Fighting the fad food frenzy

I hope you’ve had a good week? However good it was, I had custard on Tuesday, so unless you won the Lotto, I reckon I win.

In fact, the only thing that could have made the week much better would have been to have custard on the other days too. I’m not big on making plans, but I think that’s an achievable goal for next week.

It’s been a heady seven days for proper, old-fashioned, food in our house too – we had some pork scratchings on Monday – admittedly, they were a bit “artisanal” (which I think means the pig was good at painting), gluten free, and therefore £1.45 for a very small packet, but we did purchase them in the food hall at a historic house.

I’ve come a long way from the budget version I used to consume with a pint down my local. They came in a clear bag sealed with tape, and it wasn’t uncommon to discover that the poor porker had met it’s maker before having a decent shave.

Still, two comfort food items from my past in two days is definitely an achievement. If I didn’t live beyond the end of the month, I could die happy. In fact, the levels of fat in both of those little delights has probably increased the likelihood of that somewhat.

It made a nice chance from the nonsensical barrage of poncy food that seems to be on every menu and in every supermarket at the moment.

At what point did someone decide that anything with caramel in it needed to be salted? How the hell do you come up with that as a plan?

Ring Ring: “Hi Dave! That caramel thing you produced is lovely, but we think it needs more salt. OK?”

“Um.... salt? Really? Well... if you say so.”

“Ha! Only kidding. April Fool! That’d be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Dave? Dave? Damn, he’s hung up...”

Pulled pork is another one. We managed for centuries without needing to have our meat dismembered like an angry toddler had recently attempted to tear it to pieces with a fork. What next? Mashed steak? Distressed Trout? Lightly tickled pheasant breast?

I’ve even had a mint and lime sorbet which was so sour, the effect on my tongue was similar to the ringing noise you get in your ears after a loud concert. Everything I tasted for several hours afterwards seemed strangely muffled, while the aftershock left me briefly able to understand Sherlock plots – and nobody should be able to do that.

I will admit to being seduced by some of modern life’s food du jour, though. One of my greatest regrets is that I didn’t discover chilli hummus until I was 48. So many wasted years. But granola can go away, sushi can shove off, and quinoa can... er... quit it.

I’m founding the Custard Appreciation Society. Let’s make this country great (and custardy) again! Who’s in? Free Pork Scratchings for new members!

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 29th of July 2016. The paper retitled it as 'Enjoying time in custardy', which is the kind of pun I normally use. I think they're starting to get used to me after 4 years...

I did get somewhat excited about the idea of setting up a Custard Marketing Board spoof account on Twitter, and thought up a selection of somewhat daft and rude subject matter, including creating a hashtag for 'Custard Uses Milk!' Don't think about that, though. It's quite rude.

This one was fun and easy to write, and could have gone on for days. There are so many middle-class foodstuffs now, which seem to be permeating into everyday life like there's nothing ridiculously pretentious about me. Gah - it makes me want to throw my low-fat soya latte at the screen.

Maybe I should do a follow-up at some point. Go anything you think I should include?

Last week's Queen at Wembley '86 post performed rather spectacularly - in the space of a week, it's become the most viewed post on this blog EVER. The power of good rock music reigns supreme eh?

Talking of which, delighted to see that ELO's best-of album 'All Over The World' has gone to No.1 in the UK - their first since my favourite album of theirs, 'Time', back in 1981. Well deserved. And I'm off to see them at Wembley next June. Coincidence? Probably, but a good one.

In case LinkedIn is your thing, I'm on there nowadays too. Not entirely sure what I'm doing there, but if you can bear to connect with me, I'm here Tell me you found me via the blog for bonus points! ;-)

(CD A:Z suspended, as I've got a new one for the collection that I'm giving a spin - '80's Romance, The Complete Belle Stars'. Jolly good it is too.)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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