Why the French are more mature than we are

Probably not the man himself.

OMG! There’s a bloke – in another country – and he’s had an affair! Hold the front page!

I always wanted to be able to yell that. Well, the ‘front page’ bit, at any rate. And 20 years ago next month, I had the chance.

I was a duty chief sub for a national daily newspaper and shortly before we went to bed that night, the news chugged through that Stephen Milligan, the Conservative MP for Eastleigh had been found dead in somewhat compromising circumstances.

It seemed that he had accidentally killed himself during a spot of autoerotic asphyxiation, wearing only stockings and suspenders, with a bin bag over his head, an orange segment in his mouth and an electrical cord around his neck.

“Hold the front page!” I yelled to our small but perfectly formed team – not that we knew all these details at the time.

Now usually, I’d be the first in line to say that, beyond the man’s death, there was no public interest aspect in the details of that death being so widely revealed and discussed.

However, what changed this was that the story came at a time when John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign was in full swing, and rather seemed to conflict with such a stated governmental aim.

If only we’d known then what we know now about Major and Edwina. Who’d a thunk that, eh?

Anyway, that was the context. In other words, there was a public interest angle.

Tim Yeo, who was a junior minister in Major’s government at around the same time, stood up at one autumn Conservative Party conference and denounced single mothers as the cause of every problem in the country.

A couple of months later, he was revealed to be having an affair with a single woman who was pregnant by him.

In other words, it was an approach of: ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.

As such, there was a legitimate public interest angle to publishing the story.

Of course, there are plenty of circumstances in the UK where there is absolutely no public interest for publication of a salacious story. Some of the public being interested doesn’t count.

The News of the World had to try to fabricate a public interest angle in order to justify the stories about Max Mosely, for instance. It didn’t work, but the damage had already been done – and papers sold.

We seem to have a peculiar attitude in the UK – and not only the unholy combination of prurience and prudery that sees people lap up salacious stories and then justify it to themselves by being judgmental about the very thing that they’ve just been entertained by reading.

There’s also a widespread series of weird attitudes toward privacy, ranging from the spectacularly crass ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide’ to ones whereby anyone in public life has no right to a private life, to a position whereby you lose privacy incrementally dependent on how much you earn.

Then there are spurious arguments such as those about Ryan Giggs: ‘Well, he’s a role model’.

Who said so – did he describe himself as a role model; or others? Should he be penalised for what others say about him?

If he declared himself a role model, then perhaps you do have a public interest justification for publishing details of how he shagged a few women – although it also remains to be seen why we, as a whole, remain so utterly obsessed with monogamy and seem to experience a collective fit if anyone else’s life experience doesn’t actually fit this subjective – and some would say unrealistic – ethical stance.

The French are different.

Buy a newspaper on the other side of the Channel and it will not be full of stories about who shagged who, who fell out of a nightclub at 4am and so forth.

So it was something of a surprise to see that a gossip magazine had decided to publish the ‘news’ that President François Hollande had been having an affair.

Outside of the ‘yuck: who’d do it with him?’ questions – do some people really not get the sexual allure of power? – it seems that what has subsequently upset parts of the British press is that the French have not made more of it.

After all, how dare they not be as infantile about sexual relationships involving consenting adults as we appear to be, in general.

The biggest concern in much of France seems to be that the president was riding pillion on a scooter.

The allegations about the affair are not new, but publishing photographs of – allegedly – the couple is and certainly breaks the country’s culture of the private lives of politicians remaining, err, private.

The ‘other woman’, Julie Gayet, is set to sue Closer for invasion of privacy.

Good luck to her.

What happens between consenting adults is nobody else’s business – unless there is a genuine public interest angle, as illustrated above.

In the case of a former French president, François Mitterrand, the public were not worried about him having an affair – only whether or not he used public money for private business.

The same matters are the only relevant ones in the case of Hollande.

So, dear France – please do not go down the route of commoditising people’s private lives for the financial benefit of a few.

And for anyone who really thinks that they have a right to know who is shagging who, just because it's sex or because of their own set of values – grow up.

Stanley Spencer and WWI revisionism

Poppies

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter whose work was dominated by two things: his deep religious beliefs and his love of his home village of Cookham, which he often linked, creating Biblical scenes beside the Thames.

In 1915, the Slade-trained artist joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, and in 1916, he volunteered to serve with the same unit in Macedonia, where he was later transferred to the infantry.

In the 1920s, the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere was designed by Lionel Pearson as a memorial to Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who had died at the end of the conflict. It was commissioned by his sister and her husband, Mary and Louis Behrend.

A Grade I listed chapel, run by the National Trust, it has views over Watership Down – yes, it really does exist.

And in 1923, Spencer was commissioned by the Behrends to paint a series of scenes for the chapel. They were completed in 1932.

Inspired by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Spencer wanted to paint murals too, but the environmental conditions of the English Home Counties mitigated against that, so he stuck with more traditional paintings and completed 19 for the project.

At present, the chapel is being restored and so 16 of the paintings are on display at Somerset House in central London until 26 January.

They will then move to the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, where they'll be on display from 15 February to 14 June, before returning to the chapel, which will reopen in July.

Although Sandham has come to be a memorial to more than one soldier, Spencer’s choice of subject matter is largely removed from the heat of battle.

The nearest we come is a kit inspection in a Macedonian trench (Dug-Out), and the famous Resurrection of the Soldiers altarpiece in the chapel, and which – along with the two panels that join the rest to the ceiling – is too firmly attached to the chapel walls to be removed.

That painting, where dead soldiers and horses are rising from graves, plain white crosses falling into a heap or presented to Christ, is, in this exhibition, screened onto the wall of a room adjoining the main exhibition area.

Ablution

It was one of the works we studied when I was doing art A’ level – in the days when I disliked pretty much anything that had been painted in the 20th century.

But seeing the paintings now – up close and in good light – was not simply a matter of being impressed by Spencer’s skill with a brush, it was also quietly affecting.

Many of the scenes portray life at the Beaufort War Hospital: scenes of calm domesticity such as making the beds or carrying tea urns.

In one, soldiers are washing, while one has iodine applied to wounds. One washes another’s back, but otherwise, throughout the panels, there is no sense of conversations taking place: the fellowship – camaraderie – between the soldiers is a silent one, and this strange silence seems to reach out from the paintings to the viewer.

In one of the smaller panels, a shell-shocked soldier lies on the floor, obsessively scrubbing, as staff scurry around him. It’s one of the few overt indications of the damage done to men by their experiences at the front.

In another, men sit around a table at the hospital eating sandwiches. Well, one says “men”, but Spencer has painted his men as boys.

His choice of a naïve style leaves them all as boys – including the one officer represented in the entire cycle, who sits astride a horse, gazing down at a map of Macedonia, while troops relax around him in a countryside that is more Cookham. But even that officer looks like a boy.

Their very naïvete may even be read to suggest that expectations about the war and beliefs in its rightness were themselves naive.

It is a poignant comment on the human cost of the war itself and arguably a subtle version of the idea of ‘lions led by donkeys’ – all of which brings it into very sharp focus in light of debates going on about the nature of the war itself as we move closer toward the centenary of the first shots being fired.

Scrubbing the Floor

There are other works included in the exhibition: a self-portrait, for instance, and the magnificent Poppies (1938), which illustrates just how much of a deliberate artistic decision Spencer made in the naïve approach.

But this sits in a wider context.

As we approach the centenary, substantial airtime and column inches have been given to recent accusations of revisionism and left-wing propaganda in terms of our cultural attitude toward it – not least from the current secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.

The troops were not, apparently, ‘lions led by donkeys’ and that popular perception is a myth that has been created by left-wingers.

All of which rather ignores the fact that the historian who is largely credited with creating the idea of the bumbling officer that we recognise from Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder IV - was one Alan Clark, also a Conservative politician, who penned a 1961 title, The Donkeys.

In an interesting article in the Times Educational Supplement, John Blake writes:

“What Haig and the other commanders lacked was experience with the new weapons of war. These increased the killing power of an individual soldier to such an extent that offensive tactics that had previously been relatively safe became lethal: jogging in a pack across an open field in the face of machine gun fire is quite a different proposition from doing it against single-cartridge Martini-Henry rifles.”

That’s debatable, because the British Army had decided that ordinarysoldiers were not going to be given the most up-to-date rifles, because they’d use too many bullets too quickly.

Blake also states: “The reason the infantry was asked to walk across the Somme battlefield was to ensure that they arrived at the German lines together and thus were not slaughtered one by one as they climbed into the enemy trenches.”

And the British had already had experience of trench warfare in the Anglo-Boer War, so that should have presented few surprises.

But even if his explanation for the officers making the soldiers walk toward the German trenches is correct – and I have no reason to doubt it – it doesn’t make it any the less crass and negligent.

Machine guns were not new technology by this time: the Gatling gun had been used by Union forces in the 1860s in the American Civil War. Even pigeon post would have got the news of its efficacy across The Pond in rather less than half a century, so Blake is being disingenuous in pretending that the use of machine guns in WWI could not have been expected.

Elsewhere in cyberspace (and thanks to Dave for this), comes this: “One of the most striking things I have retained in my memory of watching numerous documentaries and reading various accounts over the years on WWI was the sad tale of one particular British Army Captain who, on receiving his orders for the forthcoming attack, worked out that, given the positions of the enemy and line of attack he was being ordered to take, he and his men were all going to get killed.

Map Reading

“What is more, he also worked out some sort of alternative flanking approach that would achieve the objective which would not have meant certain death (though I am sure he didn't think it was risk free either!).

“On presenting all this to his commander he was ordered to stick to the original plan and do his duty. He did and was killed.”

And then, of course, there was decision to launch one last attack, 10 minutes before the armistice. What does that show if not a disregard for the life of the men under your command?

There is more complexity to the history of WWI than is popularly remembered – but that is almost certainly true of all history.

For instance, I would certainly not doubt that many if not most people at the time did consider it a ‘just cause’. But there’s no conflict between that and anyone now saying, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was not.

What is disturbing about the current attempts at revisionism is not even that they appear to be partly about scoring political points – and ignoring facts, as illustrated above – but that given a background of British military adventurism in recent years and the current prime minister’s desire last year to get more militarily involved in Syria (thankfully defeated), one cannot help but be concerned that the two are linked and that our leaders believe that we, as a nation, need to be prepared for involvement in further conflicts, thus requiring a narrative of ‘just wars’ fought and glory gained, with great leaders at the helm, rather than anything different.

In terms of Syria, secretary of state William Hague (sounds remarkably like ‘Haig’) even attempted to suggest that, in that civil war, we could get involved without taking sides – after bigging up the rebels as though they were some sort of saints and the Syrian situation as beautifully simplistic.

In the meantime, Spencer’s quiet paintings act as a continuing reminder of those lost. There might have been a respite in the hospital for many, but there was no ultimate respite for millions, and no resurrection for those who fell – just as there are no officers among those rising from the dead in Spencer’s altarpiece and handing their crosses to Christ.

Perhaps in that simple artistic fact lies a truth that was well understood at the time.

These paintings are well worth seeing – and not least as people try to wage ideological war over how we portray and see the sacrifices made by so many.

They take a very different approach to, say, Paul Nash’s blistered landscapes or the poetry of Sassoon, Owen and others.

But I doubt that many will see them and not be quite profoundly moved.

Further reading

An interesting look at what might have happened if Germany had won WWI.

The Spencer exhibition and Michael Gove’s comments.

Cry God for Harry, but mostly for great theatre

This might be the time to suggest we borrow from the Bard and ‘cry God for Harry, England and the Michael Grandage Company!’

It’s a long time since I’ve been to the theatre to see a Shakespeare play that I don’t know. In the case of Henry V, I haven’t even seen the Olivier or Branagh film versions all the way through.

In such a circumstance, you have to be on your toes as a member of the audience.

This version of the play has been edited to keep it to just three hours (plus interval), but it doesn’t suffer as a result.

I’m not going to detail the plot – suffice it to say that the action takes place before, during and after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) in the Hundred Years’ War as Hal, now king, invades and defeats France and gains the hand of the French king’s daughter, Katherine.

It has been interpreted in various ways – both as a jingoistic celebration of military might, but the antithesis of that too.

That, in itself, is one of the strengths of Shakespeare’s writing – that it is not an obviously black and white affair.

But it’s equally worth remembering, of the history plays alone, that writers still had to be careful what they had their characters say.

To give you an idea, in 1605, George Chapman, Ben Johnson and John Marston penned the satire Eastwood Hoe, which so offended James I with its anti-Scottish content (they took the piss out of his accent), that Johnson and Chapman were jailed for a time, although Marston escaped arrest.

In this production, we begin with the Chorus appearing to address the audience, dressed in jeans and a designer t-shirt with the Union flag on it. The Chorus too concludes the entire piece and we seem to be being reminded of present wars.

The intended message is not laid in stone, but it is a subtle way of connecting past and present, and of making the audience aware that the consequences of wars past were just the same as of wars present.

Henry himself ranges from being principled to being brutal: he is neither simplistically 'civilised' nor 'uncivilised', but both, depending on circumstance.

The scene where he woos Katherine is very funny, as we see him fumble for words and a gentleness that is appropriate to the situation.

As so often in Shakespeare, there is a scene where we see some of the ordinary soldiers. In this case, when Henry disguises himself to wander around the camp on the eve of battle.

It’s been noted in more than a few analyses that such characters, though mostly unnamed, are often drawn in remarkable detail and with great sympathy – suggesting that the Bard himself knew such serving men in his own time as a soldier.

Here, the scene accentuates Henry’s own loneliness and isolation – or perhaps more widely, the loneliness and isolation of leadership.

It’s also a play that is pretty much a roll call of famous phrases – “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” might trigger reminders the title of a drama set in WWII, and that's just one.

If the “cry God for Harry” speech feels slightly rushed upon us because of the editing, then the St Crispin’s speech is spine-tingling goosebumpy – and that’s precisely what you go to the theatre for.

Christopher Oram’s set is simple – and totally true to the Chrosus’s opening speech of the play, when it talks of “within this wooden O”.

The performances are universally fine, but particular mentions go to Ashley Zhangzha as Chorus, James Laurenson as Exeter, Ron Cook as Pistol, Noma Dumezweni as both Mistress Quickley and Alice, and Jessie Buckley as Katherine.

Jude Law as the eponymous king – the big draw, of course – really is excellent.

He ranges from courtly gesture to embarrassed wooing to looking quite at home with a bloody big sword – and all with apparent ease.

There’s not much time left to see this, but if you can – go.

And at the end of a 12-month period in which we just happen to have, with no planning, seen the entire first Grandage season, I deeply hope that there will be more.

And for the record:

Privates on Parade ***

Peter and Alice *****

The Cripple of Inishmaan ****

A Midsummer Night’s Dream ***

Henry V *****

This is the mainstream – and we want more please, Mr Grandage!

The Michael Grandage Company

Wow – someone's discussing food security

Owen Paterson has, rather charmingly, suggested that it would be a really good thing if people bought more British-produced food.

Now it’s not often that I find myself in agreement with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – a man who infamously stated that badgers “moved the goalposts” – but on this matter I am.

Although what he’s asking is rather more difficult than Paterson bimself might realise, for a number of reasons – not least among them, cost.

At a time when increasing numbers of British households are finding it difficult to make ends meet, food is often one area where people feel that they can buy cheaper.

It’s nearly a year ago that the horsemeat scandal broke and one of the points that emerged with some clarity was that the cheaper the meat product, the more likely it was to have been adulterated with something that was never listed on any label.

The consumer needs cheep food and, in order to continue to make profits, the company needs to cut costs as well as the price. Given that there were extensive chains of companies involved in the production of these products – all of whom needed to turn a profit – it can hardly be much of a surprise that someone in that chain decided to cheat.

In early autumn 2012, I spent a day with trading standards in Northamptonshire.

This was an area where the (Conservative) council valued the service provided and was trying to protect it against cuts, but it had already been reduced to a point where much work was being done by phone instead of visits – the logistics of a semi-rural county made many visits too time-consuming.

I was shown around the store of contraband merchandise that had been intercepted and impounded. There was no shortage of tobacco – mostly produced, it was explained to me, in China, and containing … well, just about anything, including floor sweepings.

There’s not a world of difference between that and the horsemeat fiasco.

The level of tax on legal goods such as tobacco is an issue – not least for those on low incomes.

But in the case of fresh food, tax should not have an impact.

There is a culture in the UK of believing that food should be cheap. How anyone expects quality to come at the least possible cost is an interesting question – food viewed simply as fuel, again –  but increasing poverty means that increasing numbers of people have little realistic choice in the matter.

There are also plenty of cases of people who need convenience food because they have no facilities to cook – and of those visiting foodbanks for help who can’t afford the money to fuel a cooker.

In none of these cases is it remotely an option to tell people to ‘buy British’, unless you’re going to be able to guarantee that the Brit option is the cheapest and most readily available.

Then there’s the rise of supermarkets – to the point where they now have 80% plus of the UK grocery retail trade – which is also part of the problem.

The knowledgeable butcher who would supply cheap cuts as well as prime ones, the corner shops and the independent general stores that would stock local produce have, if not entirely disappeared, been hammered into endangered species status.

Many people have also lost the skills required to cook from scratch and therefore the chance to control more of what they eat – and then there’s the related attitude toward shopping; that it’s best avoided as much as possible excepting the once-a-week stock up at some tin box you need a car to visit.

Add to that the damage that has been done to UK farmers and producers by the same supermarket behemoths slashing prices and forcing the cost of those cuts on to farmers and producers.

Joanna Blythman has written much on the subject. If you choose just one of her books to read, then pick Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets.

As I’ve illustrated a few times on here, supermarkets are not as cheap as they might seem – and this is particularly true when it comes to processed foods and ready meals.

Another related problem is the cultural shift in the UK away from seasonality. Both as individual and commercial customers, many Britons now expect strawberries and asparagus in December, for instance.

And the supermarkets, with their global reach and massive financial clout, are only too happy to oblige.

So we have a world in which asparagus sprouts in Peru, where it is draining the water supplies of local communities, and where carnations are grown in Africa and flown to places where people will die without a water-guzzling bloom grown out of its natural season and habitat.

Quinoa, that most hip of foods, grows only in the Andean nations, but export is forcing up the price of what is a staple crop for local people. The export price had risen from $0.80 per kg in 1970 to $3.029 per kg in 2011, according to the UN.

And the UN designated 2013 as International Year of Quinoa in recognition of the Andean peoples that have grown the crop in the past and the present, through “knowledge and practices of living in harmony with nature”, and as an attempt to draw attention to food security issues.

Blythman also puts the sword to the wishy-washy idea that non-indigenous foods grown in the developing world for export is massively good for people in those parts of the world and therefore A Nice Thing.

No – you don’t get to justify munching Peruvian asparagus in January with any such patronising twaddle.

There are things we can’t grow in the UK – cocoa, coffee, lemons for instance. But in the case of the first two, they don’t need to be flown around the world as soon as possible after harvest. And lemons can be imported from our own home continent.

But much of what we import is in order to maintain all-year-round availability of seasonal produce.

On food security, it was also only last year that the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned that Britain produces less than two-thirds (62%) of the food that the country consumes, down from 75% in 1991. It called on the government, public and food industry to help.

Perhaps Paterson’s comments are that help?

A couple of years before the last general election, David Cameron told the NFU conference that any future Tory government would help farmers – by advising them on how to set up co-ops.

I don’t know whether this has been forthcoming, but this does seem to be one industry that – badger culling aside – the government is not realistically interested in helping, which is move away from traditional Conservative policy anyway.

Which point leads us to another interesting issue.

One cannot help but wonder how increased farming is going to be affected by the planned opening up much of the British Isles to fracking.

Surveys have shown, for instance, that much of east Lancashire is sitting on huge reserves of underground gas. It’s also farming country, and fracking has form when it comes to problems.

In just the last few days, four states in the US have confirmed water pollution from oil or gas drilling, while increased radiation has also been found in water and blamed on fracking.

This is in direct opposition to the claims of industry and some politicians that there are no dangers and problems hardly ever happen.

Story

Story

Fracking in the Ribble Valley seems like rather risky business – for the environment and for domestic food production. And obviously east Lancashire is not the only area that could be affected.

It’s hardly the actions of a government that is being friendly or helpful to its traditional allies in the rural communities.

So while it’s good to see people actually acknowledging that food security is important and needs tackling, however nice the sentiment, simply asking people to ‘buy British’ is not going to change a single thing – and most certainly not while the issue of low and lowering incomes, and the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ are such major problems for so many.

A rather chili picture of what we face

A ridiculous and unseasonally warm chili

If ever you wanted an illustration of how wrong some things are, it’s the chili pepper in the picture.

That rather unassuming picture of that rather unassuming fruit was taken last week – after the pepper in question had been picked from a plant in a pot in my garden.

Let’s just reiterate: that’s not a greenhouse, but a garden. It may be south facing, but it’s in England. And it’s the winter. There’s another one left on the plant too.

Nothing has stopped growing, because the weather is nowhere near as cold as it should be in this part of the world at this time of year.

And this is neither the first time, nor the only example of the climate having gone haywire.

Of course there were floods in the olden days. But they were not every year, several times a year, in several – if not many – places.

We might not have had many deaths from the ongoing stormy weather, and London has certainly not been battered, but yet again, people have been flooded out of their homes, left without power over Christmas and beyond – and still it comes.

That’s without considering the environmental impact – salt water washing away sea walls and swamping fresh water areas of great importance to animal, bird and plant life.

And government is hoping to further cut back the department in question – the department that, for instance, deals with flood defences.

The weather in this part of the world used to be essentially reliable. It no longer is. Depending on the time of year, you basically knew what would be coming.

Not any more.

Anyone who says that the climate isn’t changing is a idiot.

I’m not going to claim to know exactly what’s caused/causing it (I’m not remotely qualified to read, understand and comment on the science) but to be honest, I don’t think that what’s causing it matters.

It’s happening and anyone who doesn’t think that we should find ways to deal with it is also an idiot.

In the meantime, I’ve got chilis on a plant in London in January.

This one was sliced and used to flavour the mushroom ‘gravy’ that went with pan-fried tuna last weekend.

It’s a Rick Stein dish – and a very nice one at that.

Start by softening chopped/sliced onion or shallot, carrot and celery in a pan, then adding your chili, plus dried mushrooms. How many dried mushrooms? Try a shed load. Porcini provide a really big flavour hit.

Add some white wine and simmer to reduce, then add some vegetable stock and reduce again.

Strain everything and, depending on how much liquid you’ve got left and how many you’re feeding, you can reduce again.

At that stage, whisk in some buerre manie – that’s equal amounts of softened butter and plain flour, mixed together – until you have thickened it as much as you want.

Pour over your pan-fried tuna and consume with relish.

Stein serves it with mashed potato with garlic. I opted for crushed root veg: parsnip, swede and carrot. Tasty, comforting – and healthy.

Not that it was the only episode of smash and grab on the dried mushroom front over the holiday season.

We started this year’s Christmas dinner with a mushroom consommé that also required less a shed load and more a whole garage full.

Made from vegetable stock that was then reduced with the dried mushrooms in it, it was clarified with an egg white raft and then strained through muslin, to pack a massive flavour punch.

The rest of the dinner went okay, but realisation has dawned that a four-course meal for two is not actually massively practical, since the non-cooking diner has a lot of time to sit around waiting between courses.

It was a realisation that was increased by a rare episode of entertaining friends with a three-course meal that flowed perfectly naturally even though one ingredient (carrots in the boles de picolat, which The Other Half insisted should be included this time) was defiantly reluctant to actually be cooked through properly.

But with three people to sit around, wine in hand, and chat, it wasn’t an issue for me to give the dish extra time.

I’ll say this, though, Christmas Day’s mandarin sorbet was top notch.

The rest of the festive cooking was about as simple as can be, although having proven to myself that a set custard needn’t be such a risk – that three-course meal – I set out on New Year’s Day to prove it hadn’t been a fluke, rustling up little crème caramels.

Honestly – who found out that burning sugar could make something so utterly scrumdumptiously fabulous?

Our first course, incidentally, was steak, with sautéed leeks and little potatoes pan-cooked in duck fat.

On the subject of duck, I have, in the last couple of years, discovered Reflets de France tins of duck confit from the south west of France.

It’s not the cheapest fodder in the world, but contains exactly and only what confit should: duck legs, salt and duck fat.

Over the holiday, Ocado had run out, so they substituted me some Gressingham duck confit. This has an ingredient list of:

Duck Legs (85%), Orange Zest, Ginger Purée, Rapeseed Oil, Salt, Black Pepper.

I have to say, the taste is okay, but The Other Half was not wrong when he pointed out that they’re rather tougher than the Reflets ones. And amazingly, they’re from the chiller cabinet, which seems rather to defeat the object of preserving the meat in, err duck fat and salt.

Christmas did produce one culinary first for me, though: after watching Nigel Slater’s excellent programme on biscuits, I finally pushed past my polite reservations – and dunked a biscuit!

So peeps, that in a nutshell is notes from the festive food front.

And so, with Christmas packed away once more, it’s back to what passes for normal.