HORSEMEAT

The horsemeat-in-burgers scandal (UK news reports 17 January) reminded me of the time I was unwittingly served horse steaks by an Anglophobic medical student in France - she had heard all the frog and snail jokes wafting over the English Channel. She shared an apartment with my French 'sister' and insisted on cooking one evening. The first course was good - tuna and sweetcorn vinaigrette, which I had never tasted before, although the tuna and sweetcorn combo has since become a nasty staple in British sandwich fillings found on supermarket shelves. The second course was fillets of steak, still bleeding. I took a couple of bites, then Brigitte stared at me in triumph: 'Tu aimes les cotes de cheval?' I didn't rise to it, of course. I just carried on eating, and the meat tasted pretty much like beef. I haven't eaten it since though for the same reason I won't eat veal (which is delicious) or lamb: I rode ponies and horses when I was a child and don't like the idea of eating one. They were my friends, and I don't eat my friends... I see the spring lambs in the fields and weep over what is to come to them. This is just sentimental claptrap of course because I eat cows, pigs and chickens, which have a far worse life in industrialised sheds than many horses and lambs, gambolling in the fields and salt-marshes.

What struck me about the reports was the word 'contaminated' because I suspect the horse DNA found in the burgers is far less 'contaminating' than the revolting sludge recovered from meat carcasses that constitutes the ingredients for most supermarket pies, sausages and burgers. Down the street where I lived in Paris was a 'boucher chevaline' which did a good trade with the people in the quatrier..  I walked past the horse's head on the sign every day on my way to the market but bought my 'viande hache' (steak mince) from the general butcher further down. I would never buy supermarket mince - not even Marks & Spencers which purports to be free range or organic. The safest bet is to make home-made burgers with beef from the local butcher, raised and slaughtered locally and ground in the mincer in the butcher's shop. That is the way it used to be in the time of rationing during the Second World War when the British diet was purported to have been then healthiest it has ever been. I remember the mincer and sausage machine at the local butcher near where I grew up, and the grocer slicing huge joints of boiled ham and farm-made cheese. Today, we eat plastic-wrapped  shit. There is no other word for it. There are so many chemical contaminants  and salt and sugar additives in British food, it is hardly surprising that we are the fattest nation in Europe, although the continentals, feeding increasingly the American way, are catching up.

Bottom line: I'd rather eat a bleeding 'cote de cheval' than a Tesco burger or pie.

photo: Richard Faisey

BOOK LAUNCH - 'GRAVE TRUTHS'

My relaunched title, 'Grave Truths', is now available on Amazon Kindle. Click the link for a sample:


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grave-Truths-ebook/dp/B00ASLDT0O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1356602622&sr=1-1

CHRISTMAS CHEER

This  came in today from Richard Faisey

''Two weeks ago I took some pictures of a yearly gift happening. This local group collect shoe boxes and other bags filled with goods and other useful items to send abroad for Christmas....''

And I thought of Tiny Tim in 'A Christmas Carol':    GOD BLESS US, EVERYONE

photos by Richard Faisey

REMAINS OF THE DEAD....

My new e-book, 'Remains of the Dead' was published yesterday by Endeavour Press. Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remains-of-the-Dead-ebook/dp/B00AHVFYR6/ref=dp_return_1?ie=UTF8&n=341677031&s=digital-text

Readers of my blogs may know that I write psychological thrillers involving the dead  (victims of murder, victims of social neglect, sudden heart attacks, dramatic suicides). They are commercial but serious in tone - at least that was my intention when I wrote them. I'm now flattered to see my new publishers  comparing me with the the likes of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs.

All my novels are set in London, where I lived and worked for nearly twenty years and which continues to inspire me every time I go up there, which is often, because  I always find something new to discover about life in the metropolis. London is the focus of my inspiration and Cornwall is my writing base. I would find it difficult to write stories about Cornwall because it has never presented me with any dramatic tensions - apart from hospital treatments.

That said, I had a street encounter here on the Celtic fringe  as I was walking home from Truro city centre the other day.  Heading towards me as I struggled with my carrier bags
were two people whom I can only describe as characters from the Jeremy Kyle Show (she sporting  Ugg boots and leggings, scraped back pony tail,  large hooped ear-rings and lighting a fag; he in cheap trainers and  hoodie pulled up over his head). As I passed them, feeling benign as I always do after a sortie in the fresh air, the male character sort of hooted in my face and shouted something, the only discernible word being 'fucking'. I carried on walking but after a few steps turned round  to find him gazing back at me. 'Chav', I said, quietly but clearly and walked on, wondering if he'd chase me and wrestle me to the ground. Then I wondered, as I always do with street encounters, what the story was behind the pair.

They weren't working, obviously, or going to work, but she could afford £6 for a packet of cigarettes (I am so glad I  quit smoking eighteen years ago because I couldn't afford £45 a week for twenty cigs a day). They were coming from the direction of Trelander,  a large concrete council estate on the valley slopes, built in the sixties to house incoming workers in the power industry - or so I was told by an old Truro native. This housing provision could be compared with the early Victorian stuccoed terraces in Primrose Hill, one of which I used to inhabit in a tiny rented flatlet. These bijou London homes were built for railway workers on the new Euston mainline. The difference is that Primrose Hill has long since been gentrified and celebrity-fied, while Trelander has deteriorated into a no-go enclave for no-hopers.

But why do under-educated no-hopers whose only ambition in life is to appear on the Jeremy Kyle Show to kill the endless hours of boredom they must encounter have to be obnoxious? Big Issue sellers, of which there are several in Truro in this era of homelessness,  are resourceful and polite and - if I'm not putting too romantic a spin on it - purposeful. People without purpose other than to 'drink and eat and screw' as Jarvis Cocker put it in his song 'Common People' (memorably spoofed on YouTube with Cameron and Co lookalikes), are just menaces.  The French word, menacer,  means to threaten and this obnoxious behaviour threatens us all. No amount of cuts and checks and Big Society rhetoric is going to fix it. Love-bombing with benefits and other hand-outs hasn't worked for social pariahs  like this pair. I hate to find myself  saying so,  but a spell of national service - military or civil l(a German boyfriend I had did his civil/national service in a mortuary, inspiring some of my material for 'Remains of the Dead'... ) might be a  base-line solution. My granddad, an indentured joiner who served his apprenticeship just after World War I, would have called the pair 'ignorant', which is exactly what they are, although, unlike my granddad, they were offered a free education until they were sixteen followed by a swift transition to an idle and purposeless life as as a menace. What is to be done? as the Bolsheviks would say.

POVERTY MAKES THE RICH RICH

I just watched an episode from the current BBC/Open University series, 'Why Poverty'. The programme focuses on two Park Lanes: one in Manhattan, the other in the South Bronx. It's stuff that revolutions are made on.

Why are the rich so mean? Why do the poor allow them to be so mean? What has happened to the universal human spirit that it can be beaten down so crudely and so cruelly by a few mean bastards?  How can this creeping spirit of meanness and greed permeate the rafters of the world?

Some things to check out:

1. 'Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy' by Douglas Smith (Macmillan)

2.   The New Testament (Jesus pulls no punches when it comes to the rich...)

3. Why Poverty?  (BBC, YouTube, Open University) 

You'd have to Google these links. I tried uploading the YouTube (Why Poverty?) video but there was a ghost in the machine...

mushroom (Anne Morgellyn )

'They shall by morning inherit the earth. Their foot's in the door' (Sylvia Plath)

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

I want to open this post with a salutation to Adam, who found my cellphone on the train to Paddington last Thursday and went to endless trouble arranging to get it back to me before I caught the train home yesterday evening.  Being the absent-minded creature I am, I'd assumed I had left it at home when I looked for it to call my daughter to say I'd arrived at the Women's Club where we stay in South Audley Street and would see her at St Paul's the following morning. I was just about to call her on the premium-rated phone in my room when the receptionist put her through to me. Cara was calling to say  that the phone was safe and sound in the care of a man who lived in Reading but worked at Paddington Station. He had opened  her messages to me and called her back on his phone to tell her he had mine. Then he asked her to ask me to call him to arrange a time when I could pick it up at Paddingdon. My booked train left just after his shift finished on Monday, but I said I'd hang on for him at the First Great Western Information desk until it was time to board. At ten to three, I saw a young Asian* man walking briskly towards me, dressed in on one of those green fluorescent jackets that station workers wear. He might have been a cleaner or a dispatcher. I thought, dispatcher - or some other frontline job on the station concourse.
   'Are you meeting Adam?' he asked me.
   'Yes - are you Adam?'
   'I'm Adam, yes, and here's your phone.'
I tried to give him a ten pound note for his trouble, but he wouldn't take it. 'It has been my pleasure,' he said, then, almost confidentially: 'The Penzance train leaves from Platform 8.' Since this information was not yet up on the departures board, I got to my seat before the great surge that is the lot of travellers on our overcrowded trains that can't catch up with the twenty-first century.

So, Adam, I salute you. You are kind and honest and generous with your time. It was my pleasure to meet you. I hope I meet more of your kind as I get older and more vulnerable, and I especially hope that my daughter meets more of your kind as she negotiates adult life.

*since I posted this, Adam has texted me to point out that he's Algerian, not Asian.
*******************************************************************************

I was in London to attend the annual parade through the City of London by the sixth form and band of my daughter's school, Christ's Hospital www.christs-hospital.org.uk  on 21 September - St Matthew's Day. Usually this is held at St Matthew's Church in Holborn, followed by a long march to The Guildhall and Mansion House, to which parents are not invited. But because this year commemorates the 460th anniversary of Christ's Hospital's foundation, the service was in St Paul's Cathedral with the whole school - 800 pupils, together with their teachers, seated in the transept. Sixth form parents - like me -could apply for tickets to sit in the aisle and watch the Lord Mayor's procession walk up to the Choir: clergy, Guildsmen, sergeant-at-arms and sword-bearer, stiff as a rod in his  gilt-frogged uniform, a plume of white ostrich feathers in his military hat.
The Dean of St Paul's, the Very Reverend David Ison, who gave the Welcome and Bidding, had this to say about Christ's Hospital: 'We give thanks for the vision and energy of the school's founder, King Edward VI, for those who came together in times of upheaval and change to provide for the poor and destitute of the day. We thank God for its rich academic history and its relationship with the City of London. We pray that it may continue to nurture and enrich the lives of all its pupils, that they may be a force for good in the world. We commend to God the future of Christ's Hospital, praying that it may remain faithful to the vision of its founder in providing education and support for disadvantaged children.'

In his sermon  the Dean went on to speak about Matthew, the tax collector at the receipt of custom -  a man doing a prestigious job 'in a sort of City of his day.' He gave it all up to follow Jesus; and the gospel of charity and peace, preached by St Matthew and the other Apostles, was taken up a thousand years or so later by the wealthy London Guilds and Companies and continued throughout the centuries which followed in a long tradition of giving to the poor. This charitable, but often overlooked, element in The City's history can be sampled at The Guildhall Galley near the Mansion House and Guildhall, home of the City of London Corporation.

Today, The City continues to sponsor charitable projects and foundations, including Christ's Hospital, where donations come from City banks and legal firms, as well as from the wealthy alumni - Old Blues, who have made their fortunes within the square mile. My daughter owes the most significant and best part of her education to them: she entered the school aged thirteen on a Foundation Bursary - which was a gift to me too since I had recently been diagnosed with cancer snd was worried sick about her future. To date, only a tiny percentage of the pupils at Christ' Hospital pay the full fees of over £27,000 per year- at this unique and spectacular independent school where the mission statement is giving education with care. So when I am off on a rant about hedge-funders and super-rich tax-dodgers, like the business moguls who squirrel their gains in offshore accounts, I should stop to remember those Foundation Governors of Christ's Hospital, forming an escort for the Lord Mayor, Guilds and Companies as they passed down the aisle of Wren's cathedral four days ago.

Christ's Hospital Band leading the march to St Paul's

and on to the Mansion House. The Guildhall Gallery is on the right.

Guildhall Art Gallery and London's Roman Amphitheatre

www.guildhallartgallery.cityoflondon.gov.uk/

PRINCE HARRY

So Prince Harry, 'the coolest royal', makes another gaffe by allowing himself to be snapped butt-naked at some sleazy strip-pool party in Las Vegas, the sleaziest place in the world.
  Unlike his older brother who has inherited the awful job of being monarch one day, Harry, following the example of the late Princess Margaret and other redundant members of the Windsor clan, can allay his boredom  by being naughty. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being naughty, especially if one is rich and schooled in buffoonery (Boris, Cameron and Co at The Bullingdon Club at Oxford). We know that Harry was disappointed about being taken out of the firing line in Afghanistan and is desperate to be redeployed with his regiment; but the thing is that the sorry file of young squaddies who have lately returned from the combat zone to help ease the shambolic security arrangements at the London Olympics will not have watched the games from first class seats or relaxed after this onerous duty on a holiday in Vegas, gallivanting and picking up the sort of women who are game about taking their clothes off in front of strange men. At least Prince Harry showed some modesty in hiding his 'crown jewels'.

    A few years ago, he was in the soup for allegedly plagiarising his teacher's work at Eton to gain his art A level - a crucial requirement to get into Sandhurst and begin his army officer training. The thought occurred to me today that this might not have been so easy for him under this year's newly-introduced draconian marking schemes for A Levels and GCSEs, resulting in a high percentage of lower grades and thus keeping the less able from taking up university places  - a jolly good wheeze from the chaps at the Education Ministry, I should think,  those same idiotic jobsworths who have been messing about with the school curriculum for the last thirty years.  For several summers, under the old regime, I marked English Language AS level for AQA Board, where examiners were always briefed to see the bigger picture. This meant not penalising candidates for basic English mistakes, such as misplaced apostrophes (it's/its, potato's/potoatoes), inability to distinguish between 'there' (place) and 'their' (possessive pronoun); received usage no-nos such as 'we was' instead of 'we were', etc.  The blind have been leading the blind, like the teacher at the local, 'outstanding-rated' comprehensive school, who wrote in my daughter's homework book: please check spelling and AMMEND (sic).  That was the school where they corrected up to five mistakes per homework and turned the other cheek with respect to the rest.