Somethin's Cooking In The Kitchen

Here’s an idea for a TV show. We get Bruce Forsyth to solve world poverty, Lady Gaga to work in Iran with NATO’s nuclear disarmament inspectors, and then Nicholas Cage and Kerry Katona can lend their expertise to the next World Economic Forum at Davos to tidy up Third World debt. Good idea, eh?

Well, no, of course not. It’s a ridiculous idea, stupid and childish. Put it forward as a TV programme format and you would be, rightly, laughed out of the commissioner’s office and forced to watch boxed sets of Benidorm as punishment.

Yet this week we have the pleasure of Channel Four’s Jamie Oliver setting up a school to see if unteachable kids can be controlled, interested in education, and ultimately taught to love learning. So, forget about all the years of academic research and millions of pounds of analysis by the Department of Education, social scientists and university doctors struggling with their theses on education failure.

All we ultimately needed for the answer was a television cook.

Now Jamie seems a lovely bloke and his autograph proudly graces my kids’ playroom wall but, how can I put it? I repeat - he’s a flippin’ cook for goodness sake. A chef. He can surely tell you how to drizzle vinaigrette artistically on your Cos lettuce, make fluffy cous cous or cook pasta al dente, but run a school? What’s he qualified to do? Bin the frogs from Biology and have the students dissect wild guinea fowl instead? Returf the five a side pitches in lemongrass? Have the woodwork class make sculptures from polenta?

Perhaps he’d be happy if I ask our local sixth form college headmaster to work for a few weeks as chef of his restaurant in Kingston. It’s the same principle. No doubt we’ll get a book – Jamie’s Ten Minute School Makeover – and a themed restaurant out of it where noisy diners are given lines.

Nice fella but hopelessly out of his depth and remit. Mind you, I wish I had his agent.
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My older daughter watched the Spy Kids movie and was fascinated by the idea of retinal scanners for security. These devices check your unique eye print to see if you are who you say you are. Now she’s decided she wants one of these for access to her bedroom, but she hasn’t quite heard the name properly. She asked me if she could get a “rectal scanner” for her birthday.

Bottom line is I’ve said no.

Meantime my other daughter has started freaking out over recycling. She was all in favour until she picked up the new pack of toilet tissue from the supermarket and saw the recycled logo on the wrapper. “Does this mean the toilet paper’s been used before?” she asked with a horrified look.

Kids constantly make you laugh and then remember how innocent those years, long ago, really were. When I was a kid someone told me that a certain type of garden pebble had coins inside and I used to waste days trying to wear them away by rubbing them on the garden wall. I also believed I’d become a millionaire if I left home at six or seven but was back in my bedroom after five minutes because I didn’t know how where the bus stop was.

Life was simpler in those days as there were no retinal scanners or recycling ideas around then. But I guess nothing really changes. Perhaps technology is just today’s old stones with sixpences hidden inside.

We Are The World

I’ve been away from home this week working in Madrid and clocking up some more air miles to add to the thousands I already have tucked away in a drawer somewhere in cyber space. The light at the end of my tunnel may have been switched off lately to save money but I have amassed enough free travel to take several choirs and all of Madonna’s ex husbands on a First Class return trip to a nice sandy beach somewhere on Mars. Great location but not much atmosphere.

But two things are stopping me. The first is that the airlines, as usual, go out of their way to make it impossible for anyone to actually spend free air points. I’m told the flights I qualify for leave at three o’clock in the morning and fly over Iraq. If I then ask the nice lady at British Airways to get me one anyway, she’ll say that they’re reserved for Sagittarians only and, even if I lie, the computer says the seats are available only in leap years or on days when a canonised saint with Blood Group A is caught doing coke at one of Hugh Heffner's parties.

The second, and more important reason that I don’t use the free travel, is that I’m starting to feel guilty about my carbon footprint. Now I don’t usually do guilt so please believe me when I say that this is a momentous event. I think the last time I felt guilty was many years ago when I strung together several rarely heard profanities and screamed them at my brother after he broke wind in a silent, yet Chemical Ali type, manner. He wasn’t impressed with me drawing attention to him and, if I’m honest, neither were the nuns at that particular school assembly.

But now the relentless nagging of the conservationists, and the lobbying of the recycling and globe hugging brigade, has at last got to me so I’ve decided the air travel will have to slow down. My carbon footprint is currently the size of a Doc Martin boot and, if it’s true what they say about men’s feet, any carbon ladies I meet will soon be swooning.

I have cut down my use of the car and I now try walking more but I’m having problems with the rest of this cherish the planet stuff. In Argos yesterday, on picking up an MP3 player I’d just bought, I was offered a plastic bag. Aware that everyone now believes my bag would lead to future babies being born with three big toes growing out of their two heads, I declined. So, of course, I carried the box I’d just bought around for three hours along with various other bits and pieces and ended up dropping them all over the street.

I know that you’re probably thinking that I should get one of these Hessian bags for life and bring it with me when I go shopping, but my new enthusiasm for the environment has its limits. I am not going to walk around looking like a social worker shopping for a nice tie dyed T shirt to wear at his wedding.

I got so fed up picking my stuff off pavements that I went for a hot chocolate in Costa. Their environmental arithmetic in counting the pennies donated from triple shot espressos meant my paper cup had a green plastic lid on it with a frog embossed in the middle and they handed me a leaflet boasting how the company is now sourcing coffee from sustainable plantations run by sperm whales. I’m sure the hundreds of trees that were cut down to make those brochures will be pleased that their sacrifice was not in vain.

And now, this week, I get back from my travels to find I have to get to grips with our council’s new waste disposal plans which mean we have a wheelie bin for rubbish, a green bin for food waste, a box for papers, a container for tin cans, one for bottles, a bag for cardboard and a further bin for my patience. I opened a wrapped sweet yesterday and thought it tasted like landfill so decided to put it in the bin. But which one? The toffee had to go in the food disposal receptacle, the cellophane in a plastic and packaging box, and then the silver wrapping in another box for tins cans and aluminium. By the time I’d walked around looking for all the receptacles, I’d worn a groove in our ethically sourced teak and ivory studded floorboards.

And the smell? Try keeping a box of old food tin cans lying around your house for a week beside a box of food waste and you’ll soon see why I’m reminded again of my brother at school assembly. Air freshener is now my new best friend as I blast millions of CFCs in to the environment to cover up the stink of saving the world. We’re supposed to be doing this so that we can stop and smell the roses that would otherwise die out, but their scent will be lost forever behind the smell of council recycling.

So I have an idea. I am suggesting that from now on we all do our grocery shopping at the supermarket as usual and then meet in the car park and eat it. We can put the leftovers and wrappings in their bins and let them sort it out while a whole new spirit of neighbourliness and friendship will rise in the car parks which will be overrun with families cooking on primus stoves and actually talking to each other. We can even organise dinner parties at the weekends with Vera Lynne singing and the kids being amused by riding the supermarket’s escalators.

I’m sure you probably think I’m Neanderthal and hopeless for not grasping this whole planet saving thing, but I promise I’ll do my best to hold my nose and get on with it.

But I can’t help wishing I could just get on a plane and fly away from it all.