Culture killing cooking?

Last night I had a delicious meal of pork chops, fresh from the butcher, new potatoes and a salad made up of mange tout, sugar snaps, peas and lamb's lettuce. After my brain had finished exploding from the pleasure, I got to thinking about how little we cook as a nation.

After pondering it for some time it dawned upon me that it is the way our society works that prevents us from engaging in more home made meals. The standard working day in the U.K. is 9 to 5, and what a way to make a living! Take travel time into account and you probably won't be getting home until around 6ish. Now factor in the fact that there may also be children to feed as well as your other half and the situation escalates to where you are trying to prepare a meal for 4 or more people, something you may not feel up to coming home tired from work.

It's no wonder that take away and microwave meals have become so popular. Even the things you take as being harmless, like fish fingers or boxed up burgers are a convenience which allows us to escape cooing from scratch. Now on the whole it is said that cooking with fresh and varied ingredients is healthier than reaching into the freezer for the closest meal-in-a-tub, it also provides greater options, but I understand why it is so appealing to slap something quick on the grill or in the microwave and munch away.

In France, their fairly flexible working week has some companies allowing employees Friday afternoons off, or finishing early if they do not take their lunch hour whereas in the U.K. you would be hard pressed to find such generosity. I could continue in a lengthy ramble about how this also cuts into the time with children or how such our working life seems to detest the concept of having a family but I still restrict myself to the cooking for now. Yes we have to work, but why should our lives outside suffer? People who eat well tend to be healthier, more active, live longer and feel better about their lives, which logically would make them better workers, but as it stands, it seems that work must be everything and our lives beyond those office walls must suffer to suit them.

TV Trouble

An article I came across today detailed how Stephen Fry feels somewhat disillusioned with the current state of British television, and I have to agree with him! British television these days seem to be saturated with Joe Public programmes, where everyone and anyone can come along, make an arse of themselves or become a huge success, for the few minutes in between them wining and the next programme coming along.

There is the odd programme that I will follow avidly, Doctor who and Merlin strangely being two of them and the two Fry praised whilst claiming they were aimed solely at children, but beyond them there seems to be a significant lack of innovation or inspiration, with successful formats being recycled and repackaged for the nation to lap up again.

There is one thing worse than this dusting off of TV garbage and passing it off as a fresh show, and that is that we let it happen. Too many people seem content to accept and revel in these substandard shows time after time and until we as a nation decide to get up and stop feeding the problem, I fear I will still be complaining about this situation in 5 years time, as Britain's Got Talent tries to find contestants who haven't already appeared on a talent show.

You sweat, I laugh.

The summer is finally setting in, and it is at this time of year that people notice that I do not perspire normally, rather I feed off the rays of this yellow sun like some lizard or Kryptonian.

I do sweat, just not at the same pitiful temperatures as the rest of your humans. The summer warmth has reminded me though that we spend a mere 4 or 5 months in this rare weather, the rest of the time we are treated to the bitter British cold, depressing grey skies and excessive electric and heating bills are we stave off the frosty lows.

Under normal circumstances, I would blame the government for this outrageously lopsided approach to the weather, along with the poor air quality, their obsession with turning any patch of grass into more houses and their endless promises to improve health care yet we still have to wait six months to go into hospital for a problems we have today.

This time though I shall blame it on Murphy and his enduring law; the law that states that "what can go wrong, will go wrong", and it seems to be very concentrated in this country.

Now you may think that I am being unnecessarily unfair towards these United Kingdoms, but during my several hundreds years of watch people come and go and times change, I always feel that this nation is, as Top Gear would say, "ambitious but rubbish".