The latter attempt to draw a line that encompasses the common or garden pie in pastry with the shepherd’s, cottage and fish pie are doomed to failure. Constructions such as ‘a filling touched by at least one starch layer’ cause us to include lasagne and pizza. Two say that at least two dimensions must be touched leaves the shepherd’s pie out, as well as the pie in a pot beloved of pub grub, but still leaves ravioli in the mix. To say ‘to the most part or totally encompassed by a casing’ opens us to the possibility that a boiled egg is a pie.

The hard formalists (I pin my colours to the mast here) escape this tortuous taxonomy by being brutal with the scions of pie. We insist that pie means pastry, immediately kicking out pasta and eggs and other non-pies from the family. Harder formalists insist on the essential slice of a silo shape, to exclude a pasty, but even I think this is going too far.

The performativists reject all this as modernity’s relentless desire to categorise and exclude. They insist that the hard formalist position – by excluding such staples as the shepherd’s pie – cannot be right. The soft formalist project is equally doomed to failure. It ultimately commits violence on the pie family by excluding, and is as equally hard as it’s more honest philosophical cousin, or it becomes so meaningless as to offer no clarity at all to the pie eater. Instead, they argue that the only sensible position is that the definition of the pie cannot be codified, and is instead a cultural understanding negotiated by the self-identifying community of pie-eaters. What they consider to be a pie is a pie. What they exclude is not a pie. It has an elegant simplicity.

But they are wrong. It’s the same kind of moral relativism that leads to new labour and the toleration of female circumcision and the death of universalist leftism. It contains the essence of the demotic, which leads as any fule no, to public executions being brought back and big brother never going away. It cannot be allowed.

Comrades, it is clear that the pastryites must prevail. It is the only sensible way forward, against the postmodernists and the obscurantism and heideggarian new-age fascism, as Slavoj Zizek has wisely written. But our adoption of this evident sense is pricked by the warmth we feel for the shepherd’s pie. His rustic honesty is something we admire, and his pie retains a note of authenticity we are anxious not to lose. We don’t wish to execute him as Kulak scum, but can he be collectivised and turned into a new model pie?

The new world provides the answer. The antipodes were once considered the leaders of the world for progressive social legislation, creating welfare states before even the Swedes. Whilst, like the Swedes, their racist past haunts them, and plagues to this day, in one respect they still lead the world and shine like a beacon to pie-eaters everywhere. Their pies are simply amazing. They’re ubiquitous. They’re used in citizenship ceremonies to affirm nationality. And they solve our progressive dilemma.

The synthesis of pastry and shepherd’s pie. I give you the Potato Top!

It’s bound now to be described as like Beckham’s, but really, this sort of thing went on all the time back in the day. Before wall-to-wall saturation coverage, the number of goals captured on film was much less, so it really was a case of the best goal we got on tape, not best goal scored. As the number of top flight and non top flight matches was much lower, goal of the season could be won by non-top flight players.

One good thing from saturation coverage has been to be able to have these gems saved by those there, those not there, and no doubt the players themselves; Kids in the future will be able to see that their old dad could actually play a bit after all. And thanks to the interweb, the level at which the cameras are present is much much lower than it once was, meaning that this FC United goal from Rory Patterson was captured this weekend, like many of their others.

I re-read some of my first letters from my schooldays, and they’re scarily intense. I remind myself far too much of Adrian Mole. I don’t consider myself, Mole-like, to be an intellectual by dint of sharing the same letters page as Slavoj Zizek and Alex Callinicos, but I am a bit chuffed by it all the same.

I’ve now had letters published in The Grauniad, the New Statesman, Tribune, and completing the set, The Sun.

I sent a letter to the Observer regarding a piece Claire Rayner wrote, but they didn’t publish it. But Claire did take the trouble to write back to me, which was nice.

Now, to make my tea, I need two good-sized mugs. I boil the kettle. The hot water goes into one mug first, stays for a few seconds so the mug is heated, then goes into the second mug. The tea bag goes into the first, hot, mug, boiling water is poured in, to within a couple of millimetres of the top, and the two mugs, one containing brewing tea, and the other containing hot water, are left to stand. After about five minutes, the mug of brewed tea is placed in the sink, where some new hot water (freshly re-boiled) from the kettle, is sloshed into it, so it overflows by about half a mug. This is to stop the well-brewed tea being too strong. The full-to-overflowing mug is now tilted a little bit, so it spills out enough tea to allow room for some milk.

Remember the second mug, full of the hot (now not so hot, but still quite hot) water that was used to warm the first mug? That is now emptied. The tea bag is fished out from the first ‘brewing’ mug, and placed in the bottom of the empty ‘warm’ mug, where a small splash of milk is poured over it. The effect of the hot tea bag, and still-warm mug, is to take the chill off the milk – and impregnate it with a mild tea flavour. To encourage both these objectives, the mug is picked up and swirled, put down for a few seconds, picked up and swirled again, and left to stand for a short while longer. The tea-coloured, warm milk is now poured from tea-bag mug to brew mug, which is given a stir.

The resulting colour is observed. A little more milk may be necessary, in which case it will go via the still-warm tea bag mug, into the brew mug. When the colour is exactly right, I will stir in exactly one rounded teaspoonful of golden caster sugar. The tea, which at this point is still far too hot to drink, will now be left to stand for at least five minutes, before a sip is attempted.

And when you come into the living room with tea for your guests, it turns out they all died several years previously.

It’s easily the best one yet; the design is pretty good, the calculations work fine and it covers all eventualities except tossing a coin to separate teams tied after the previous 7 ways of separating them have not worked.

It’s totally free, and all I ask is that some kind soul buys me a pint; FT regulars in London have opportunities to do this for real, but since I shan’t be in every pub FT readers drink in (though one can try), there’s a donation page to buy me a virtual pint.

If you like it, then please feel free (=please please please) sent it to friends, post on messageboards and the like. It’d be dead good if you could.

He can only speak for himself, he says. ‘I had a place at university to study law’.

Well, thanks for clearing that one up!

More Jerome Anderson

Slavoj Zizek once persuasively argued that the reason why the military were so against letting gay men into the forces was not homophobia, pure and simple. It was that the military is all about being gay anyway, but only works is everyone has the cover that it has nothing to do with homosexuality whatsoever. Letting out gay men risks making clear what everyone needs to stay implicit.

I think the same is true in football. The language is revealing here. Players caress the ball, and stroke it around. They’re routinely asked to talk of love and commitment, and are in ecstasy on a regular basis. Footballers don’t seem to be able to have sex without having their mates around to watch and join in. And they have bonding rituals which, like the military and the old Axa comic strip in the Sun, seem to be full of ridiculous opportunities to see someone get their kit off.

Like the military, teams are always about the sum of their parts. They all have to work together, and have to think of the greater good rather than their individual wishes. Indeed, part of the training of both appears to deliberately deaden the ability to think independently and follow orders, intelligence and critical thinking are actively derided; players shouldn’t say anything of interest ever. You don’t want to get all clever.

But you do want to be flash. Players are obsessed with each other’s outward signs, like peacocks eyeing each other up – the attractiveness of someone’s cars, clothes, houses and such like. It’s more, much more, than simple materialistic bragging common to any golf club or workplace.

The idea that Mourinho’s style creates something that players want to be close to, to retain the favour of is eminently feasible. The same is true of Cantona, and both have a charismatic element that comes from more than just accented English. When an opposition player spoke of ‘fucking Cantona’, it was more than an insult.

* – As heard at a Celtic pub in 2002 when Bobo Balde had the ball and was being urged to give it to Didier Agathe

** – There was, of course the Footballer Wives storyline about this, which was incredibly well researched and true-to-line; whoever advised them really earned their cash that week.

Both make too much play of the effect one individual has and downplay the importance of chance, or the efforts of their subordinates and the the behaviour of external factors beyond control of the CEO/Manager. Both are self-serving myths in that are used (in business anyway) to justify stellar salaries at the top and downsizing at the bottom.

The myth in football is used to justify the idea that replacement of a manager is the solution. Ironically, the Leagues Managers’ Association would be far better campaigning to get their members acting like the big I am, as the idea that a judicious firing of a manager and the hiring of another will work wonders is encouraged by managers claiming such magical powers for themselves.

The interesting development is the type of person like Mourinho is, which contravenes a far more pervasive myth in football that the only person qualified to manage is the football man, who is grounded and suffused in the game. This invariably is an ex-player, and in a sense, the LMA is the SCR to the PFA’s JCR. Both are full of arcane rites, both are part and parcel of a system that they mutually reinforce, despite the occasional antagonism between them.

Mourinho is different. He wasn’t a player and doesn’t subscribe to the osmotic theory of management that managers arrive at a an understanding of the game through simply doing it. Mourinho prepares rigourously, and, whilst he can’t control every factor (despite presenting himself as being able to do just that) he works to remove as many elements of chance as possible. He’ll wind up referees, he’ll prepare dossiers for players, he’ll change teams around quickly in response to changes in the game. The main thing he does is prepare players to be able to deal with chance.

The simple truth between myth-making and Runciman’s statistical means is that the best teams win because they have the best players coached by the best managers. Good players can only go so far without decent management (hello Gerard Houllier!), whilst good managers can only take an OK team so far (hello Charlton!). Good managers sometimes don’t work out with good teams. It’s a funny old management matrix, Saint!

Which takes us back to the emblematic magical manager of myth, Bill Shankly, who said that a football pitch was no place for children. You needed adults who could take responsibility, make decisions and be trusted to respond to the game. Teams who are able to manage co-operatively on their own are best placed to master the variety of circumstances that could face them much better than dictatorial control freaks. As in football, as in life.

But that’s not what we got. It was astonishly poor. He needed to pan it out with increasingly polemical references to Stalin and the nature of dictatorship, but if I wanted 6th form denunciations of totalitarianism, I’d have watched Bill O’Reilly. By all means remind us of the grim reality of life in Stalin’s Russia, but reminding us again and again? We know. Stalin bad man. Killing bad. Repression bad. Now, those buildings…

There was also a laughable attempt to ascribe something to the Russian ‘Bolshie’ character. He said that the Germans were, well, much more compliant people (scratch a libertarian and I’ll show you a vanilla right-winger happy to generalise about nations and ‘races’ who’s read Hayek and has a posh accent), he posited that there was a link to some historical essence of non-compliant Russian-ness which is why we use the word Bolshie. Eh? As opposed to an English word for being a bit uppity that equates being an agitator with being a Commie.

He kept referring to the impossibility of being an architect under Stalin; Stalin’s desire for a style defined by the bourgeois or imperialist styles it would not be rather than any conscious idea. These were good points, but I wish he’d done some research and perhaps identified a particular building and showing us how the bureaucracy and the whims of the apparatchiks of varying ranks interfered with the design and building process leading to the weird thing we see now. Instead, he did just do a few jump cuts set to music. And reminded us that Stalin was BAD. And that Jonathan Meades is so very, very, good.

* Apologies to the 1991-2 editorial team of SCAN, Lancaster University’s student newspaper, for use of their headline.

‘Be like Maradona – give up coke’

In Hollywood Wives we see the degeneration of the doppleganger into a common-or-garden tale of when heredity turns bad. There, the charismatic Buddy Hudson turns out to have a twin, separated at birth, who has grown up without any of life’s advantages and is EVIL. In a piece of make-up genius, the badboy brother was disguised with a heavy beard, so we never found out that they were identical until badboy shaved.

I think underlying this is an anxiety (No! surely not etc) about the self. What would we be like if we weren’t us? How much of us is nothing to do with us and capricious fate? What would we be like if we’d not grown up in the same way, with the same influences? But even that’s degenerating. Now, it’s just about narcissism (which it surely always had elements of) in a kind of ‘oh, look there’s someone who look like me!’ with a frisson of family history skeletons (did dad have an affair etc).

Last year, a good friend sent me a text from her office overlooking the Betsey Trotwood. She’s seen me going into the pub at about 3.30pm, and joked that it was early even for me to be hitting the pub. Trouble was, I was till at work when she sent it. Sadly, I was in a meeting so I didn’t get it until later, and wasn’t able to check who it might be. A few years back, a close colleague came bounding into work saying ‘you looked distracted at Victoria Station this morning’. Having been nowhere near Victoria at all, I was surprised, but not half as much as him. He’d seen me at a distance, and shouted. Seeing no response, he’d moved closer. He’d gone past the point where you’d realise you’d made a mistake and veer away or turn on your heels. He’d been about 2 feet away from me, and said ‘Hi Dave’ and ‘I’ had looked back with a blank stare.

‘He could have been your brother!’, my colleague exclaimed. I’m adopted, and maybe he was.

We sit in a boat with about 5 people in it, with varying degrees of amateur casting from 3 rods going on. When I’m not doing any casting I can never really relax and get drunktake in the marvellous scenary and tranquility of the Loch as I’m terrified that, like Ben Stiller in There’s Something About Mary, I’ll get hooked by one of my friends as we make some cack-handed attempt to do a champion fish catching cast. Luckily, all we have to show for this fear was a perceived few near misses, when someone felt the whush of spiky metal through the air.

Occasionally, we get a snag, which initially feels like a catch, and excitment miounts, and the boartd rocks dangerously from side to side. usually, it’s just a log on the bottom of the bed of the loch. We are all very relaxed as we just keep on tugging until it comes free.

No more. In future, we will row over to the end of the line and calmly retrieve the spinner and weight, because we really, really, really don’t want this to happen.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s the recipe, and that site’s editor should know, as he was the rabbit who sang Bright Eyes on the show.

I therefore amd forced to conclude that you are looking back through rose-tinted specs and therefore Ptee = Richard Littlejohn. Or else it is suffering from the illusion of another false memory.

* – Now, flinging a proper custard tart would be something. It would be worth getting hit by one of those, thought ideally, you want a slightly looser one, so the outward stability holds it in, but you get runny eggy custard to coat the face upon impact.

“So, what were they like to work with?”

They were actors in gorilla suits all along!

* Apart from anything Sepp Blatter’s said.

An old woman wanted to check that her vote would be valid as she’d put a tick, not a cross. I assured her that as long as it was clear who she’d voted for, it’d be fine.

The Tory candidate is quite young.

No activists from the Tories or Lib-Dems joined me at the Polling Station.

Lots of people really don’t know what to do; they approach the station tentatively, unsure as to whether I was an official part of the process, or some hanger on (answer=somewhere between the two). I wonder whether beneath cynicism there lies fear, or being the ‘weird’ one who doesn’t really understand what they have to do, and hides that behind statements about how politics ‘isn’t for them’ or ‘doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my life’. The ritualistic aspect of voting, something I love, is seemingly dying out, and it need not. It really just needs explaining, and Delia Smith is the woman to do it.

I’m counting people scowling at me in my Labour rosette or point-blank refusing to give me their number as Tories, which means on current evidence, Michael Howard isn’t going to be in Number 10, as he needs to seriously run Labour close in this seat.

My companion wasn’t a Tory or Lib-Dem, as they didn’t have anyone doing the job. A policewoman provided good company though – we discussed ASBOs, public drunkenness, reform of the Police, resources, the decline of civic society. I like this aspect of number-taking – you really do get to have conversation you wouldn’t otherwise have with people you wouldn’t normally meet.

One Labour voter told me that it would break his heart to vote Lib Dem, but couldn’t after the war. I knew what he meant, but couldn’t discuss that with him either. A 91 year-old woman voted, walking to the polling station on her own. She apologised for lumbering me with the consequence of a choice she’d not be around to see through to the end; myself and my policewoman companion both chided her pessimism. I thought afterwards that when she was born, women weren’t allowed to vote – a salutary reminder of how modern our own democracy is.

The stadium is impressive architecturally, with the exposed steelwork of the cantilever hidden behind a screen, creating a totally different shape to the building. Maybe British stadia are going for the exposed exo-skeleton look on aesthetic grounds, but it’s far more likely that it’s simply because it’s cheaper that way. As Simon Inglis points out in Engineering Archie, a book about the great British football stadium designer Archie Leitch, the cheap and functional always took pride over the aesthetic. British grounds were engineered, not designed. Not much has changed, it would seem.

But back to the problem of club identity; the architects behind the Arena have come up with an amazing solution; the screen transmits light, so the stadium

changes colour

depending on who

is playing.

Edinburgh Aiport yesterday, on discovering that there was bugger all food to be had for breakfast in the departure lounge.

* ooh look – it’s another Freaky Trigger series that I’ll doubt I’ll get around to doing anymore on

New Brazilian 17-year old wizard Kerlon has invented* a new trick. He balances the ball on his head and runs with it. Any attempt to kick it off will be dangerous play, seeing how you’re aiming to kick him around the head. A shoulder charge would be illegal.

I think this is nothing more than obstruction, like putting the ball between you legs when sitting down and preventing the ball being played. That’s the definition of obstruction. This sort of crazy madness must be banned by the International Football Board. If unchecked, they’ll all be doing it, and before you know it, football becomes rugby-with-heads, or netball-with-bonces. Unless, of course, players learn how to execute high kicks with stunning accuracy. But enough Shaolin Soccer.

* ie, been the first person to actually do it in a proper match

* Probably John Major’s best set-piece gag, when he said to Neil Kinnock “‘He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.’ Appropriately, that quote comes from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’- and Labour will lose.”