What are those dirty foreigners doing with our HobNobs, that’s what I want to know. Eating them, sure. But how? I remember visiting my French exchange, an otherwise quite charming chap from Marseilles. At breakfast I’d sit down with some luscious French bread and a slab of butter. He’d get four chocolate digestives, put them in a bowl, and cover them with pineapple juice.
“Seriously?” I’d say. “C’est le c?r?ale!” he’d insist. I’d shrug, ask where the toaster was, he’d ask what a toaster was, I’d tell him and he’d think I was lying.
I’m talking about the news in The Times yesterday, that exports of Britain’s cakes, puddings, and other non-fried contributors towards morbid obesity and heart disease are rocketing across Europe, from France to Hungary. It would appear that Mr Kipling’s cakes are not just exceedingly good, but plenty of other things, including excessivement bon and, apparently, rendkív?l j?. Cakes, biscuits, crisps, shortbread, cheese and tea. Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia and Japan. We’re basically killing the world, one calorie at a time.
There is a temptation, here, to veer towards amused disbelief. Perhaps even self-loathing. This would be a mistake. As anybody who has travelled even a little bit will tell you, no other nation in Europe can make a decent biscuit. Either they’ll overdo the sugar (Belgium, Switzerland), or spatter it with weird glazed bits and fashion it, inexplicably, into the shape of a farm animal (Germany, and all points east). They’ll treat it as a treat, basically, rather than a staple. It is no surprise that they prefer ours.
And yet, just because they are eating British things, we should not assume that they are eating them in a British way. They’ll be making our Jaffa Cakes into goulash or something. Fashioning dumplings out of our Bourbon creams. Pickling our cheddar.
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It’s different out there. Did you know, for example, that virtually nobody else even owns kettles? To date, the most vicious argument I have had in this office came about after I admonished an American colleague for making a Lemsip in the microwave. “I grew up without kettles,” she said. Although what upset me, I think, was the way she made quote marks around the word “kettles” with her fingers. “Everybody has kettles!” I shouted at her. “Like cutlery! Or taps!”
“Faucets,” she said, at which point I rather lost my rag. Later, I asked how her family made coffee then. She said in a coffee machine. You can’t be condescending with Americans. They have so much more practice.
Let’s clear this up
I do wish Caroline Flint would make her mind up. First, she wasn’t resigning because Gordon was brilliant, then she was resigning because he was a chauvinist. Now she’s said, I think, that it was actually because Gordon thought she was planning to resign when she wasn’t, and she was so annoyed by this assumption that she did. Frankly, she’s starting to sound a little flighty and emotional. No offence.
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She lost me, anyway, when she wrote a piece in one of the papers when her resignation was chauvinism- based, and used the phrase “let me be clear,” in the first paragraph. Could politicians please stop asking us to let them be clear? It’s like a virus sweeping Westminster. Gordon does it all the time. David Cameron does it every second sentence. Often he’ll even say “Let me be perfectly clear” or, more cunningly, “I want to be clear,” which stops it from being his fault if he then isn’t.
Me, I’d be happy to consider it a given. Henceforth, we will let you be clear. Be clear all you like. Knock yourselves out. Or, if you must herald it, it’d be nice if you did the opposite, too. “Let me be muddily and infuriatingly obtuse,” you could say. Although you might need to say that quite a lot.
Something about Muammar
I am transfixed, and not for the first time, by the spectacle that is Colonel Gaddafi. He looks odd, in the way that Robert Downey Jr might look odd, had he covered his skin with wax, dyed all visible hair really badly and been told by a Hollywood director: “We want you to play Colonel Gaddafi, but play him looking really odd.”
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It’s not just appearances, it’s everything. The costumes. The way he travels with a tent. The way he genuinely seems to feel he has something to say about female emancipation, despite having a personal bodyguard made up entirely of buxom young women in tight uniforms, all of whom wear the same shade of lipstick. He just seems entirely implausible. Less so this week, admittedly, alongside Silvio Berlusconi, but I’ve often thought he must be putting it all on, for a laugh.
And yet there’s that photograph. The one of the Libyan resistance hero pinned to his chest. He’s the dictator of a whole nation. He could have got anybody to knock up a decent laminated badge. But there it was, lopsided, and crudely sticky-taped to a bit of card. He’d so obviously made it himself, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the jet. It’s strangely adorable.