If British menus were honest…

Steak and Ale Pie

Our kitchen staff play endless games of keepy-uppy with every one of our beefsteaks, ensuring each chunk of meat thrown into our pies is as tender as can be. Two full driptrays of beer go into every pie, along with all the stray peas we can sweep up from under the fridge.

Veal Escalope

Our local butcher will lovingly compress all the sludge he can mechanically recover from the carcass of a stillborn calf and coat it in breadcrumbs shaken from a toaster. The grim result is shoved under the grill at an e. coli-killing heat for your convenience until it starts to curl.

British Cod and Chips

We deep-fry all our pre-prepared battered pollack (a special type of cod) TWICE to make sure you get a Traditional Fish Supper that is both crispy on the outside and like fish-flavoured chewing gum on the inside. We serve it with a slurry of peas and tartar sauce which should have been chucked out months ago.

Authentic Italian Spaghetti Bolognaise

We’ll mix our manky tomatoes and furry onions with the greyest mince we can find into a pan last washed by a Parisian plongeur in the 1920s, top it up with Mexican wine and leave to boil over until you’re crazy enough to order it. We’ll serve it on a ball of spaghetti stodgy enough to block you up for a week.

But here’s my homemade Shepherd’s Pie recipe

This will convince you that British people can make tasty food. I promise. It’s essentially minced lamb and mashed potato. Here’s what you need:

500g minced lamb.
Some rosemary, some thyme
Bottle red wine
Couple of onions
Couple of large carrots
Tomato puree
2 egg yolks
300ml beef or chicken stock
Worcestershire sauce
Olive oil
Garlic
1kg of starchy potatoes (I used Desiree)
Loads of grated hard Italian cheese (I used parmigiano reggiano)

So.

Heat the olive oil in a hefty saucepan. Grate your onions, carrots and garlic and add to the pan. Keep it moving until it’s soft, browned and smells good.

Season the meat generously with salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme and add to the pan. Stir fry until the meat is brown, adding tomato puree and Worcestershire sauce as you stir. (I used about 2 tablespoons of each.) Then pour in 1/3rd of a bottle of red wine. Turn the heat up and reduce. This means cook the bejesus out of it until most of the liquid has evaporated.

Then add your stock (I went with beef; Gordon Ramsey says chicken.) and simmer gently for about 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel and cut your potatoes into small chunks and boil for 25 minutes. When they’re done, drain and leave aside until they’ve finished steaming. Otherwise you’ll have sloppy mash. Now it’s time for the secret ingredients. Mash in two egg yolks (JUST the yolks) and a heart-attackalicious amount of Italian cheese. Really mash it up good now. Your arm should hurt. Set aside.

So now you transfer the meaty veggie goodness to an Perspex dish and spread the mash on top. The best way is to dollop it into the corners and spread towards the centre with a fork. Try to make it an even depth throughout. Smooth the top off with the back of a spoon, then drag a fork across it to give it a nice ridge effect. Sprinkle more grated cheese if you value quality of life over quantity. Put in a preheated oven for 25 minutes and serve. See, British food is tasty.

Try to use the active voice whenever possible. But remember there are times when it is better and less accusatory to use the passive. For example:

Active: You fucked that job right up.
Passive: The job was fucked right up.
Active: We made some serious fuck-ups.
Passive: Some serious fuck-ups were made.

Apostrophes

Use apostrophes to indicate possession. For example:
Your daughter’s face is ugly.
Your son’s intelligence is low.

More examples of use:
Your sisters’ pimps’ cars – More than one sister, more than one pimp.
Your sister’s pimps’ cars – One sister, many pimps.
Your sister’s pimp’s cars – One sister, one pimp.
Your sisters’ pimp’s cars – More than one sister, but just one pimp.

Capital letters

Keep everything in lower case unless it is a proper noun. For example:
There are many shit-rag magazines written by and for morons, and Heat Magazine is one such magazine.

Similarly, use lower case for government and the people involved in them. For example:
Most of parliament were involved in the expenses scandal.
Many world leaders are warmongering sociopaths.

Colons and semicolons

Colons introduce something: an idea or a list. Semicolons separate complete but closely related sentences. For example:
I know you won’t understand this; you are a complete dolt.
I only get drunk on week nights; I like to be hungover on someone else’s time.

Commas

Use commas to link words in a simple list. For example:
Life is futile, boring, brutal and short.

Use commas to cordon off extra parts of the sentence. For example:
The reporter, instead of covering the court case, was fucking an unpaid intern in a stationery cupboard.

Note that the traditional rule of not using a comma before ‘or’ or ‘and’ is not rigid. You may need it to avoid ambiguity. An Oxford comma can be used when the last item in a list contains the word ‘and’. For example:
The fat bastard has eaten too much ice cream, pizza, and fish and chips.

Everyday words

To get your message across use plain English as much as possible. Avoid official-sounding terms. Here are some examples and their plainer alternatives:

equitable = we’re screwing you
elected member = sociopath
expedite = make you redundant
expenditure = the money we’ve wasted
henceforth = I made a mistake and I’m blaming you
in lieu of = we’re not paying you
utilise = exploit

Dates

Write dates in full using the ‘dd month yyyy’ format. Do not write days, unless absolutely necessary. For example:
The London Olympic Games will be a shambles as of 27 July 2012 (not 27th of July 2012).

Speech marks

Use double quotation marks to indicate direct speech, or words quoted. For example:
Tony Blair said of Iraq: “Their weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.”

Time (writing the time)

Write the time using numbers, without punctuation and using a 24 hour clock. For example:
I wrote this between 1630 and 1700 on a Friday afternoon instead of doing what I’m paid to do. Before I got this job, I signed on the dole every Tuesday at 1030.

Tone

Speaking or writing, we should always strive to be clear, concise and compelling. Web writing should:

• Allow people to waste time on the internet without using their brains.
• Allow people to copy and paste without crediting the author.
• Be easy to make knee-jerk reactions to.

I shout up the stairs: “Honey, are you expecting something from Hong Kong?”
She replies “Oh, my tape measure!” Of course.

This is what happened: she needed a tape measure, but wanted to get one cheaply, with no physical effort. So she bought this tape measure on eBay. It cost £1, delivery included. And it got delivered from Hong Kong. Think about that: the cheapest and easiest way to get a TAPE MEASURE is to get it FLOWN OVER from CHINA. Our species is completely fucked.

Me: ‘If I was worried about climate change, I’d wonder about the carbon footprint of that tape measure.”
Her: “Well it didn’t fly over on its own plane!”

I suppose that’s fair. A flight attendant didn’t have to check it was wearing a seatbelt and offer it an inedible midair meal; the plane it came over on would definitely have flown anyway without it. But still. We buy tape measures from Hong Kong.

Video in plain view

Nearly two years ago me and Guy Dixon recorded 12 songs in 6 days at his house in Syresham. It turned out pretty good, I uploaded it to this site and a couple of hundred people downloaded it. We went slightly crazy doing it. We recorded bits of video throughout and he recently edited it into something watchable. It’s very self-indulgent, but if you have an interest in recording you might enjoy it.

Download Outta Space (320 kbps MP3, 6.8MB)

So when I’m not saturating my poor brain with all that, I’m enjoying the sunshine and being sociable. Will start using brain again in Autumn.

This is a great 5 minute video, by the way. It’s not that far from what it’s like to be absorbed in a Mario game. It’s probably something Bill Hicks would have loved.

I vowed to visit a proper salon the next time I needed a cut. Which is a different kind of embarrassment: it’s impossible to avoid the blow-drying and the straightening. It only took two days until my hair reverted to wavy normality, but for those two days I wanted to beat myself up every time I saw my reflection.

So, to cut to the chase, this David Mitchell monologue resonates with me.

David Mitchell is evidently a good name to have if you want to achieve something. I’m reading the the latest book by the other David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I’ll leave the book-reviewing to the pros, but if you like fiction, you’ll like David Mitchell.

Me and Guy started work on a batch of songs before Christmas, and we’re still not finished. Maybe because we keep playing snooker instead of musical instruments. So while we continue to piss about with keyboard parts, feel free to enjoy the catchy but unmixed chorus of a song called Factual Accounting.

I did my best to speak only German in Austria. Sometimes Austrians would respond in English, but the trick is confidence: we are what we pretend to be, and I pretended to be someone who can speak German. I only came seriously unstuck once: I ordered a couple of beers from a waitress. While she was off fetching them, another waiter pointed at my empty glass and asked if I wanted it re-filled. Panic!

How on earth do you say “I have already ordered another beer from the waitress, but thank you for your attentiveness”? The plastic wheels were falling off my linguistic tricycle. Knowing that I needed to use the verb ‘to order’ in the present perfect tense was as useful as knowing I’d need to run steadily at 15mph to do a four minute mile. The only thing I could think to say was “The fräulein has written of my thirst.” Do they have Jeeves & Wooster in Austria?

They certainly aren’t in danger of running out of beer and schnitzel in Austria. I could have stayed in Vienna for a long time, but I had to come home in time for all the election excitement. As I write this, Nick Clegg is being courted by both Brown and Cameron. If he passes up the chance to force a referendum on the UK’s electoral process, I may have what used to be called a nervous breakdown. I don’t even care if that means another chunk of Gordon Brown.

Brown. We’re like a nation of battered wives in denial: he’s only hit us five or six times, and it’s always when he’s been drunk. And we must have provoked him. Either way, our next Prime Minister will certainly be a man who voted for the Iraq war. Well done, everybody. White phosphorous all round.

I take comfort from knowing that good ideas always win in the end. Take Professor Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who worked in Vienna. (Guess where I picked up this story.) Semmelweis had the craziest idea: he thought that germs caused people to get sick and die. This was a controversial idea only 150 years ago.

He noticed that one in ten mothers who gave birth in hospitals died shortly after, while only one in fifty women who gave birth at home died in the same way. He also noticed that doctors went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to attend to women in the maternity ward. He made a suggestion: that doctors wash their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering babies. Who did this prick think he was, telling the great doctors of Vienna how to do their jobs? And to make things worse, his idea worked! The dying stopped. Wait til you hear what thanks he got.

To cut to the chase, he ended up being admitted to an insane asylum, where he died of a self-inflicted cut to the hand from a deliberately infected scalpel. Poor old Semmelweis. But his good, unpopular idea of people washing their hands after dissecting corpses won out in the end.

This is my mantra for May: honourable people with good ideas always win in the end.

Isn’t spring wonderful? I feel peaceful. I’ve been watching Hampstead cricket club do their thing. My living room overlooks the pitch. It’s meditative, all that leather-on-willow bollocks. I also did something very grown-up and bought a Van Gogh print in a proper frame. And my girlfriend and I play Badminton every weekend. Sign of age #47: I tend to get up earlier on weekends than I do during the working week.

So this time next week, watch out for a comprehensive sociopolitical analysis of the Austro-Hungarian region: a blog called ‘what I did on my holidays’.

Such important questions were conspicuously absent on the first of the party leaders’ debates on tv the other night. Did you watch it? Most people’s vote in the UK makes no difference to anything. If you live in Cambridgeshire, you might as well cast your vote down the toilet. But it’s extraordinary that there should be such a thing as a safe seat. The very concept of a safe seat is an argument against the first-past-the-post system.

What would Labour have to do to lose their core voters? Apparently causing violent death and misery on a mass scale in the middle east isn’t enough. What would be enough?

Nothing. Gordon Brown could ride a blind pensioner like a donkey to Buckingham Palace to announce his introduction of compulsory euthanasia for World War II veterans, and some people would still vote Labour. At most they’d tut and roll their eyes.

I guess it’s a tribal loyalty, like supporting a football team. You are invested in the outcome of a game in which you lose either way. The result of a UK general election is the answer to the question ‘Would you prefer to be punched in the stomach or kneed in the groin?’

The principle argument against electoral reform is that it would weaken government; it would dilute legislative power. Well, good. That’s exactly what I want, and I don’t think I’m alone. Labour have created 3,600 new criminal offenses since 1997, and I think we could have managed without them.

I hope for a hung parliament, followed by electoral reform. I think voting Liberal Democrat is the best way to move in that direction.

Or, y’know, they’re all the same, hang the bastards, yadda yadda yadda.

The rules of the game are unique for each player

I overheard two bicycle couriers chatting on a park bench the other day. It was interesting to eavesdrop; they talked shop in the same way bankers might talk about interest rates. Mostly, they talked about run-ins with the police and white van drivers.

One guy: “The guy just turned left in front of me; I slammed into the side of his van.”
Other guy: “Did he stop?”
First guy: “Did he fuck.”
Other guy: “Did you call him a cunt?”
First guy: “Nah, I just called him a tosser.”

It would seem that in the lexicon of bike couriers and van drivers, there is a scale of profanity with fixed consequences. So, if a bike courier calls a van driver a tosser, the van driver will shake his wrist in a wanking gesture while he drives off. But if the bike courier calls the van driver a cunt, the van driver will get out and beat up the bike courier. Perversely, the van driver is allowed to call a bike courier a cunt for more minor infractions on the basis that he is protected on all sides by glass and steel and is almost certainly heavier, thicker, generally a more physically substantial individual. Every game has its rules.

Fantasyland

I don’t like to moan about my job, because the hours are short, the pay is good and no-one gives me a hard time. But it’s boring. You amuse yourself as best you can.

I don’t want to go all Jeremy Clarkson, but some of the shit I have to edit and publish about health & safety is unbelievable. It’s often not even about health & safety itself, but about what percentage of managers have read a report published by so-and-so on such-and-such, following a recent survey etc.

The people responsible, in order to keep themselves in a job, use as many words as they can to say as little as possible. To keep myself in a job, I try to make it readable. Then I publish it to the sound of trumpets.

I want to e-mail the content owners as follows:

Dear whoever,

Your unintentional pastiche of local government health and safety satire is on the site now.

Kill yourself,

Me x

But of course what I actually send is:

Dear whoever,

Your content is on the site now. The style guide demanded that I remove most of your exclamation marks. I hope that’s ok.

Regards,

Me

Still with me? You deserve a reward. Here’s a bunch of New Yorker cartoons all re-captioned with just ‘Christ, what an asshole’. Mostly it’s an improvement; you’ll be surprised how funny it is. I think it’d work for most one panel comics.