Fake food and fatuous reminiscences

Recently I heard about vegan black pudding. In a trivial bout of synchronicity, I found it in a farm shop in Lancaster some days later and promptly bought it. It is called V-Pud and contains beetroot and herbs as well as other meat substitutes.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/first-vegetarian-black-pudding-has-lancashire-meat-lovers-spluttering-424652.html
The article is brief, but the comments are worth scanning as clearly, this has divided views in the vegan/veggie world because it is made by the producers of meat products. Some people have expressed opinions that to buy this is to prop up the animal slaughterers while others are simply glad to have an alternative to a food they liked before becoming veggie. I can see both sides of this argument and have felt that before in regard to McSween’s veggie haggis. In that particular case I don’t have to act on any philosophical beliefs as although I quite like the product, it really doesn’t like me. In fact I prefer Hall’s veggie haggis as it does respect my digestive system, but Hall’s also make vast quantities of food out of dead animals.

There is also the illogical argument from some carnivores who fail to think through why some veggies would want acceptable substitutes for common foods. In our culinary tradition, it is just easier to cook sausage shaped stuff and to continue with some form of non-meat and two veg.

I had no inspiration for a recipe with the V Pud, so cooked a full vegan breakfast for my daughter and self. This consisted of hash browns, baked beans, V Pud and fake bacon. It was fine and my daughter who has never eaten non-veggie black pudding enjoyed it, although she said it was a little bit minty tasting. Her other comment was that she'd prefer to have a veggie version of Lorne sausage. I never liked that, so had never thought of it. I can't see this happening as Lorne sausage is probably only eaten locally hereabouts so there wouldn't be much of a market for a meat free version.

On the whole, the V Pud was ok, but unless I was doing brekky for a vegan I probably won’t buy it again for some time.

Daughter graciously pretended to listen to my reminiscences about black pudding while eating. I recalled buying black pudding suppers from the local chippy as a teenager on the way home from the youth centre disco’s in the 70’s. These were ideal snacks as they were halved puddings deep fried in batter and cost 10p.

10p was half of my pocket money in those days, the other half being spent on entry fee to the youth club disco. My friend E was given 50p for her allowance. I’m not sure if that underlay some of the adolescent conflicts that frequently arose between us, but it did not help!

E and I were either “awfy, awfy close” or “awfy, awfy in the huff” throughout the mid 70’s. In time we drifted apart, aided by her marriage to an Eastern European missionary and their eventual settlement in Scandinavia. Is it cynical of me to comment, that if you fancy being a missionary, selling your god in Scandinavia is more comfortable than some other places? But wherever she and her family are, I wish her well.

Postcard from Oz

M., who kindly comments at times on this blog, is off touring exciting places right now. I received a postcard from her this morning, which on looking at the picture I recognised as San Fransisco. When I turned it over I saw the stamp was Australian.

Now, that's class! Buying the card in San Francisco and posting it from Australia. Thank you M and I hope you enjoy the rest of your tour and come back ready to share your adventures with us stay-at-homes.

Heteronormative phallocentric piffle

Heteronormative is my word du jour, having recently learnt it from reading radical feminist websites. Unsurprisingly, Word spellcheck doesn’t recognise it, so here is a definition:

HETERONORMATIVITY (heteronormative): Those punitive rules (social, familial, and legal) that force us to conform to hegemonic heterosexual standards for identity. "

This explosion of polysyllability was induced during a visit to the Manchester Art Gallery to see the Holman Hunt exhibition. Hunt was a prominent figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and this exhibition gathered together a range of his work. The Pre-Raphaelites used to be a favourite but the more varied art I view, the less I find to praise in this movement. I can appreciate the quality of the artistry, but the subjects are too sentimental for my current tastes. Hunt’s are of particular interest because of his religious overtones. For example, in the Awakening Conscience, he depicts his interpretation of a “fallen” woman.

The quotes below are from a deconstruction of the painting.

"The Awakening Conscience is a fine example of popular Victorian painting. It tells a story. Its theme is the fate of the fallen woman. Many details are intended to be read symbolically. The moral message is stern and strongly disapproving.
There's a ring on every finger except the "wedding finger". She is a kept woman, entirely dependent on the support and whim of the man. If he rejects her, she is likely to resort to prostitution in order to survive.
The soiled, discarded white glove on the floor symbolizes the woman's fate if she stays with her lover." Ref: Robert Cumming's Annotated Art , DK Publishing, 1995

It is fair to say I was most Victorianly not amused by this.

Other Pre-Raphaelites in the Manchester Gallery include Rossetti (the bloke, not his more admirable sister). Some of the notes beside his paintings gave me the distinct impression of a sleazy over-entitled male, which I'm sure was not the intention. For example, his Astarte Syriaca has these comments:

"Astarte was an Ancient Middle Eastern goddess, an earlier, more malign version of Venus, the Classical goddess of love. Above her head is her emblem, the eight-pointed star, and behind this the sun and moon meet. These are symbols of her power over nature. In legend, Astarte's girdle made her an irresistible force and Rossetti has conveyed this by cramming the picture space so that it seems as if Astarte might stride out of the painting and confront you, half-threatening, half-alluring. Astarte has idealised feminine features that recur in Rossetti's paintings: soulful eyes, sensuous rosebud mouth and luxuriant, flowing hair, based during this period on the features of Jane Morris, his friend's wife."

Not a Pre-Raphaelite painter, but hanging opposite Astarte Syriaca is Sappho by Charles-August Mengin which has this explanation on the card beside it:

"The painting has an intense sexual charge intended to appeal to male viewers visiting the officially endorsed Paris Salon exhibition. Its eroticism was legitimised for them by the meticulous finish of fine brushstrokes and the scholarly reference to Classical history."

So much for heteronormativity and the male gaze; could these descriptions not have alternative notes written by informed radical feminists? I'd really enjoy myself reading those but instead, public art galleries remain places of mild disgust to me, owing to the preponderance of pudenda and nipples parading as “high art”. It is the basic dishonesty that is so insulting; these are paintings for men by men, often with the explicit double standard of female objectification and moralistic control of women's agency. And yet, we are expected to admire this as 'art' and to swallow an extremely slanted patriarchal analysis of what we are looking at. More erudite feminists than I have expounded on this subject, notably the Guerrilla Girls.
From their website:

"In 1985, (in the USA) a bunch of female artists, incensed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included 165 artists but only 17 women, founded the Guerrilla Girls. Dubbing ourselves “The Conscience of the Artworld,” we started making posters that bluntly stated the facts of discrimination and used humour to convey information, provoke discussion and to show that feminists can be funny. We assumed the names of dead women artists, and began wearing gorilla masks when we appeared in public, concealing our true identities and focusing on the issues rather than on our personalities."

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/admin/moreherstory.shtml

Manchester Art Gallery has a painting by the first woman to be admitted as an associate of the Royal Academy - Annie Swynnerton, a Manchester lass. The gallery has one of her paintings on display, although disappointingly, no image of it on their website. However, below is their description which differs from my perception of it. In fairness, I didn’t warm to this particular painting, but some of her other paintings which are more to my taste.

Manchester Art Gallery has this to say about the Swynnerton on display:
"Montagna Mia means 'My Mountain'. Natural features in a landscape are often personified by the humans who live near them. The painting may show a protective mountain 'spirit', but breasts and arms metamorphosing into peaks create an ambiguous, erotic, perhaps symbolic image. Is Montagna Mia waiting to be conquered?"
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/search-the-collection/display.php?EMUSESSID=eeb6690341ca67e575aba7014dbe44de&irn=3904 Above is a Swynnerton painting I do like.

Here is a link to the Society of Women Artists history page which discusses the difficulties of women being admitted to the Royal Academy. Other pages on their site contain glorious art by women.
http://www.society-women-artists.org.uk/History.html

Holman Hunt Exhibition http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=45

Moggy Bloggy

I’ve spent the last several days living with a brace of cats. Judging by many people's blogs, it appears almost obligatory to do a blog extolling the delights of feline friends accompanied by pictures of unbearably cute cats artfully posed to maximise their attractiveness to cat aficionados. This post has the photo, but a combined lack of photographic ability and disinclination to pursue these moggies until they decided to drape themselves in an appropriately cute display of teeth and claw, means they are not representatively as cute as they are in real life (in their owner’s eyes, anyway).

I’m not a cat person. I’m marginally more a dog person, but owing to an affliction of sneezing caused by mutt & moggie hair, I do my best to avoid hairy beasties. This makes prolonged space sharing with other people’s pets an increasingly difficult experience. A few hours is fine, otherwise I have to resort to dosing myself with hefty amounts of antihistamines thus dulling my senses enough to live with my friends’ beloveds.

However, when I’m feeling especially uncharitable I find myself referring to these companion animals as furry parasites. With this attitude, I decided to take the cats in question in hand and sort them out. My aim was to turn them into productive members of the household and credits to society.

I cornered them in the kitchen, (without resorting to bribery with food), and gave them their instructions for adding to the sum of human knowledge. They were told they had until the end of the week to crack the secrets of nuclear fusion. Time passed, but no scientific progress was forthcoming. The cats never even bothered to go online and access the Journal of Nuclear Fusion.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/toc/0029-5515/45/10A

Perhaps I wanted more of them than they could achieve, and on my next visit their task should be more meaningful to the average kitty-brain.

Liquid Nitrogen and Arthritic Digit

“LHC, The Universe and Everything” was the title of a lecture giving an update on the Large Hadron Collider and CERN. Dr David Evans of Birmingham University outlined the physics behind the LHC in an entertaining and comprehensive, but adequately basic manner for this non-academic would be physicist.

He illustrated his talk with fascinating PowerPoint and gratuitous use of volunteers who followed his instructions to manipulate magnets and demonstrate particles moving through tubes representing the collider. Then he explained about the cooling process needed for these particles which are superheated to many times the temperature of the sun. They need to be cooled to lower than the temperature of outer space.

He used liquid nitrogen and rubber tubing to discuss the type of cooling needed. Rubber tubing inserted into liquid nitrogen becomes friable and can be smashed easily against a table - a great effect during a lecture. In reality, CERN supercools with superfluid hellium. Liquid nitrogen is safer in a lecture room.

After questions, dominated as per usual by volubly egotistical elderly blokes who appeared to be even more wannabe physicists than me, Dr Evans offered the audience a chance to play with the liquid nitrogen. Yippee! I love to experiment, so I moved toward the front to stand in line to get a polystyrene cup of liquid nitrogen to pour over my palm. In order not to give yourself a freezer burn, it is best to hold your palm at an angle so that the liquid nitrogen can slide off onto the floor where it evaporates harmlessly (without damage to the flooring). I tried this a few times, expecting to feel whatever it was that caused some hulking great brutes who’d pushed ahead of me to squeal. I felt nothing; maybe my hot little palms were too superheated to allow the liquid to get close enough to do more than give a faint tingle.

In a corner of the room, some opportunistic student types had drawn back the curtains to expose a broad window ledge where they were engaged in their own experiment: throwing small amounts of liquid nitrogen along the ledge to watch it fizzle, pop and evaporate. Some reminiscences were shared about antics in labs by those of us a little older, but clearly not wiser.

I was left with the consequences of my own inadvised playing with the cup of liquid nitrogen; I stuck my rather arthritic forefinger into it and, while, again feeling nothing, was left with a persistent ache for the next day, as the joint swelled a little as a result of the low temperature. This is a warning to myself to think before doing this again and to remember that extreme cold is the wrong environment for arthritis.

For more scientific discussion look up CERN.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/spotlight/SpotlightCool-en.html

Keep right on to the end of the road …

Today is Armistice Day and poppies are in evidence in the media, but not much in real life. I have a white poppy, but have never worn it as I’d prefer not to get into heated discussions or to terribly offend anyone who misunderstood what the white poppy symbolises.

http://www.ppu.org.uk/poppy/

It is now 90 years since the end of the ‘Great’ War. Much is being made of this anniversary, not least because only the last few people to have lived through or even fought in it are still lingering on, and chroniclers are seizing this limited time to record first hand memories.

I grew up hearing stories of that war and even in the 1960’s it did not seem like ancient history to me. My grandfather and his contemporaries were drafted into the services to fight in the war to end wars. I’m reasonably certain that I only exist because my father’s father survived the trenches.

He was born in the fading years of the nineteenth century and would not have been old enough to volunteer at the outbreak in 1914, but would have joined the army in his late teens. He and his relatives probably survived because they were not in the trenches all the time. My grandfather was a dispatch rider; as the family story goes, he was Hitler’s opposite number.
On the other hand this could be somewhat incorrect, although it is recorded that Hitler was a messenger and was at Ypres amongst other places.

My great uncles were stretcher bearers, and although they too survived, it was not without seeing unspeakable sights and facing great danger as unarmed, they went into No Man’s land to recover bodies, both dead and alive.

When I was ten, we went on holiday to Belgium and France and visited Ypres and a small museum where trenches had been preserved and artefacts from the surrounding area collected and displayed. I could not bring myself to go into a trench, with that awareness of the tragedy symbolised in those few yards of mud. The vision of the grisly displays in glass cases, including skulls from unidentified soldiers, remains vivid.

http://www.ypres-1917.com/hill_62.htm

Nowadays, I can appreciate far more the horror of those years and the waste of human life on all sides. But even at 10 years old, I could understand that there was no nobility, no glory, no damn point to it.

Then, as now, proportionately more Scots fought and died for ‘their’ empire/monarch/ ‘country’. Then, as now, what they come back to is not adequate to their needs for recovery of physical and mental health. Then, as now, we hear that their equipment is not good enough. What is the point of getting involved in warfare and setting up your own troops to struggle, maybe even fail, for lack of money. Is it not simpler to take a pacifist view and avoid conflict?

On Sunday, Radio Scotland profiled a CD of poetry, songs popular during the first war both at the front and in the music halls, as well as music written by contemporary artists whose brief was to create music reflecting what WW1 means to them. Of the traditional music, I found the Piobaireachd MacCrimmon's Sweetheart most moving, as was Dick Gaughan’s Why Old Men Cry for the more modern selection. The website describes the CD thus: “The album has a more Scottish perspective than any of its predecessors, but when one considers that Scotland suffered the most soldiers killed (per head of population) of any nation that fought in the conflict, such an album is greatly overdue.”

http://www.musicscotland.com/acatalog/Far_Far_From_Ypres_.html

I’ll end by saying that I am appreciative of the stories my family shared about my grandfather’s war experiences and that he returned and was the gentle man I remember until his death at 73. However, I am grateful also, that I have access to information about the conditions he and other’s on all sides existed in for these lost years fighting a useless "war to end wars". And the opportunity that I have to believe in peace and to speak out against the war criminals in our government who have embroiled so many of today’s young people in theatres of conflict in other people’s countries to the detriment of local women children and men.

Sadly, I have not managed to uphold what I promised myself when I set out to write this post – to not have a rant, but I feel passionately about this, so maybe I needed to go ahead and rant.