SOMEWHAT SERENDIPITOUSLY, after my musings last week on food and cooking we have, over the past few days, been festooned with images of the kitchens of the great and comments thereon.
“Two-kitchens” Miliband is excoriated for his domestic double dunter AND for being pictured gazing thoughtfully at a green plastic bin in the sadly utilitarian “downstairs” version rather than the all-singing, all-dancing “upstairs” set-up.
David and Samantha Cameron then get in on the act with their well appointed “heart of the home”, all expensive American fridge and carefully strewn cookbooks.
It’s a modern obsession, having a “dream” kitchen”, “dream bathroom” or even “dream sofa”. I don’t know about you but I don’t dream about kitchens, bathrooms and sofas. At a time when Blade Runner is apparently being remade, it might be appropriate to remember the title of the story on which it was based, Philip K Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” They may very well do so but I draw the line at dreaming of electrical appliances.
Nicola Sturgeon of course, when asked ironically about her kitchen, referred the questioner to her husband, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, who, she said, was much more familiar with it than she was; rather like Dolly Parton being asked how long her hair-do took and replying that she didn’t know because she was never there.
Given the sexist claptrap the First Minister has had to put up with in recent days, I can understand her thinking, on the principle that you can’t be made to stay in the kitchen if you don’t know where it is.
With exquisite timing, however, it was also announced this week that La Sturgeon is now, technically, the highest paid politician in Britain, as we still know it.
In the words of a post-war hit from the great Louis Jordan: “You can’t jive these girls like you used to do, Cause some of them is making more money than you.”
AND SPEAKING of dishes, which we were, peripherally, and sexism, which we were, directly, it’s interesting to note that certain pundits and cultural analysts (not to mention those with deadlines to meet and pages to fill) have taken to objectifying men with just as much gusto as they have always applied to the female of the species. Young, handsome men, of course. You still don’t tend to get much tutting over older men “letting themselves go” as you do with women who dare to stick their unplumped, unsmoothed carapaces over the parapet of 40-something and still expect to be allowed out in public. Unreconstructed in a man tends to mean an ageing sexist: in a woman it’s someone who hasn’t yet succumbed to the knife and the filler.
Any road up, the laddies are getting it in the neck and most other parts of the anatomy as often as their female co-stars these days. Getting their kit off is de rigueur – even Scots music guru Calvin Harris has transformed his former wholesome Doonhamer image into one of a six-foot, six-packed underwear model for Emporio Armani. Calvin Klein must be kicking themselves, I fear.
Then there’s flavour of the month and dish of the day Aidan Turner, having his Mr D’Arcy moment in the remake of Poldark.
Churlish though I may sound, he actually doesn’t do a thing for me, although I reckon he’d be deeply disturbed if he thought he did. And undoubted thing of beauty (and no doubt also a fine actor) as he is, I smell the scent of political opportunism in the West Country wind.
It can surely be no co-incidence that this saga of floofy white shirts (unbuttoned) and ravishing young rakehells with devil-may-care curls and a penchant for skinny dipping is showing at the same time as the beleaguered Nick Clegg reveals that he is giving six figures’ worth of cash to support the more or less moribund Cornish tongue.
(The problem with addressing these issues is you just can’t avoid the double-entendre…)
Nick, I hate to break this to you but nobody (not even Miriam) thinks you are Aidan Turner. You can only suffer by comparison. And I somehow suspect that the young women of Cornwall and elsewhere already know how to pronounce PHWOARR without any help from you.
AULD AGE disnae come itsel’ but there are times when one dates oneself with a vengeance. Can I be the only person in Britain who, when faced with the word “fracas” re the tiresome Jeremy Clarkson, immediately pictured Eric Morecambe adjusting Ernie’s wig and asking a fictional behind-the-scenes operative: “Can he say ‘fracas’ on the BBC?”