Contains tips of surviving austerity, scottish spag bol, Felicity Jones’ Infernal career, ScotRail, Bob Dylan’s category error, Alan Bennett does I’m A Celebrity — Get Me Out Of Here
A version of this appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on October 18 2016
It’s official — the economic outlook is so bleak that even fast food outlets have announced their sales are dropping. People are spending less because they are worried about what’s around the corner because, to be honest, if you’re still eating King-Size McWhoppers, you’re probably not too concerned about the future.
The rest of us are staggering from the news leaked from the Treasury that a hard Brexit might cost £66billion a year, which sounds an enormous amount, even to those who have recently bought a ticket on Scotrail. Yet amongst the storm clouds of leaving the EU, some chilly financial types are trying to persuade us there’s a silver lining in our weak pound, by insisting that this will make us more attractive to foreign investment, and boost export sales. It’s even been suggested that devaluation was necessary and long overdue; which is rather like God flooding the Earth to rinse out the misdeeds of humanity, then having Noah saying that the lawn needed it.
Pessimism is on the march. With all the signs indicating that it’s less a case of seasonal belt tightening than buckling up and bracing for a potentially very bumpy ride indeed, there’s not much comfort in the fact that I’m bang on trend, having stored all my savings and investments in the form of Nectar Points.
It’s time to embrace Pot Noodles, own-brand gin and all other forms of enforced personal austerity short of harvesting roadkill and preserving your floors by sticking a square of carpet to each shoe. And since we’re all in it together, let’s share our best moneysaving tips.
BBC Scotland: Instead of spending large sums recording and broadcasting The Quay Sessions with Edith Bowman to a tiny audience, why not visit each viewer’s house and give them a pile of records by bands who are now as hip as old boots. Fining Edith every time she says “amazin’” or enthuses about someone’s “journey” would also open up a rather useful revenue stream.
Parents: chocolate biscuits are delicious, but hardly cost-effective since your children will eat them. Take a tip from the Victorians, and replace them with Garibaldis and Fig Rolls. The notorious squashed fly biscuits are so resistible, that your biscuit tin will last until the third or fourth great-grandchild.
Political Parties: save money on costly think-tanks by filching education and childcare policies from other parties. If you’re the SNP, you can call this “magpie politics”, call for the Conservatives and Labour parties to retire, and fire off one of your leftover glitter cannons to celebrate
Foodies: Get on fleek by ditching the spendy bagged salads, and go foraging for wild foods like dandelions and nettles instead. NB; elderflower champagne is not recommended. A relative enthusiastically gathered, brewed and bottled up one vintage before it had finished fermenting. The result: late one night, the garage sounded like the final shootout in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, followed by a morning clearing up exploded glass.
Fashionistas: You might think about cancelling the eyebrow shaping sessions. The HD, or Scouse Brow, should have been killed off by now anyway: has no-one mentioned they make you look like killer clowns?
Troubled train company Abellio spent thousands of pounds sponsoring a drinks reception at the Nationalists party conference last week. This linkup has been criticised as inappropriate because the SNP awarded Abellio the ScotRail contract last year.
I can’t see the problem: after you’ve travelled in one of ScotRails’s sluggish, dirty, overcrowded trains, strong drink is the first thing you reach for.
Music and nostalgia fans are very, very excited that Bob Dylan has won a Nobel Prize for literature, even though Dylan’s lyrics were never meant to be spoken, and need Dylan’s ungainly voice of sand and glue in order to resonate. Not just Dylan’s voice either; is it possible to recall Like a Rolling Stone, without also thinking of the call and response of Al Kooper’s crashing Hammond organ riffs?
Dylan is no stranger to awards and acclaim, including a doctorate in music from Saint Andrews University, collected in 2004, but the Nobel folk have thrown pretzel shapes in order to give Dylan one of their prizes. By shuffling their category definitions, they’ve paid him a back-handed compliment by rewarding him for being something other than one of the great musical influences of the last century, who gave pop culture a paradigm shift. Bob has not returned their calls.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Nobel world, the times they ain’t a-changin’. In 2016, it’s more likely a male musician will receive the Nobel literature prize than a single female writer get a nod. In fact, there were no female laureates this year, and only 14 women have won in 115 years.
What can women do to get on the Nobel jury’s shortlist? Perhaps it’s time for Wolf Hall’s Hilary Mantel to consider finishing that death metal album.
A round of applause for whoever thought of asking writer and actor Alan Bennett to take part in ‘I’m a Celebrity’ — Get Me Out of Here”. Who would not have been charmed by the 82 year National Treasure in the Bush Telegraph, pondering the Cream Cracker Under the Snake Pit of Doom? Besides, as a man who has published three volumes of personal journals, he’d have been right at home in a diary room.
Alas, Mr Bennett had no desire to be filmed chomping on a kangaroo gonad as if it was a cupcake; he turned the show down. However, he now admits to watching Bargain Hunt when he’s having his lunch, so maybe they can coax him into wearing wacky waistcoats and bantering about Toby jugs.
Is it true that Pope Benedict likes to make surprise visits to retirement homes near the Vatican? Because if there’s one thing people in a retirement home enjoy, it’s sudden surprises.
Red wine or milk? Sausage or pancetta? How to cook the ultimate bolognese sauce can be a subject so fraught that actual fights can break out. Now a week after Jamie Oliver was censured by the Spanish for polluting their traditional paella with a handful of chorizo, Antonio Carluccio has been laying down the law on authentic Italian spag bol.
Apparently it requires two types of minced meat, tomatoes, and some red wine — but absolutely no herbs or garlic. Even the spag element is wrong because Antonio says we should be using tagliatelle.
Until I was 12, I knew two things about Spaghetti Bolognese — the sauce should be as red as blood, and could be whipped up in ten minutes, provided you peeled open the corned beef tin quickly enough while the onion was frying.
This was my mother’s recipe and, unlike Antonio, she firmly believed in the power of a bayleaf, bypassed tomatoes and wine in favour of a belt from the ketchup bottle, and topped it off with a generous grating of cheddar. It was part of an inventive Mediterranean repertoire that included pizzas which she fashioned from giant flattened scones, topped with tomatoes and bacon, and tinned ravioli from William Low. We loved them all.
Billy Connolly once recalled ordering spag bol in Fort William, and being asked “Do you want chips and peas with that?” And why not? This country is open-minded and experimental when it comes to spinning the platters that matter. Unless you are terrible food snob, there’s nothing wrong with bending food rules — that’s why our number one dish is chicken tikka masala.
Poor Felicity Jones has been nobly talking up her new movie Inferno, the latest from the blockbuster Da Vinci Code franchise. As Tom Hank’s supersmart sidekick on his latest treasure hunt, she dashes around Italian monuments trying to save us all from a deadly virus, pausing only to help Tom dole out discourses on Dante’s Inferno. How did this film manage to pull in Felicity, an Oscar-nominated actress with a Star Wars film in the pipeline? It’s a mystery. Dan Brown should write a book about it.
NASA scientists have discovered over 1,200 planets that are capable of supporting life. In other words, if Donald Trump somehow manages to turn it around and become president, we still have options.
