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".

Preventing Piracy Impossible

Today Francis Keeling at Universal Music stated that the music industry will probably never be rid of piracy completely. When considering this against the long, beautiful history of music, the image of a man growing old springs to mind.

Like the music industry, life started off perfectly, no problems, nothing playing on your mind, a care free existence you might say. But as time went by, the worry lines traced their way across your brow and now every time you look in the mirror you are haunted by the every expanding forest of nasal hair.

Like it or not, these hairs are the piracy we will never get rid of. You can snip away at the edges, push everything backwards or rip it out at the root but no matter measures you take it will always come back.

In this case, technology has been its own downfall. Gone are the days of vinyl records where the innocence of music took its last stand. From the advent of the tape recorder things changed forever. These days you don't have to sit there waiting for the tape to finish playing as the other tape in the dual deck recorded every precious piece of magnetic information, today you download, copy and paste or select and burn.

True the industry, in the future, may introduce copying protected hardware or digital rights will prevent you from modifying or transferring files, but when it comes down to the bare basics, anyone with a speaker output, a microphone input and a bit of audio cable can sit in their room making illegal duplicates to pass on to the Blackbeards of sound.

So no, we will probably never be rid of piracy, with all of its legal struggles and artist's loosing money, but is that the price the industry now has to pay for the advancement in technology it has so encouraged and utilized over the years?

Traffic light terror.

Near my house there are a set of pelican crossings, traffic lights with red, green and amber lights and a jolly old green man to let pedestrians cross when the fancy takes them. The purpose of my rant today is not that these lights are near my house, it's more how they seem to hate the pedestrian and worship the car.

Some common sense notions to get things rolling. First off, some crossing have lights that will change to red when a pedestrian presses the green man provided a certain amount of time has passed; other will let people cross after a certain period of time. The latter is what I am faced with nearby. Secondly, the green man is meant to be up with the traffic lights red for a certain period of time to allow people to cross and ensure that the road is clear for the traffic flow to continue. Right, now these facts have been established I can get on with moaning.

Too many time I have been stood at those lights waiting to cross. The road they find themselves placed on is very busy one, connecting a supermarket to the main roads that run through the town. Yet I never expected to find myself wasting 5 - 10 minutes of my life every other day feeling like a chicken in a bad joke. At time I have found myself there long enough to notice that each of the three junctions has been from green to red twice before it lets me have my walking way. On a normal straight road this would mean you would have to wait 6 cycles before being allowed to pass. The car certainly seems to be the favourite of these lights then, with the pedestrian being considered a nuisance that only has to be dealt with now and then.

The second problem I have with these lights is how long the green man stays up for. I am by no means a slow walker, I have given my girlfriend chest pains as she tries to keep up with me, so the other day I timed how long it took for me to cross at one of the sets of lights. Six seconds. Now that may sound like an ok time to get from one pavement to the other but consider this; when I got to the other side of the road the green man had gone and the traffic lights had been green for quite a few seconds. I find myself left at the mercy of the patient drivers who have to wait for me to disembark their turf before pulling off.

There are quite a few elderly people near where I live, so I managed to take the opportunity one afternoon to watch one woman trying to make it across the same section of road. If I am unable to do it in six seconds, I had to wonder what hope she had. Thirty seconds she took, and yes you may think of me as a little evil for watching her rather than helping her across the road like a good boy scout but I have a point to prove! In the time it took her to make her journey, the green man was gone before she was a quarter of the way across, and the traffic lights were screaming go by the time she was half way.

It seems to me then that this system is both biased and dangerous. Why the people who installed these lights favour the car so much is beyond me, it may be some silly method of trying to cut CO2 emissions by having them get to places sooner, it may be to get them into the shops quicker to feed the vampire of a council we have around these parts, or it may be an attempt to keep the people on one side from breeding with the people on the other. Whatever the cause, I may one day be writing to you from a hospital bed with the impression of a radiator grille across my chest and a wing mirror up my bum.

Picking a Political Party Pickle

So the debates wage on, the leaders verbally abuse each other in their own special high-brow manner, and the nation becomes divided over where their loyalties lie.

As the day draws near where we, the people, will have our chance to select who we will be grumpy with for the next few years, I find myself becoming firmer in my decision as to who to vote for. Normally I wouldn't divulge such information until after the election, or if I knew I was in a room of complete political security and tolerance, if there is such a thing, but this time round I feel I shall make an exception.

It was somewhere around 1922 that we last had a Liberal Prime Minister, don't quote me on that but I know it was somewhere around that period. Since then, it has been an eternal tennis match with the power being hit back and forth between Labour and Conservative. With two parties holding such dominance for such a length of time, you can't help but notice an almost undeserved sense of security between them; the knowledge that if their party doesn't get in, the other will and that the Lib. Dems. are never really in the running.

For me, this certainty gives them a backing which has allowed the true drive and passion to serve the nation to wither and rot. Given that they 'know' it's between one party or the other, politics seems to have sunk into a popularity contest where the winner is the one who is hated the least, not the one with the better agenda or ideas for the future. I wouldn't be surprised if Simon Cowell managed to turn it into something new for Saturday night TV.

Over the last few weeks, the Lib. Dems. have come across as a kid in a playground with a great idea for a game, but going unheard because they are shorter than everyone else; and if you haven't guessed yet, I'm going to be voting for Nick Clegg.

Not just because I find myself attracted to some of his policies, but also because it would be the kick up the arse the other two parties need to get them thinking about why Labour and Tory have become words said through gritted teeth.

So far I have lived through four Prime Ministers, Thatcher to Brown, and John Major is the only one I liked, but I think that was more for his looks. I hope the next five years will change that.

Brown Going Down?

That time has come again, and some would say it's been too long in the waiting. Gordon Brown announced at the start of this week that a general election will be held on May 6th 2010 sparking the proclamation of pledges, plans and prosperity by the three main parties scrambling to take the throne for the next few years.

The Labour Party has come under a great deal of fire during their time in power, with the Iraq war continuing to claw at their backs, Tony Blair stepping down after poor election results and with the more recent expense scandal, you have to wonder, is Brown going gentle into that good night?

Honestly, after listening to what people near me have to say about the government, local councils and politicians, I get the distinct impression that whoever takes the reigns of prime minister next will be drowned by the voices of discontent. During the height of any political battle, the news will be inundated with people criticizing a party's plans or performance, and any positives only seem to be presented as a defense case.

One thing is guaranteed, whoever is voted in will have some high expectations to meet and I feel no matter how hard they try, it seems certain they will be struggling to keep up their popularity next time the voting season is upon us.