Don't stop the carnival

It has been a week of strangely named days. First off there was Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, or Mardi Gras, or Carnival, or (if you happen to be of an Icelandic persuasion) Bursting Day.

Why Bursting Day? Possibly because, it is alleged, this is the day when Icelanders stuff themselves with salt beef and peas. Mum's gone to Iceland, and she'll not be buying mini-pizzas.

In tropical climes they dress up in 20ft ostrich- feather plumes and cavort half-naked in the streets. Quite often James Bond runs around shooting people, which adds to the fun.

In Finland, apparently, they drill a hole in a hambone and make a whistling noise by whirling it around their heads.

At Chronicle Towers the sub-editors vie with each other to bring in the tastiest cakes.

And elsewhere in normally strait-laced England, we beat together eggs, flour, milk and water, fry them in a pan and throw the results at the ceiling. Who says we don't know how to have fun?

Hard on the heels of Shrove Tuesday (so called because it's when you're supposed to get shriven, fact fans) comes Ash Wednesday, which marks the end of the carnival (whatever the Alan Price Set may try to do about it) and involves the serious practice of feeling very sorry for yourself indeed.

Especially if a pancake falls off the ceiling and lands on your head when you come down for breakfast, and even more so if you indulged in the Polish practice of consuming pickled herring and lots of vodka the night before.

Even Monday, otherwise ordinary Monday, was the feast day of Saint Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. But the only truly interesting thing about Polycarp is his name, and the celebrations passed unremarked in most households.

But now we're into Lent, and it's time to think about what to give up.

Some people choose to give up chocolate biscuits, some choose to do without beer.

But what better luxury to eschew, if you want to purge yourself of evil and prepare yourself spiritually and bodily for a better life to come, than Chris Tarrant's new game show: The Colour Of Money?

For anyone who had better things to do last Saturday night (how lucky you were), here's how it works.

Chris wants to give away some of his money – around £64,000 to each of two contestants. Not a totally life-changing sum, but enough to tide you over when times are tight.

Chris has divided his money in unequal amounts between several machines. Each machine has a different colour, from ordinary shades like red and blue to more exotic tones of pumpkin and khaki.

To win the wonga, each contestant has to choose a machine in turn, give a sentimental but ultimately unconvincing explanation of why they picked that particular colour, and then wait for as long as they dare while the machine spews out £1,000 every second.

Their task – which is down to luck and nerve and not a jot of skill – is to stop each machine before it runs out of dosh, and gradually build up their winnings. But if a machine runs out before they stop it, they don't get any of its money, and their target becomes all the more difficult to reach. And if they don't reach the target in 10 tries, they get nothing.

One contestant was a mum whose reservist husband had been recalled to Afghanistan. The other was a Brummie chancer who wanted to treat his girlfriend to the wedding of a lifetime. Guess who won?

The Colour Of Money is billed as the most stressful game show on TV, but it's hard to tell who suffers the most stress – the contestants or you.

Your fight-or-flight instinct tears you between smacking Chris Tarrant on the conk and turning off the telly and having a bath. But your horrified fascination with the sheer cupidity of the contestants keeps you glued, right to the very end.

Even the two young Dixons, who will normally watch anything, have made it their Lenten vow not to watch The Colour Of Money again.

Which leaves them free to schnarf up all the chocolate biscuits, while Dad will drink more beer. Result!

Smoking Prince

Just seen Prince Charles blow his green credentials at the ceremony to unveil the memorial to the Queen Mum in The Mall.

He and Camilla climbed out of an ancient limo which appeared to be belching exhaust fumes from every orifice. Of course it may have been condensation but I don't think so...

Meanwhile the Queen herself appeared wearing an enormous fluffy peach hat that looked heavier than some of her many crowns. Still remarkably chipper, though.

Hundreds and thousands

Have you ever wandered into a bookshop and considered, instead of a novel or a biography or a cookbook or a computer manual, buying one of those gigantic tomes entitled One Thousand Somethings You Must Do Before You Die?
Like 1,000 Books you must Read; 1,000 Films you must Watch; 1,000 Albums you must Hear (as long as they haven’t been smeared with strawberry jam); 1,000 Recipes you must Try but then Find You’re Missing One Vital Ingredient When All The Shops are Shut; 1,000 Paintings you must Nod Wisely at and Pretend You Understand Modern Art; 1,000 Buildings you must Dash Round While the Kids Complain that this is So Boring and When are we Going to the Beach?
Do. Not. Buy. A. Single. One.
For they will take over your life.
Take the first of the breed: One Thousand Books... Now let’s do the math. Assume a reading speed of a book a fortnight, with War and Peace and Thomas the Tank Engine averaging each other out. With 52 weeks in a year, that makes around 25 books a year (you get time off for birthdays and Christmas) or 100 books in four years.
And after this Charles Atlas course in world literature you’ll reach The End of that very last book after 40 years of solid reading.
Unless it’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, in which case you’ll never get past the beginning.
Assuming you started your trek at the age of 10, you’ll now be an incredibly well-educated 50-year-old. And assuming you live on to a good age (and let’s face it, you’re not going to have much time for life-shortening debauchery with all that reading to get through) you’ve got another 30 years left to get polish off the Albums, Recipes, Paintings and Buildings.
It’s not going to happen, is it?
Maybe albums would be a more manageable challenge. They take less time to listen to than books do to read, and thanks to the power of iTunes you can download all 1,000 of them for the trivial sum of £7,990.
Come to think of it, you might not even have to spend that much. In our house we already have pretty much every single album in the book. Or we do up to around 1980.
Then there’s a gap of about 15 years which is the main cause of your humble columnist’s embarrassed silences during the music round at the pub quiz, when he sits staring into his pint and hoping that the landlord is old enough to remember Steely Dan.
And from 1995 up to the present day, our musical tastes are represented for the most part by the collected works of Now That’s What I Call... supplemented with a couple of ambient trance CDs which were freebies from work and whose perpetrators are probably now gainfully employed as Pontins Bluecoats. (No shame in that: these days you’ve got to follow the work.)
Let’s face it, though, there hasn’t been much good music since 1980 in any case. Thrash metal, death metal, Britpop, grunge – they all sound more or less the same when you’ve reached 536 in the top 1,000.
As for all those recipes, well everyone in our house prefers Dad’s toad in the hole to pigs’ trotters en feuilleté robed in their own aspic and strewn with a whortleberry and lilac jus. Just.
And as for the iconic cultural artefacts, given the present strength of every other currency in the entire world against the pound, nobody is going to be travelling further than Somerset this year. And the last time we looked there wasn’t a Taj Mahal in Minehead, unless it was an Indian restaurant.
No, these thousand-item lists are no more than a great big con.
They shame you into buying them by giving you an uneasy sense of intellectual, cultural or culinary inferiority.
And it’s only after you’ve shelled out that it dawns on you what you’ve actually spent good money on: an advert for back-catalogue albums, for preposterously complex dinner party failures, for exotic destinations way outside your budget, or – the most cunning con of all – for even more books.
This is the bloggy version of my Bath Chronicle Column.

Tesco takeover

Also pottering round the shops this morning, I discovered that the Somerfield store in Weston High Street is to be taken over by Tesco. Hang on in there, friendly local shops!

Naked lunch

Pottering round the shops as you do of a Saturday morning I noticed the teaser on the front page of the Daily Mail advertising a free DVD of the "costume drama" Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I always thought the main reason for watching films like that was because of the lack of costumes. Have the Daily Mail developed a sense of humour?

Survival of the fritterest

It has been a week plagued with spam.

Not so much the electronic sort, promising easy-to-earn academic qualifications, unfeasibly large amounts of money, dubious medical enhancements or instant closure of your online banking facilities unless you immediately go to a Brazilian website that looks just like the Abbey National (even if you don’t bank with them) and fill in a form giving them your personal details, with ID number and passphrase thrown in for good measure.

Not the enticing offers of undying love from Natalia, who has “seen your profile on the internet” and has decided on a whim that she wants to spend the rest of her life with you. Sorry, Natalia, you’re much too late.

Not even the transparent chain letters that purport to be warning you of some devious – and completely fictional – credit card scam that has already been perpetrated on hundreds of people around the country and will soon be practised on you and your friends, if you don’t pass this message on.

No, electronic spam has become such a part of life that you hardly notice it any more. But this week has seen the comeback of the original Spam.

Spam with a capital “S”. Spam pink and jelly-swathed. Spam of school trip sandwiches, Spam savoury and toothsome, Spam chock-a-block with pork shoulder, ham, sugar, water, salt and sodium nitrite. Spam in a dark blue tin with a key that you turn to release the meaty goodness. Spam made in Denmark by a company called Tulip under licence from Hormel (who would prefer us to call it SPAM® Luncheon Meat but that would be too much like shouting).

It all started when we were watching the box one night last week. The name of the programme is forgotten and really quite immaterial: it was the adverts that grabbed us. Because there it was, large as life and twice as natural (or three times as natural if you’re comparing it with that sanitised bulldog who sells car insurance): an advert for ready-made Spam fritters.

We gazed into each other’s eyes and a frisson of reminiscence sparked across the room. “Do you remember...” we said as one.

Because in the early days of our courting, your humble columnist nearly blew it by inviting the young lady who was later to become Mrs D back to his seedy basement flat and cooking up a Spam fritter supper.

It did not go down well.

Those parts of the batter which weren’t glutinous were badly burned. The meaty content lost its appetising pink sheen and turned grey and viscid.

The accompanying frozen peas could, if memory serves, have doubled as ammunition and did nothing to cut through the nasty aftertaste of greasy cooking fat.

(Young bachelors, here’s a tip: if the way to your true love’s heart is through her stomach, then a nice piece of halibut works a whole lot better than Hormel’s finest.)

Anyway, one thing led to another, Miss W became Mrs D and took serious control of the cooking, and some years later there we were watching telly and wallowing in an unseemly bout of nostalgia.

A couple of days later Mrs D – who generally only buys pork products if they have a Union Flag on the packet along with a picture of their source material romping merrily in a sunlit meadow – announced brightly that it would be a cheap food shop this week.

And indeed it was. For what should appear in the kitchen cupboard on Monday but a tin of the self-same meaty kitchen staple that so nearly rent us asunder all those years ago?

We’re in good company. On the Japanese island of Okinawa, Spam is incorporated into stir-fries. In South Korea they sell it in gift packs and use it to make “Army Base Stew”. In America’s 50th state, childhood home of Barack Obama (who says this column doesn’t keep up with current affairs?) they enjoy it as “Hawaiian steak”.

The past has come back to bite us: or perhaps we are about to take a bite out of our past.

Because for one Bath family, Spam is back on the menu, and you can smell the frying all the way down the street.

Green and blue and red all over

Here’s a little puzzle. (No prizes for the winners: just think of this as a pure mental challenge in which getting it right is the only reward you can expect. A bit like life, in many ways.)

What is blue, red or silver when it’s with glass and red, green or blue when it’s with plastic?

Well, you can pour it on your breakfast cereal, you can pour it into your coffee, and if you’re not looking what you’re doing you can even pour it over the cat. The answer, fact fans, is milk.

And those colours? They’re the bottle tops. Depending on whether you get your milk from your friendly local delivery operative or from the shop, it’ll come in traditional glass bottles or the squidgy plastic equivalent.

And if you get the former, skimmed milk has a blue top, semi-skimmed a red top and full cream a silver top.

But if you buy your milk in a plastic container, the lids are red for skimmed, green for semi-skimmed and blue for full cream.

If you want to live dangerously, there’s also gold top, that nectar of the gods which comes with its own European cholesterol warning and the childhood ingestion of which is largely to blame for your correspondent’s current stoutness. But we’re not worried about that at the moment. Much.

Now, it’s all very well if you only buy one sort of milk. But if you’re the sort of family that runs out of bottled on a Sunday afternoon and has to make a run for the shops, then come Monday breakfast you are in for chaos and confusion.

Because (just in case you weren’t paying attention earlier) glass skimmed is blue, plastic semi-skimmed is also blue, and glass semi-skimmed is red.

(Look, you were promised a mental challenge, and you’re getting one. Just hang on in there and there may be some kind of explanation later. Just remember that nobody said there would be a point to this.)

Right. Imagine for a moment that you’re on the sort of health kick which involves you drinking only skimmed while the youngsters get the semi-skimmed variety, and your mind is in its usual state at seven o’clock on a dark and murky Monday morning.

Blue? Red? Red? Blue? Glass? Plastic? Plastic? Glass? Arrgh.

It’s no wonder you’re grumpy by the time you get to work and decide to enjoy rich, creamy, non-healthy semi-skimmed in your warming morning beverage. And your grumpiness is not improved when you find the fridge at Chronicle Towers packed with plastic milk cartons topped with a bewildering range of red lids (skimmed) and green lids (semi-skimmed), plus the occasional blue one for those playing Extreme Artery Challenge.

There is a sort of serious point to this. And it’s not about the fact that the aforementioned fridge has recently been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Because all this labelling is pretty confusing even for those of us who aren’t colour-blind, and must be even more so for those who are.

Red-green colour-blindness is the most common form, blue-green much rarer. And what colours do those bottle tops come in? Red, green and blue.

Yes, of course you can read the label or the printing on the foil top – or at least you can if your hand is steady enough to hold the bottle still at the ungodly hour when you rashly promised to get up and make Mrs D’s tea.

But beware when you next open the milk: it could affect your blood pressure in more ways than one.