food bank take-up, that doesn’t mean that they’re right. That’s why we need to be asking questions.

I don’t want to rain on the economic parade, but Labour and Labour supporters have latched onto this as “A Big Thing”, and I can’t say that they’re wrong to do so. I know that it’s a big cause for concern, for me and many other Liberal Democrats. We’re concerned for the human tragedy, obviously, but also because it seems to fly in the face of statistics that say the economy is getting both stronger and fairer.

Policy ought to be evidence-based (and unlike Labour I won’t just grab a statistic and say “so there!”), and we need to understand what this piece of evidence is telling us, so these are questions for which we need an answer.

Day 3347: National Christian Pi Week!

Monday:


Happy March, and this week, it is Great British Pi Week, and, as a celebration of our Christian heritage, for one week only, π will equal its Biblical value of 3 exactly.

Get your condensed circles while they last!

Around the World in a mere 76 days!

Almost 5% less football (also: cricket, tennis, golf, snooker – does not apply to Rugby as that is a game played by men with odd shaped balls… …what?!)

Cuddly Cthulhu endorses this non-Euclidean geometry. Please enjoy your pies responsibly.


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Day 2908: Obesity – is conception too late to take action?

Wednesday:

New reports from SCIENCE suggest that once mommies and daddies are even THINKING about having little baby elephants it may already be too late to stop their offspring turning into total PORKERS without radical re-educational brain-washing and extensive gene therapy… probably using LASERS…

…image of ELEPHANT strapped to giant-sized CHOPPING-BOARD as SINISTER figure of Mr Jamie Oliver adjusts the surgical food-i-mix to SLICE-&-DICE

ELEPHANT: Do you expect me to TALK???

OLIVER: No, Mr Dome, I expect you to STIR-FRY!

…I'm drifting!

Three MILLION years of EVOLUTION on the African plains taught you monkey-people at a GENETIC level: eat lots of stuff, especially those yummy sugary and fatty things; you'll need the reserves later. A few THOUSAND years of civilisation (literally living in cities) risking famine if the crops fail have done NOTHING to change that. So fewer than half-a-dozen DECADES of enormous abundance certainly aren't going to convince your species that starvation isn't just one more sticky bun away.


The Government – of course – wants to have their cake and eat it.

Or, more accurately, have YOUR cake and you NOT eat it.

As they exhort and extort us to work longer and longer hours at the call-centre or computer screen, no-one has any TIME left to go for a WALK so in spite of actually eating FEWER calories than people in YE OLDEN DAYS, we continue to increase in weight because of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

And then, with no time to COOK properly, we all end up eating CONVENIENCE food, stuffed with sugar and preservatives, or fast food loaded with fat. Yum yum. And very soon, tum tum.

Meanwhile, children no longer walk or cycle to work lest they be SQUISHED by all the OTHER mothers on the SUV school-run, and no longer play outside because, even if they had the time between cramming for the next Government imposed SAT test, no one would let them out anymore because those state-sponsored TERRORISTS the NEWSPAPERS have terrorised parents into believing that the only children to avoid shooting, knifing or bludgeoning by the crack-addled FERAL YOUTH of Broken Britain (© Mr Balloon) are the ones snatched by PREVERTS that Social Services allow to roam wild in our community thanks to Political Correctness Gone Maaaaaaaaaaaaad.

We all have a stretched thin, stressed out lifestyle and people are SURPRISED that it's having an effect on our health???

Here's a thought: crying and whinging that we're all doomed to be titanic FATTIES by age five is only going to make people MORE twisted up: some will give up and tuck into another round of pork pies on toast; some will give themselves bulimia aka winter vomiting sickness. No one will get any BETTER.

You want to help? Give everybody Monday morning off and make it "walk-to-work day"; build more swimming pools and make them free for everyone; give every schoolchild a bicycle for Christmas. And more than anything STOP going on and on and on about obesity: you are only MAKING PEOPLE UNHAPPY!

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Day 2782: Genetically Moronic Crop

Wednesday:


Oh Mr Prince Charles! GM crops DON'T cause Climate Change!

Ever since being appointed PRINCE OF WAILS, Mr Charles has been famously shooting his mouth off about anything and everything that he finds "Absolutely Ghastly". Yes, he's not so much monarch in waiting as Britain's Battiest Blogger.

But as a living, breathing example of SELECTIVE BREEDING taken to its most ludicrous extremes (his claim to own all of Cornwall depending entirely on his dodgy assertion that he's some special "breed") you would think that Mr the Prince would be a TINY bit more cautious before condemning anyone else's GENETICS.


Just to be completely fair: the engineering of the seeds for sale, plus the shipping of them around the world to where they are to be sown will CONTRIBUTE to CO2 emissions and that WON'T HELP global warming.

But it's not the main CAUSE either, and Mr Charles has already gotten in enough hot water for jetting around the world to know that there are WORSE things for the environment. (At least he's learned that nowadays it's better for the planet if he travels by HOLOGRAM.)

And, yes, selling poor people crops that "self terminate" or in English don't let you plant them for next year's crop is really MEAN.

BUT… if third world farmers can grow a yield of two or three times what they used to so that they can feed themselves AND sell the excess so that other people can feed themselves AND have enough money after being (admittedly forced) to buy next year's seeds to make a profit then… how are they going to see this as "A BAD THING"?


The Crown Prune risks UNDOING the good work that has done in keeping the threat of Climate Change at the top of the agenda but making silly, over-the-top claims conflating a GENUINE THREAT that is supported by loads of scientific evidence to worries about GM that remain scientifically unfounded.

Day 2745: Food Glorious Food

Monday:


Our Prime Monster, First Lord of the Treasury and King of IRONY has warned us not to waste food… before nipping in for a quick eight course dinner. Mmmm, tasty, but maybe not Tasteful.

But ALAS: we have a left-over slice of PIZZA. Clearly, Mr Frown's needs are greater than mine so… how many stamps to post this to Downing Street?

Less appetising than Mr Frown?

Day 2662: Biofuel Bad

Tuesday:


(All that typing about Master Gideon left my nose VERY tired last week, so there are GAPS in my diary again that I've got to fill in.)

A new law came in saying that all petrol for cars must now include something called BIOFUELS.

What this means is… you know how OIL and COAL got made by lots and lots of plants getting buried under the Earth and millions and millions of years of SQUISHING going on to squeeze them into OIL? Well, the idea is to cut out the GEOLOGICAL middle-man and make oil straight from the plants.

On the face of it, that might seem like quite a good idea. Instead of unlocking carbon deposits from under the Earth, we would be locking up the CO2 first before releasing it, the very definition of carbon neutral.

Except, of course, processes like that are RARELY 100% efficient, so you wouldn't be REALLY completely neutral.

Farmers in Europe, America and even Brazil, for years cursed with GRAIN MOUNTAINS, WINE LAKES and BUTTER ESCARPMENTS have seen the development of bio-ethanol as a great BOON, because it is a way for them to greatly increase the economic value of their land: rather than being subsidised to not use it, they can get a good price for a fuel crop and by reducing the amount of cereal on the market, get a better price for that too. It sounds like a WIN-WIN scenario until you remember that that better price for the farmer means that it has cost SOMEONE more to eat.

And if you think about it you don't have MILLIONS of years' worth of plants storing up sunlight energy in their carbohydratey goodness, you only have THIS year's crop.

But this year's crop is ALREADY looking a bit too THIN to feed all of the animals and people and animals-that-will-go-to-feed-people without taking out a great area of land to grow car food.

Even if it wasn't for current crises in farming like drought and poor harvests, the simple fact is that there are just too many people.

Leaders in Latin America have issued a warning that using growing land for fuel crops instead of food is harming some of the poorest people in the world and there have even been RIOTS in Haiti.


Anyway, you probably already know that my PREFERRED alternative is to use untapped sources of RENEWABLE ENERGY (like windmills) to turn water into easily-portable* Hydrogen (plus spare Oxygen in the air) to use in fuel cells that turn the Hydrogen (with Oxygen from the air) back into water and energy.

(*No, don't think Hindenburg; liquid Hydrogen is no more dangerous than Petrol… which means QUITE dangerous but within acceptable and controllable limits.)

Day 2297: Yum Yum

Monday:


We settled down with a late dinner this evening to watch "Edwardian Super Size Me", an everyday gastronomic adventure with all the trimmings and a side order of lard. And extra trimmings.

And extra lard.

It turns out that the people of the Edwardian Era, led by King Edward VII or King Tum-Tum as he was known by his loving subjects, were rather fond of their food. It would be unfair to say that they ate like pigs, mainly because "entire pig for breakfast" seems like a pretty average start to the day!

For this experiment, restraint critic Mr Giles Coren and very funny but much underused Ms Sue Perkins were asked to be Edwardians for a week – wearing all the clothes and eating all the food.

Mr Giles went to see a DOCTOR, Doctor Petty. Or Doctor Pennyfarthing as Mr Giles ended up calling him after his soon-to-be-nightly glass or two of Madeira wine.

"You're completely mad," was Dr Pennyfarthing's professional opinion, "and you'll be dead in a fortnight!"

Good job they were only doing it for a week!

Monday's menu consisted of: Porridge, Sardines on Toast, Curried Eggs, Grilled Cutlets, Coffee & Drinking Chocolate, Bread & Butter, and Honey.

And that was just breakfast!

Luncheon of sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin and rolled ox tongue (bleurgh!) was followed by High Tea of fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, and butter before settling in for Dinner of oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, and vanilla soufflé to finish.

Well, "finish" if you don't count the aforementioned glass of Madeira and a goose leg that poor Sue just hadn't been able to face.

But Monday was just a run-of-the-mill sort of a day. No really! That's what they ate when they WEREN'T trying to impress anyone.

Tuesday started with breakfast at Simpsons on the Strand with a light repast of smoked haddock, scrambled eggs, kippers, cold cuts, one roast pheasant, fruit, bacon, sausages, devilled kidneys, scones and kedgeree.

By this time Sue and Mr Giles were barely able to move, so they decided to try out an Edwardian diet. This turned out to be, basically, exactly the same as any other Edwardian meal, but chewed and chewed and chewed until either the food turned to liquid or you died of lockjaw.

Oysters, foie gras terrine, roast cod with asparagus, mutton hotpot, pink Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream were all given this treatment. Which was a shame as it probably wasn't helping them cut calories but it was killing all the flavours stone dead.

It was claimed that King Edward had tried this diet himself – but, said Mr Giles looking at a portly portrait, the evidence would appear other wise. This made both of my daddies scoff. (No NOT in the Edwardian fashion!) Surely the evidence is only against him having used the Fletcherism Diet if it ACTUALLY WORKS! said Daddy Richard; personally, I think the evidence of him shows that the diet has no effect whatsoever, said Daddy Alex.

Still, no time to worry about that as they had to hurry home in order to host a dinner party.

Melon glacé, mock turtle soup, sole au gratin, crab and asparagus mousse in aspic, boiled mutton with caper sauce, quail pudding and a rather wobbly punch romaine jelly for pud. The quail pudding, by the way, was a whole quali each, wrapped in fillet steak and sealed in a suet crust.

By this point, Daddy Richard was looking rather queasy, but Daddy Alex said his mouth was watering. I said that we could try this diet if I could have the equivalent in STICKY BUNS, and Daddy Alex AGREED!

I reckon that this must be at least ten-million-and-four sticky buns, but Daddy Richard tells me that 5000 calories a day is only about 20 sticky buns. I think he is trying to get out of it, don't you!

Meanwhile, dinner guest Mr Roy Fattersly was pointing out, while tucking into the suet pudding, that only nought-point-one per cent of the population could actually afford to live like this. The rest were on bread and dripping once a day if they were lucky. Not that this had stopped Mr Roy from turning up for the dinner, but maybe it was just so that he could make exactly that point. And at least he had the grace to depart before the food fight broke out!

In fact, Mr Giles told us that a dinner party like this one – which, if you were a society hostess, you would be expected to serve up two or three times a week – would cost £24 in old money. Which was equivalent to TWO THOUSAND POUNDS today.

Or to put it another way, you would need something like SEVEN MILLION pounds of capital just to be able to afford the DINNER PARTIES.

And that was just dinner for 8 – you might be expected to have up to 20 guests. Multiply the money appropriately.

Wednesday, and after the usual breakfast, Mr Giles was off to Simpsons Chophouse of Cornhill for the lunch of a city gent: steak and kidney pudding with a giant sausage, then a huge pork chop and then stewed cheese served with mustard on little bits of toast.

Sue unfortunately was not allowed in. Simpsons did not admit women until 1916 and that was after the Edwardian era was over – King Tum Tum passed away from (to nobody's surprise) a massive double heart attack in 1910.

So, barred from the bastion of male do-dah, she took a day-trip to Brighton instead.

The Edwardians loved to take the train down to the coast, though on the way they would take in a – you guessed it – five-course luncheon. Sue doubted that South West Trains were quite up to the silver service these days, so brought a HUGE hamper and a picnic of lobster mousse, toasted whole sardines, a rolled salmon cone (which Sue called an oily fish CORNETTO) and something in a plastic tub made of curried fish and garlic the smell of which left most of the other passengers to Brighton in a semi-comatose state. I hope that the BBC paid for their train tickets!

Daddy Alex, on the other fluffy foot – a Daddy who claims not to be as fond of fish as he is of LARD – has CONFESSED to a strange HANKERING to find out what the deadly fish-and-garlic-box contained. But not while Daddy Richard is in the same hemisphere, he promises.

(Incidentally, on the subject of the EVIL FISH COURSE, dear Mr Paul suggests I might have something to say about Scottish politics. Whatever can he mean???)

Sue was, of course, doing all this in a full-on WHALEBONE CORSET. So, she admitted, it was sometimes something of a STRAIN. (And that was BEFORE we went into the to-camera TOILET MONOLOGUES!) Despite being taught the ETIQUETTE of eating cakes at the Ritz – small bites and then make conversation about sewing, or try a little French – she had to admit that a lot of the time she was just pushing the food around the plate and leaving lots. In fact, she said, many Edwardian ladies would confine themselves to bed rather than face the horrors of the breakfast and luncheon tables!

Mr Giles was also kitted out in Edwardian garb, and that afternoon it meant big flappy shorts in order to try some Edwardian exercise: a game of five which looked like a crowded squash court where everyone had forgotten their bat. I am NOT SURE that the athletic authorities today would approve of Mr Giles use of BANNED SUBSTANCES either – namely a big cigar and a bigger glass of brandy.

Then back home for another huge dinner.

In the interest of a more feminine approach – and to try and rebalance her now desperately Atkins diet – Sue took Mr Giles to a vegetarian restaurant on Thursday. Yes, it turns out they DID have veggie restaurants in Edwardian times. About thirty of them. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

They were also a HOTBED of the SUFFRAGETTE movement. This came about for three reasons. Firstly, because the vegetarian restaurants were also Temperance Houses and so, with only ginger beer to drink, rather than falling asleep in the afternoon they could spend it in fervent political discussion. Secondly, vegetarian food did not need as much preparation as half-a-dozen meat courses and this liberated ladies from the stove. And thirdly, anyone unlucky enough to be sent to prison for protesting the right to vote was well advised NOT to eat the meat!

The thing to go with all of this FOOD is of course something to DRINK, and the Edwardians were it turns out terribly fond of CHAMPAGNE. In fact it was usually BREAKFAST TIME when they were wiring their way into their first bottle and the rest of the day would be carried along in a fizz of bubble.

No wonder Mr Steed is always dressed as an Edwardian gent!

So, after having some pink fizz at Harrods to start them off, Saturday saw Sue and Mr Giles off to Hampstead Heath for a spot of picnicking. Of course, they didn't have the forty-odd servants to lay it all out for them, and Sue did insist on experimenting with a newfangled (invented 1892 but commercially available from 1904) Thermos flask for TEA, but good old Mr Giles stuck in to his lobster and champers.

But the climax of the week was to be an all out blow out at the Savoy, recreating an actual meal from 1906. King Tum Tum had SERIOUSLY taken to eating out – after years of having to cope with his mother's home cooking at Windsor Castle, you cannot really blame him! And apparently, a huge meal, like the one that Mr Giles and Sue were about to indulge in, would cost only £7. Obviously that is still the equivalent to £600 today. But remember how expensive the dinner parties were in comparison. Eating out quickly became VERY popular.

(Plus there was the whole "you can mix with exciting and exotic actors and dancers and opera stars without having to invite such a vulgar class of people into your own home". Which was nice.)

Of course, today in the real world, eating at the Savoy has gotten a BIT more expensive. Here is what they had to eat. And by now they were no longer having to force it down. Which was nice for tonight, but probably a bit worrying for the next week when they have to come down to today's portions.

First course: £1,000 worth of Beluga Caviar and native and rock oysters.

Second course: Pot au feu Henry IV. Mr Giles called it the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of béarnaise, but it's basically beef soup. With the beef added back in.

Third course: A choice of sole cardinale and whitebait. Or, if you're eating the Edwardian way, both.

Fourth course: Chicken d'Albufera, i.e. a whole chicken (each, obviously) stuffed with rice, truffles and foie gras, served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply-reduced, with mushrooms and more truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.

Fifth course: saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

Sixth course: pressed Rouen ducklings. This was the bit where even Daddy Alex went a bit cross-eyed. Four duckling were individually hand strangled especially for them in France. Once roasted, they were placed into a solid silver duck press so that they could be crushed before their – and our! – eyes. "Ooh, it's a duckling smoothie," said Sue. What was left of their insides was then scraped out, stuck in the liquidiser, liquidised, brought back and boilded up in a silver dish with the blood that had been squeezed out and a dash of champagne (obviously) in order to produce a sauce for the meat. "Mmmm, slightly bummy duck's blood," said Sue.

Seventh course: asparagus hollandaise, just a little something to clear the palate. Or in Sue's case, to get caught immovably between the teeth. The Edwardians apparently loved this but it's supposed to be a bit bad for the gout.

Eighth course: Peach Melba, served in a hand-carved ice-swan that was bigger than ME!. This dessert is of course named after the famous opera singer: Dame Placido Flamingo.

Ninth course: Canapés à la Diane, which looked like yet more truffles on toast.

Tenth course: call for ambulance!


The week finished with a return visit to Doctor Pennyfarthing, whose tests of Mr Giles revealed that he had increased his body fat by 10%, increased his cholesterol by 15% and increased the gout-causing urea in his blood by a third! And he was now clinically dead.

The Edwardians, you see, had a life expectancy of 42. Yes, 42. Oddly enough, something about eating the equivalent of an entire family of hippopotami every week might have had some deleterious effect on their health. Either that or they just EXPLODED.

So presumably they didn't live long enough to learn that all that bacon was good for the latest health scare very bad for you.

Sadly, this whole way of life was killed off by World War part one and an invasion of American BREAKFAST CEREALS.

Anyway, even before the ICKY SQUISHED duck, Daddy Alex had started to realise that something was MISSING from all this Edwardian excess. And then it dawned on him: the missing ingredient – CHOCOLATE.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers, then, he said. The Edwardian diet is OFF!