Food Science Day 4: The Culinary Art of the Bad Pun 1

AIM: To establish whether a bad pun can lead you to inventing a delicious new dish. In this case: LYCHEES ON TOAST

APPARATUS: Pestle & mortar; grill

INGREDIENTS: 1 middle-sized tin lychees; 3 slices of bread; 1 slice’s worth of butter for spreading

METHOD: To maximise our chances of making something tasty from a bad pun, three separate forms of lychees on toast are to be attempted.

1. The marmalade method: pulp a number of lychees to a consistency similar to marmalade by crushing in the pestle and mortar, disposing of any excess fluid emerging from the crushed fruit. Squeezing the pulp by hand proves more effective in removing more juice.
Toast one slice of bread, butter it and spread the lychee pulp on it like marmalade, or perhaps jam.

2. The grilled sliced lychee. Toast a piece of bread on one side. Slice some lychees and place them on a single layer on the untoasted side of the slice. Grill the lychee side until the bread around it is toasted.

3. The rarebit. Pulp lychees as per the marmalade method. Toast a piece of bread on one side. Spread the lychee pulp on the untoasted side and grill the lychee side until the bread around it is toasted.

RESULTS: Lychees are mostly juice: when pulping lychees, adding additional lychees to the pulp makes little difference to the total volume of the pulp. In reproducing the experiment, care should be taken not to add too many lychees to the pulping stage, or insufficient fruit will remain for the slicing method.
Whoops!

Taste test were largely positive: the researchers found themselves rather keen on each of the three samples. Least impressive was the slicing method, though that was perhaps due to the lower-than-desirable coverage of the toast with fruity flesh. On the other two samples, opinion was divided.
The marmalade method was helped by buttery yumminess (Use of avocado for this purpose was rejected on the grounds of obvious foulness). The rarebit method had the advantage of slight caramelisation, also leading to an increase in the tasty. None of the three samples lasted long before being wolfed down by greedy scientists. Some researchers suggested that the popularity of the samples was a result of these being the closest thing to real food served thus far in the day, and that people were hungry.

The control group of people who did not like lychees wanted nothing to do with this experiment, but who cares what they think, the lychee-hating freaks?

CONCLUSION: there is not yet enough data to prove that a bad pun will necessarily lead to deliciosity, but the state of delicious can be inspired by poor quality wordplay.

“Charities, Police, Opposition Parties and Church leaders”

The weirdly-timed backlash against the forthcoming increased flexibility in pub opening times continues.

“Tory leader Michael Howard said the legislation should be shelved until binge drinking has been brought under control.”

As far as I am aware, binge drinking has never been under control in British history. It’s a largely unpleasant part of the culture here and to think that it’s controllable through the pub opening hours is delusion. The various quotes in the Guardian piece seem to be saying “relaxing licensing laws won’t make any difference to binge drinking”. Agreed: so why bother restricting freedom of choice unnecessarily?

Maybe there are ways to deal at a cultural level with binge drinking: I’m not sure what they might be*. I’m sure that our legislature deciding for me whether I may remain in an alehouse after 11.20 on any given evening isn’t it. I don’t see how it’s any of their business, and it’s an ongoing irritation that they think it is.

The Government agreeing to a review of the effects of the changes after a bit seems sensible, especially if it shuts the irksome puritans up. But why aren’t these analyses talking about Scotland, where more sensible licensing hours appear to make a sum total of no difference whatsoever to levels of drunkenness or alcohol-fuelled crime?

* Perhaps seeing pictures of other drunks would do the job. I’ve been out in Rugby and there seemed to be plenty of drunks to look at without having their pictures projected onto the buildings.

The unexpected joys of a forthcoming Conference season #2 (niche marketing division)

Football seasons, eh? They seem to start earlier and earlier every year.

This year, the combination of (a) the season starting at the height of August, and (b) my team playing at a level at which an uncovered away end is by no means a rarity, has driven me somewhere I wouldn’t normally go: Boots.

See, two hours spent standing in the hot summer afternoon sun leaves me at risk of unsightly and uncomfortable sunburn on my rapidly balding pate. But I can’t be rubbing any old suntan grease into my head because there’s still (just) enough hair to go greasy and look horrible.

Surely capitalism can provide for this urgent need? Yes, it can: Boots Soltan Hair and Scalp Sun Protector. A boon for slapheaded bad football bores everywhere. Hey! Sometimes the p0rn0graphy of minimally differentiated products throws up something I really, like, need! Or want, I suppose.

While you’re here, here’s a Cement Industry Heritage Centre Update: I’ve heard nothing back from Lafarge. When I have any cement-related business to do I’ll take it elsewhere, and I urge you to do the same. Hmph.

The unexpected joys of a forthcoming Conference season

Exeter City begin their 2005/6 campaign away at Gravesend and Northfleet, who play in Northfleet. It’s a not-especially promising kind of place on the Kentish bank of the Thames, but an easy first day trip for City fans based in London. How super. But we might be able to make the day even more exciting. I know that’s hard to believe, but look:

“To: Lafarge Cement

On a visit to Northfleet last year I noticed a sign to a Cement Industry Heritage Centre. Since I will be back in the area soon, I thought I might try to take a look around. I can?t find anything relevant on the Internet, except one reference to a Blue Circle Heritage Centre.

Do you know whether the Heritage Centre exists, or did once? If so, was it attached to Blue Circle, or am I looking in the wrong place?

Thanks very much for your help

Tim H”

Dear reader: a CEMENT INDUSTRY HERITAGE CENTRE. How I hope it’s still there.

I wonder if I’ll get a reply?

The GBBF and its Discontents

I was nearly rude to a man in the Wenlock Arms a few days back. I was sipping demurely on a series of diet cokes while all those around me tucked into delicious-smelling, fine-looking, well-kept real ales. At the bar, enviously buying my companions more pints of Pitfield Dark Star, I was quizzed by a nice fellow about the quality of the beer. I like knowing about this stuff and found my inability to help surprisingly frustrating.

Turns out he’s an American over for the Great British Beer Festival. He asked whether I would be going along. Under other circumstances I’d normally lie politely and be on my way. But I found myself saying “No, I wouldn’t dream of it. I like real ale but I hate beer festivals. I like the pub, me.” Crikey! Where did that come from?

Here’s the FT orthodoxy, as I understand it: we like our booze but our priority is the pub, in particular the pub as the ideal environment for The Soash*. A good pub with dodgy beer remains a good pub, while an awful pub with excellent booze is still rubbish. The root of the deep-seated mistrust of CAMRA on FT stems from this priorities, because CAMRA’s priorities are precisely the opposite of ours. There is also the small matter of those graphics which show people’s heads ickily turning into pints of real ale, but let’s set that aside for now.

The beer festival, it seem to me, is the distillation of What We Don’t Like About CAMRA, with some delicious drinks to compensate. And the booze is GREAT. But beer festivals are uncomfortable places to drink, never enough seating, nowhere nice to lean, every available surface covered in sticky, drying ale, there aren’t enough J-cloths in the world to soak it all up and there is therefore a foul stench of stale ale. Festivals have a bad habit of having live music. GET ONE JUKER. But, oh no, a juker would get all the beerheads complaining about the music and that would distract them from talking about the relative percentages of hop and barley, and the water sources, and what particular blend of imported yeast they use, and…

And you have to pay to get in.

The point is, in exactly the same way as my musical experience is certainly not “all about the music, man”, my drinking life is not all about the quality of the beer. There must be much more to it than that.

*The Soash (sl): socialising (abbr.)

Peckham Pet-Tastic

Down in Sunny Peckham something’s happening.

You can call it socially engaged practice, you can call it democratised art, you can call it goofy fun, but we can all agree it’s Pet-Tastic.

I think I was unsuccessful in my attempts to persuade some good friends of mine to take their months-old baby down there dressed as a doggy. That would have been the best thing.

Playing the game

“I’ll get some stick over this” smugs Frank Kane over his provocative “harsh realities” in yesterday’s Observer. Will any suckers bite? Chomp, chomp.

Passing over the half-truths (he should read the chapter in here about Louis Edwards’s acquisition of Manchester United) I couldn’t help but gag on his Pangloss impression:

“Glazer’s audacious move is the start of the second revolution in British football - after the setting up of the Premier League - but it will be much more traumatic and long-lasting. At the end of the day, it will be good for the game, and for business.”

He’s likely right about the second revolution in English football, and if so it certainly will be traumatic. But his airy assumption that breaking apart collective bargaining will be “for the good of the game” beggars belief. Maybe there’s a case to be made, and if there is I’d like to hear it. Kane’s assertion is empty and crass.

The foundation of the Premiership has brought some good things to the game but the FA’s inability to manage the power of the larger clubs has brought huge problems, which I won’t rehearse here because they’re obvious but which you can read lots more about if you’d like. If the clubs, inspired by Glazer, are to smash apart any last vestige of distributing TV money then we can only assume they will happily keep making things worse, as long as the mony keeps growing. At present, the only benefits suggested are mainly flowing in the direction of the Glazers.

It’s tempting (especially if you support a financially-knackered tiny club, as I do) to pay no attantion to the Glazer take-over at Man U: this die was perhaps cast the day they converted to PLC status to raise money to build a new stand, and it seems entirely possible to me that Manchester United aree about to embark on yet another era of on-field success. But I don’t want English football to be ripped apart again, its hierarchies to be stretched further, and ever more painfully. Bless the Manchester United fans who feel the same way.

Enraged, I had to write.

Top five things in galleries to go and see for free in London right now

Top five things in galleries to go and see for free in London right now (in reverse order)

5. Henrik Plenge Jacobsen: “J’accuse” at the South London Gallery

HPJ is really saying something in this exhibition, something about justice and media, but I’m not sure quite what. The pieces here are diverting enough, and I’m always going to be a sucker for a specially-pressed op-arty picture disc, but whenever I felt like I was getting near working out what he was trying to express, past a sense of something being wrong, the ideas seemed to drift away from me. The show’s included here partly for the cheeky pair of architectural proposals, for a new European Central Bank building (a pile of dollar bills) and a new Bank of England building (three piles of Euro coins), both of which made me snigger. But he’s also had a set of red, spherical lights installed in the tree outside the gallery like Xmas baubles. Each has ANGST written across them in some strong sans-serif and they’ve been giving me great pleasure as I take the newly-bendy 12 along the annoyingly slow going of Peckham Road. (Ends Feb 27)

4. Hamish Fulton at Maureen Paley Interim Art

Hamish Fulton walks. He’s been toddling around for the best part of forty years now, each action an invisible line on the world, each one commemorated by something you can put in a gallery, something you might buy. His earlier pieces were mostly photographs with a few words of oblique description, but gradually the words became more important. It’s his entirely textual works which really excite my imagination, and this show has a nice selection of both. The largest single piece, concerning a journey made across Western Europe, just reads WATER, and takes up a whole wall, too large to hold the whole thing easily in your field of vision. I can understand how that might sound uninteresting but these pieces, these few simple words, get me dreaming.
For Fulton, I understand, the art is the action, the walking itself. For me, I’m only really interested in the evocation. I suppose it’s poetry, of a sort. (Ends March 24)

3. Jenny Holzer at Spr’th Magers Lee

Two works, each installed across a corner of the gallery space. Regular Holzer business, words scrolling across LED displays. Unusual Holzer business in that the words are poems by Henri Cole. I’m not used to proper grown-up poetry neing presented in goofy scrolling text, not used to having to catch it line by line as it scrolls away. Also the back of each LED gives out a reddish light so the space behind them glows pink, like some robot ribcage, or ET. (I see, on a cursory glance at the notes, that one of the works is called “Rib Cage” so I guess Jenny will be pleased with me). It’s as fleshly a move as I’ve seen Holzer make, which still isn’t very fleshly, to tell you the truth. (Ends April 2)

2. William Scott at Archeus, Albemarle Street

It’s billed as A Survey of His Original Prints, and there’s work spanning almost 40 years here. I think of Scott’s prints as being mostly naively-rendered pans, and cookign implements, with maybe a bowl or an egg or a pear or two, often just in silhouette against more or less single-coloured ground colours. Turns out I was largely right, though his work encompasses a few simple landscapes and some abstractions too. Sounds dull, eh? I’m not sure I can really explain why it’s not, except to say that I find myself enjoying very much indeed my time standing in front of these bits of paper, the subtleties of their colour and form; I end up thinking yes, here’s what my eyes are really for.
(Ends Feb 26)

1. Abram Games at Ben Uri

Abram Games was a commercial artist who worked mostly in the medium of posters. He, and contemporaries of his like McKnight Kauffer, were known in advertising circles as the Mid-Century Modernists, apparently, which is enough to endear him to me before we even start. Even so, this show which consists almost entirely of ads and public information posters contains the most arresting and most fascinating images I’ve seen for ages. It’s interesting to see similar graphic techniques used to sell newspapers I would’t dream of buying, and used to try to persuade soldiers to wash their feet. Real actual social history interest here, then, especially in the series of posters showing progressive social measures in high modernist buildings as a reminder to British soldiers of what they were fighting for (Churchill pulled this campaign, saying that the soldiers knew Britain wasn’t like that). But we’re not going to be rockist about this and merely examine commercial art for its historical value, are we?
There’s plenty of aesthetic reward in these posters, plenty of luscious, visceral shape-and-texture enjoyment too, more than enough to justify being snowed on on the Abbey Road on a Sunday afternoon. (Ends March 6)

While we’re here

While we’re here: a much-mentioned statistic was that half of the bijou but committed (and entertaining, and mental) Exeter City Supporters Club of Norway made it to the game, while only 0.025% of their Manchester United supporting compatriots made it. Here’s what you need to know:

MANCHESTER UNITED KLARTE UAVGJORT

De norske Exeter-supporterne er h’yt oppe etter sjokkresultatet mot Manchester United. (The first photo on this page really should be captioned “They don’t like it up ‘em!”)

Kantina p’ Old Trafford er st’rre

Non-scientific top nine things about going to watch my small team play against Manchester United and gain a draw against most expectations

Non-scientific top nine things about going to watch my small team play against Manchester United and gain a draw against most expectations

1. Not being able to sleep properly for two nights before the match.

2. Carsmile Steve’s face when we met for breakfast keeping on doing this nervous drawing-his-lips-tight-across-his-teeth thing.

3. Seeing the odd recognisable Exeter face in what seemed to me like an absolute ocean of people making their way to the ground. I’ve been to games which have attracted larger crowds than the 67,500 who went on Saturday, but the maybe the presence of the occasional Grecian scarf made it seem more amazing.

4. Being with my lot. As a result of the way our tickets were allocated, I sat with the FT kids and with my family. But we were also sitting near most of the folks I usually travel with, sing with, moan at. Watching this particular motley bunch go through the same agonies as I was suffering was strangely comforting. There is, and can be, only one Ben Nutter.

5. Magic socks! I received a nice warm pair of socks for Christmas which are slightly too small. I saw City beat Hereford 4-0 and 2-1 while wearing them, and so took them to Manchester with me. They are a bit uncomfortable but I’d be a fool to ignore actual real lucky hosiery. It’s every fan’s dream! Halfway through the evening I drift into reverie for a few seconds and interrupt my companions’ sane conversation with a big smile and the phrase “I’ve got magic socks!”

6. Buying a ton of papers for the rail journey home, and bumping into various bleary Grecians around Manchester with arms full of newsprint. We liked the coverage in the Sunday Times and the Sunday Mirror the best as it was the most fawning and excessive about Exeter City. Also the Mirror had a picture showing 50% of the SE22 Grecian Army. Happily, he’s more photogenic than I.

7. Article about the day by my good friend Al Crockford in the prestigious Exeter Express & Echo. Main thesis of article: after the game we did kamikaze drinking and -hey!- eating’s cheating. Accompanying picture shows AC with his complete solid diet for the evening i.e. two onion rings. He holds them aloft: 0-0.

8. Securing tickets for the replay.

9. The sleeping thing, again.