Peter Rhodes on cheap food, problematical pockets and a Rolling Stones lullaby
A reader tells me her new country coat contains something called a Napoleon pocket. She says it's excellent for keeping a hand warm, but isn't it cultural appropriation?
I am reminded of the waxed-cotton shooting jacket advertised in a number of national newspapers a few years ago. The Daily Telegraph advert said the jacket featured a gamekeeper's pocket. The Guardian described it as a poacher's pocket.
“You haven't finished posting your job,” accuses an email from one of those websites where you go looking for tradesmen to do work. No I haven't. I got as far as the terms and conditions, which seemed to go on for ever, page after page of exclusions, liabilities and legal threats, and gave up in despair. Look, I just want a chippy to build a porch, not a lawyer to re-draft the EU regulations on duck eggs.
Still with the EU, European Council president Charles Michel says Britain could be flooded with cheaply produced food should it lower its regulatory standards after Brexit. This was interpreted by some media sources as a warning although cheaper food might strike many families as more of a promise.
Charles Michel's dire talk of “unfair and unjust competition from other regions of the world” rings hollow for two reasons. The first is that, as anyone over a certain age will testify, the moment Britain joined the Common Market in 1974, food prices shot up. It's payback time. The second is that while in the EU and subject to EU rules, regulations and standards, Britain endured the worst foot-and-mouth epidemic of the century, mad-cow disease and that embarrassing episode when the beef in your beefburger was scrag end of Dobbin.
Anyway, isn't there something deeply patronising about a well-heeled Eurocrat in Brussels preaching to the working families of Britain that expensive food is good for them?
And why does anybody assume that UK regulatory standards will be lower than those set by Brussels? I look forward to a post-EU Britain getting a grip on the internet. How can it be, for example, that a dealer can advertise on eBay as “UK seller – fast delivery” when his own record reveals: “Member since April 2019 in China”?
Last week's item on songs to sing to small babies mentioned the Dingle Dangle Scarecrow. However, there is a much more potent crib song. I heard it nearly 50 years ago at a folk club where a singer took a hard-rock Rolling Stones hit, set it in waltz time, slowed it right down and sang it pianissimo, gentle as vespers and sweet as a psalm.
Sure enough, after a couple of verses of the Stones' lullaby the infant's eyelids flutter and the Land of Nod beckons. It is a most effective sleep-inducer for our seven-month grandson although at some stage I will have to tell him what a Honky Tonk Woman is.
