Mayonnaise Label Collection: Kewpie (J1)

Having seen – in last Saturday’s post - one of the best pre-fab Mayonnaises ever bottled (Dutch Duyvis), let us now proceed with one of the most astonishing, extraordinary and bizarre brands to come from the other side of the globe:

J1. Kewpie Mayonnaise. Frankfurt, July 2000.

No price, 500 grs. (2012 price: approximately € 6)

The Japanese belong to the yellow races. There is nothing wrong with that.

Mayonnaise is a yellow sauce. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Mayonnaise (On the contrary!)

Yet birds of a feather do not always successfully flock together. This brand, which for some obscure reason known only to its importer “JFC International”, found its way to a German airport supermarket, might as well be re-baptised Hara-Kiri Mayonnaise; for the correct translation of ‘Hara-Kiri’ is ‘cutting the belly’. And that it does, dear reader, most convincingly!

Because of the wasabi mustards used in its manufacture, Kewpie Mayonnaise is immensely spicy (Banzai!! cries the palate). It is sour like nitric acid (Morituri te salutant!! answer the taste buds) due to a merciless cocktail of yuzu juice and rice vinegar, sharp as samurai katanas. It overwhelms the flavour of anything it is eaten with – no, wait, worse: like a high-tech guided taste-killer, it assassinates the tang of every dish that inadvertently finds itself on the same dinner table!

All this is, to put it mildly, somewhat in contradiction to the cuddly, innocent babe-style image that the brand tries to cultivate, witness that little android-fellow printed on the cellophane wrapping of the plastic squeeze bottle. To put it in a nutshell: this sauce is so very strong and spicy that the last thing you want to do is to feed it to your toddler or your underage child! As a matter of fact, it is so hot it really ought to be X-rated.

So where does this unlikely logo come from? Well, I guess it roots in that same habit of Optimistic Denial that induces factory hands in the Japanese chemical industry to start the working day singing cheerful poetic company songs about blooming flowers and twittering songbirds, as they contemplate, outside, the deep brown, barren wasteland of the local Ruhr that their industry has left. 

The Kewpie logo – it turns out - was adopted from the plastic Kewpie dolls, a kind of winged Manniken Piss without the pee (despite the name), based on Ms Rose O’Neill’s 1909 illustrations in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Soon after publication, these figurines became so very famous and popular, that all sorts of products were named after it, like Kewpie Hamburgers in the USA, Kewpie condoms in Sweden (1), and – ever since 1925 – this Kewpie Mayonnaise manufactured by the Q.P. (sic) Corporation, a Japanese food manufacturer. All of which, if you ask me, only adds absurdity to injury of your gastric system…

Mannikin and Mayo from the Kewpie site

But what is the harsh truth? The harsh truth is that hosts of honest Mayonnaise addicts chose this dreadfully over-spiced sauce as their absolute favourite brand! I find this hard to believe and more difficult to accept, but there you have it. As far as I am concerned, the only truly good quality of the brand is its texture. That comes close to perfect. When one squeezes the bottle, a true and most decorative star-shape emerges. But does one ever want to squeeze the bottle? Not if one can help it! For it is made from a soft, fluffy, slightly greasy plastic, as horrid to the touch as it is dreadful to behold, which gives the inescapable impression that one is cruelly pinching one’s sister’s favourite doll in forbidden places, or handling a bottle of Rising-Sun-tan oil.

As for its chemical composition – and I suspect that several mad scientists have contributed to that one – it is and remains a mystery. Only those with a working knowledge of Japanese may figure it out from the label. But please, Oh ye kind and merciful people with a working knowledge of Japanese: 

Please don’t tell us?!! 

It also comes is bottles nowadays

P.S.: Kewpie Mayonnaise is not widely available in stores. The truly adventurous and the mentally insane may however go search the internet, where a large variety of unscrupulous postal order companies offer to sell you squeeze bottles of 350, 500 and 1000 grams!  

P.P.S. Those who wish to learn more about the Kewpie doll, visit this Kewpie site, from which I pinched the third picture above (with apologies...). And those who wish to have a special visual experience ought to type 'Kewpie Mayonnaise' into the Google Image search machine and see what comes up. The things people do with Mayonnaise! Astonishing!

(1) Explicable, since the name Kewpie derived from Cupid, the Latin winged god of erotic love, and the Swedes are animals when it comes to makin’ whoopee.

Nobody Writes Of The Colonels

There is a famous old saying that Victory has many fathers, but that Failure is an orphan. That notion is generally true, but it is different in the case of Greece. Today in Greece, failure has an untold number of papas. There is a Mr Papandreou, a Mr Papademos, a Mr Papoulias, and so on and so forth…

One such ‘paternal’ name is, however, conspicuously missing. A name which surely means nothing to most of you young folks, but which is graven into the uneasy memory of anyone over 50. That name is Papadopoulos. More fully: colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, military dictator of Greece from 1967 to 1974.

I won’t bother you young ones with too many dull history lessons. Let me just tell you this: back in 1967, faced with an economic slump and fearing a possible take-over of the government by the far left, Papadopoulos and a number of fellow colonels stages a coup d’état which ushered in one of the more unpleasant military dictatorships in the post-war period.

Does all that ring a bell of some sort?

The Greek Army… Nobody writes of them, nobody speaks of them, nobody takes them much into account. And yet they may slip into the picture, rather unexpectedly, very soon. To tell the plain truth: I am completely ignorant of what the attitude of the present Greek army is. But I do know that no Mediterranean country is ever very far removed from a military coup. Some of you may shake your heads in disbelief and mutter that such a thing is Unthinkable, Alfred! Well, what can I say? I can only counter that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent Reunification of Germany was pretty unthinkable. The caving-in of the Glorious Euro was unthinkable. The sinking of the Titanic was – guaranteed - unthinkable.

So. Now that the EU is once again bringing unparalleled prosperity and democracy to European nations; faced with a possible radical left-wing victory in the coming June elections; in combination with complete economic unravelling, and a substantial support of a neo-Nazi Greek movement (1), is it really so unthinkable that the Greek military begin to play with the notion of taking matters into their own drastic hands, ‘to save the Fatherland’ from enemies within and abroad? This time they may even bring back old King Constantine, who is still alive and kicking somewhere in London, I believe…

Let’s just hope that I am very very wrong, and that my apprehension may soon be dismissed as the nonsensical paranoia of a silly old man…

(1) Try this one on for size: in an interview in the Sunday Telegraph of 12 May, the Greek deputy PM Theodoros Pangalos pointed out that in those places where the Greek police voted, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party did not get the usual 7 % but scored 25 % of the vote!

Mayo Label Collection: Duyvis (H1)

H1. Duyvis Mayonaise. Amersfoort, Netherlands, 1981. Hfl. 2.15 for 500 ml

It is only fair to start our review of bottled brands of Mayonnaise, with what was probably one of the very best varieties of the Golden Sauce ever to be put onto the market. We do this not only because praise should be given where it is due; but also as a reminder how crude and cruel our mercantile system occasionally is.

Duyvis Mayonaise was a splendid product. It had an exquisite taste, which ordinary words can barely describe. Its texture was stable and beautiful, like a homemade Mayo whipped up by an expert saucier. Its warm, ochre colour came straight from the palette of Cezanne. Yes, that modest little crown dotting the ‘i’ in the brand name was certainly deserved! This bottled blend was absolutely majestic!

And yet… And yet… It was not to be…

After a desperate ten-year struggle in the mid 70s and early 80s, this beautiful sauce was withdrawn from the supermarket shelves, because customers – those hare-brained fools! – deemed it overpriced and – swine sniffing at pearls! – failed to recognize its veritable qualities. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Let this serve as a lesson to us all, dear reader! Good taste and the marketplace are almost per definition at odds with one another. They are incompatibles, opposites, water and oil... The common man wants his Mayonnaise sweet, cheap and greasy. The suppliers feel no scruples to provide such aberrations to hoi polloi. And the legislator does not seem to mind that traditional craftsmanship, national gastronomy and general health are gradually eroded and undermined, to the benefit of insatiable balance sheets. A most lamentable situation, which condemns many a most worthy Mayonnaise to tragic extinction!

We often look at this label with that saddest and most melancholy of feelings which Johann Goethe captured in the term Weltschmerz. And then our lips mumble ever so softly, that undying line from François Villon:

‘Où sont les mayonneiges d’antan?’

Cookbook: Chevre with Saint Joseph’s Wort

Allow me shock the breath out of your system with a few brazen remarks, dear reader! Listen closely.

I think the Mediterranean Diet ought to be forbidden. 

I despise the Mediterranean Diet. Death to the Mediterranean Diet, I say! Eradicate it. Prohibit it. Deposit it on the dunghill of obliterated food regimes!

Why? Well, because – with dear old Plato - I object deeply to raising a mirage onto public pedestals where only real life heroes should be honored. You see: the Mediterranean Diet does not exist. It is a fiction, like the Unicorn, or the ever-happy kingdom of Utopia, or the imminent return of Don Sebastian to the Portuguese throne, a hoax that gets abused by self-interested parties to score points and claim false superiority and get people to do things which they really ought to shun.

Just do the test yourself if you ever have the chance. When next you meet some random individual unfortunately born near the shores of the Middle Sea, start up a conversation, nudge the subject gently towards food and victuals, then express your undying admiration for the Mediterranean Diet (you gotta lure them into the trap, remember?) and once he or she is convinced you are totally well-deposed and adulating of the Latin culinary traditions, ask ever so gently of what the Mediterranean Diet consists.

You know what answer you’ll get?

You will hear that the unsurpassed, nourishing, delicious and salubrious Mediterranean Diet consists of…. Olive Oil. Olive oil and… well, nothing else, really. Yes, there are salads, and there is meat. They eat pasta and vegetables and rice, and a glass of wine if you are lucky, and they sprinkle salt and peppers on top of most victuals, and they eat with knife and fork (if you’re lucky again) and wipe their mouth on the tablecloth like normal people do. In short: nothing different at all from what you and I, from the North Cape to the Loire and from Land’s End to the Urals, spoon upon our sorry plates seven times a week, 52 weeks a year, 95 years in a lifetime.

But the olive oil suddenly makes all the difference between Human Fodder and Mediterranean Diet! Oh yes! As long as you pour super quality Virgin Olive Oil into or onto your fare, you have promptly changed it into a healthy, holy and happy manna from the Med. For Olive Oil possesses unending magical qualities so very mysterious and stealthy, that not even science has yet succeeded in locating or explaining them! Goes to show how massive they are! Oh yes! And how superior Mediterranean Culture really is, amidst the poverty, waste, corruption, animal cruelty, nepotism, pollution, unstoppable holidaymaking and mandolin music. Bah! What a fake! Gimme good cannibal gastronomy any day!

All that is not to say, however, that there is not, here and there, off and on, from time to time, a Mediterranean snack worth making, eating or serving to your guests. Indeed there is. Taramasalata is a fine example (as I explained in an earlier blog). The occasional paella (soon to be discussed in this cookblog) should not be despised. A happy plate of hummus? Always welcome. A tapa of razor-thin mojama? Bring it on by all means! And so on and so forth. 

Yes, we should enjoy these. Indeed we should serve them to our dearest invitées. But what we should never never ever do is babble about magical qualities or mysterious benefits to health, as if we had peeped out of Plato’s famous Cave and spotted, right around the corner where the Ideals hobble about, a Dago Pizza-baker doing his idiotic acrobatic tricks with a wheel of uncooked dough whirling around in the air! Impress through Simplicity and Please through Ease IN SILENCE, I say! Good wine needs no bush, and good cooking no baloney.

Therefore, after this brief tutorial, allow me to propose to you a most simple, quick and tasty Southern Snack, which you can prepare in minutes to serve as an entrée to a larger feast. For the poetry of your carte du jour, I styled it ‘Chèvre with Saint Joseph’s Wort’, but it is, of course, nothing more than goat cheese with a sprinkling of basil.

So to work. Get yourself these

Tools and ingredients:

            A roll of quality goat cheese (as the picture above shows)

            As many ceramic plates as you have guests

            One leaf of sweet basil for every guest

            A working oven, preheated at 125º C

            A bottle of the best olive oil

            Some pieces of bread

            Rough salt and black pepper freshly crushed in a mortar

Once you have all this together, proceed to the following

            Preparation

With a wet knife, cut the roll of goat cheese into 2 cm thick slices. Put one slice onto each plate. Put these plates into the pre-heated oven for about five minutes, while you chop up the basil leaves.

NB: keep a good eye on the warming plates. The cheese should not melt or run, but should just turn soft around the centre of the top. As soon as you think the desired effect has been reached, take the plates out of the oven.

Put a splash of olive oil on top of the cheese. Then put chopped basil on top of that. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Put a piece of bread on the side. Serve as quickly as you can, while the plates are still warm.

Since people love to fool around with the food you lovingly prepared for them (and which needs no improvement at all), set the table with additional salt, pepper, bread and olive oil. Also make sure they have a glass of wine and some sparkly water.

But most importantly of all: have a big sign in the middle of the table saying 

‘At dinner we do not discuss politics, bathroom matters or the Mediterranean Diet!’

NEWSREEL NEWSREEL: Rehn in the Panic!

EU Economic Supercommissar Olli Rehn just held a remarkable press conference about the state of the union. I pick the cherries from the pie.

‘Europe’ Mr Rehn said, ‘is undergoing a mild recession’. Come again?? Mild? Bambi is Mild. A soft drizzle in balmy weather is mild. Paprika powder is mild. But Godzilla, Hurricane Kathrina and Cayenne Pepper are not Mild! We have unemployment up to 25 % in various countries. Youth unemployment up to 50 % is several. The Banking system totters in a third of our nations. Credit is nil. GNP is shrinking all along the line. And solutions are not forthcoming. In short: the only thing mild here is Mr Rehn’s juggling with euphemism!

Almost all countries are doing the right thing, Mr Rehn also pointed out. In 2013 most of them will see a return to mild growth. A likely story. The trouble is: ever since the outbreak of this crisis in 2008, I’ve been hearing like a regular mantra that ‘in 9 months time things will be looking up again’. Not too good for credibility, Mr Rehn. It looks as if the EU, as the only living body in the world, can be ‘a little bit pregnant’.

This year of 2012, Mr Rehn calculated, overall economic growth in the European Union (27 countries) will be 1.3 %. Overall growth in the 17 Eurozone countries will be 1 %. Hey, isn’t that a fascinating statement now? Apparently, growth is better in countries which do not use the Euro than in countries that do use the Euro. The Euro, that miracle coin that would bring us wealth, prosperity, extra international commerce, boosted industrial output and a booming service sector.

Now, want me to tell you a well-kept secret that nobody ever mentions? OK, here goes: according to the EU’s own statistical bureau Eurostat, growth in the non-Euro countries has been bigger than in the Euro-countries for every single year since the introduction of the Euro in 2002 (with the one exception of 2008, when – note the enourmous difference! - it was 0,3 in entire EU and 0,4 in the 17 Euro-countries)! With benign single currencies like that, who needs a debt crisis? (Oh, incidentally: the rest of the world will grow with 4.2 % in 2012... and that includes Africa and the poorer part of Asia, I guess…)

Oh, and one last joke: Spain will meet its budget-slashing goals this year, according to the Commissar, despite the fact that it is already lagging behind 1.1 % this month of May. Consequently the European Commission is preparing a special emergency program for the construction of landing strips for pigs in various Spanish communities which produce that excellent jamon serrano.

A Grand Performance! Let’s all vote for Mr Rehn again next elections! (Joke)

The Mittington Mayonnaise Label Collection MANIFESTO

A random page from the collection

Statement of Intent

It is high time, dear reader, that I add one more category to the shortlist of serial subjects which you find in the upper right-hand corner of my blog. That new title is the Alfred B. Mittington Mayonnaise Label Collection.

Don’t frown. Don’t snicker. Don’t groan. By now, you all know my infatuation with and my unwavering devotion to the Golden Sauce, that precious Gift from the Gods by way of the Egg and the Oil. So why should it come as a surprise that Alfred B. Mittington has also dedicated a few decades of his plenteous lifetime to a Linnaeus-style classification of bottled varieties of Mayonnaise, as they are available on the markets of the diverse countries he travelled through and lived in? Nothing is more obvious or helpful. For the Story of Mayonnaise is a rich and fascinating one, dear reader, even when it concerns industrial products; and the choosing of a good bottled Mayo, on those hapless occasions that you cannot whip up your own, is a delicate and hazardous endeavour!

So I feel I have my mandate! By occasionally posting samples from my large collection of Mayonnaise Labels (roughly 200 items from two dozen countries), I will be educating my fellow gourmets in the captivating Saga of the Sauce, and at the same time lead him along that glorious but narrow path of culinary bliss, warning him what traps and pitfalls to avoid, pointing out the stepping stones that lead to safe havens, and – not to forget – denouncing, once and for all, several unforgivable outrages which the captains of industry, those mental cousins of cookbook authors, commit upon their innocent and defenceless clients.

Read it to your advantage, dear reader! And never forget what the grand Chinese Sage said:

天堂之路潤滑良好的蛋黃醬

‘The road to heaven is lubricated with good Mayonnaise’

[Confucius, On Godly Food, Book II, § 13]

Who's afraid of Et Dona Ferentes (2)

[NB The below may be considered a follow-up to my evaluation of the Greek drama in February 2010, which you may see here on Colin Davies’s blog]

The publisher of my bestseller ‘A Crowbar to Keynes’ wrote to me the other day (and that’s the first I heard from him since the royalties stopped flowing!) asking this simple but challenging question: ‘Now that all options are open again, Dr Mittington, what should be done about Greece?’

Forsooth a question worthy of a judicious reply! So I gave it some earnest thought, and this is what I concluded ought to be done about Greece.

Greece should leave the Euro-zone. This is both morally and economically justified.

It is morally justified, because Greece joined the common currency by doctoring the books; because they broke every rule in the manual of sound economic policy; and because they lied through their teeth for a decade to cover up their frauds.

Economically it is justified, because once on the New Drachma, the Greeks may devaluate, print money, set their own interest rate and negotiate their own debt deals; all of them things which are basic to any return to growth, and which within the Euro-zone they can no longer do.

People who know about such matters tell me that a gradual return to a national currency may be accomplished without undue catastrophe or trauma, by so-called ‘boarding’, i.e. pegging the New Drachma against one, or preferably two, stable currencies (e.g. the Euro and the Dollar) for a set amount of time, until the stormy waters have returned to their channels.

Others, who desperately want us all to believe that there is not, in the entire universe and for the rest of eternity, an alternative to the Euro, to More European Integration and to More Power For Unelected Beurocrats (guess who these people are?) will tell you that an exit from the Eurozone can only lead to catastrophe, disaster, war, pestilence and Armageddon. My answer is that such a scenario will only happen if we allow it to. And there is a way around it.

So as to make an orderly Greek transition from the Euro to the New Drachma possible, we will need to set up a full-fledged Marshall Plan for Greece. We will need to help them with bucketsful of money, mostly in the form of loans but also in the form of gifts. I will not lie to you: it will take hundreds of billions.

Oh, and now I can just hear all of you scream in furious indignation! But hold your horses and think a while. Giving them money is undeserved, you say? We should not throw our hard-earned cash at people who badly misbehaved? Well, for starters we are already doing so, and with results which are less than splendid, in case you have not noticed...

Secondly, ‘undeserved’ is a value judgement about the past, which should not be a yardstick for the future. The Germans, for one, really ought to know so. They themselves did not exactly behave exemplary between 1939 and 1945, did they now? Yet good old George Marshall and the American leadership nevertheless took the wise course at the end of the war, and spooned billions of dollars onto the German plate, so as to built up the war-torn country and give it a future. Yes, I am all in favour of justice and due punishment; but correct policy should be shaped with an eye to the future, not with a hunger for revenge. The latter we did in Versailles in 1919. And we got Weimar, Adolf Hitler and the Second World War as a reward for our wisdom.

My dear fellow Europeans: I know the Greeks behaved badly. But we allowed them to behave badly, so the responsibility is partly ours (and to a vast extend, incidentally, the blame lies with the Brussels Eurogues, who so far have not been called to any account).

Beyond that, we have a simple moral duty as human beings. No matter how undeserving the country, and particularly the political class of that country, it does not do that we, affluent Europeans, visit devastation upon the poorer Greeks, who are our continental cousins. Let us at least, by moral generosity which rises above the petty blame game, guarantee health care for the sick and reasonable pensions for the elderly. Let us make sure that the children do not go without food, shelter or education. Let us give their young folk some sort of future, and get the beggars off the streets of Athens.

This then is what wise leaders would do. Sadly, wise leaders are few and far between these days, particularly in the corridors of Brussels Palaces, where the perverse and the power-hungry go have dinner together to speak of ways to stimulate growth… I wish I could see the menu and the tab of that little Van Rompuy bash on May 23^rd… I wish they’d be fed the evening meal of a Greek old-timer, or the dinner of an Athens beggar, harvested from dustbins…

 Stop starving our poor!

Stop wrecking our democracies!

Stop repeating history!!

[Postscript May 13: for a similar view and a description of the mood in Greece, see this here article by Arianna Huffington]

NEWSREEL: Spanish Practice

One more cup of poison for the road…

The Spanish government has just announced that it will bail out the tottering financial behemoth known as Bankia with a stunning 10 billion Euros of public money. The only condition is that the CEO who presided over the unhinging of the balance sheet step down. This gentleman happens to be Rodrigo Rato, one of Grand Old Men of the PP conservative party, which at present governs Spain.

The sourest irony is surely the number. It so happens that 10 billion Euros is the exact same sum which the same Spanish government is cutting from education and the health care system… A necessary little adjustment for the good of the country and the trust of Brussels and the Financial Markets…

A demagogue might say that children and the sick are being bled so that our plutocrat friends may receive a blood transfusion…  

The trouble is that it needs no demagogue for an agonizing populace to arrive at that idea…

How ANYBODY imagines that you can continue with this sort of heartless, cynical policy without mayor revolts breaking out, beats an old man like me. How truly imbecile can our European leadership be? Even Louis XVI understood more of mass psychology! Even Marie Antoinette was a better economist!

[POSTSCRIPT]

I had barely posted the above, when the below appeared on Facebook:

No translation needed, I suppose...

Et maintenant, que vais-je faire?

Ah yes, dear reader! Europe has a brand new Supra-national Anthem. It is no longer that hallowed line from Schiller’s poem that drones through European craniums to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, proclaiming that Alle Menschen Werden Brüder. Instead, on this dreary rain-swept morning in May, Eurogues, heads of state and tranquilizer-popping parliamentarians hum the first line of that sad, insecure, dejected French chanson by old Gilbert Becaud: ‘Et Maintenant que vais-je faire…?’ And now, what (the f...) do I do...?

Small surprise that is, for yesterday brought a most unsurprising (re)turn of events. Electorates in Greece and France, asked for a verdict on recent EU policy, rejected it soundly, as they invariably have done each time they were asked over the last 30 years. Never mind that their rejection has never been heeded by the European leadership, and will surely go ignored yet once again.

In France, M. Hollande won the presidential elections with a convincing margin, on an uppity, anti-austerity ticket which was a smack in the face of all Brussels Beurocrats. Meanwhile, in Greece, the two big mega-corrupt parties, PASOK and New Democracy, which in the past were bloodthirsty mortal enemies but found snug common ground in their love of Brussels bullying, scored a mere 30 % of the parliamentary vote, which gave them a neat 149 seats in the 300 seat parliament (talk about rigging electoral laws to your advantage…!) Sadly this is just a bit too little to reign together unopposed!

Consequently, just about everybody is now desperately wondering what to do, what stand to take, what flight routes to keep open, how to encounter their beloved friends and allies in the arena of the European Coliseum, where the gladius and the trident reign supreme over the embrace and agape.

Back in Berlin, Mrs Merkel is surely wondering how to face the new French president, with his demands for growth stimulus, which can only be paid through Euro-inflation or hiked taxes on the wealthy Germans. In London, I have no doubt, Mr Cameron is plotting how to get a foot back into the European door so as to re-establish a semblance of influence, without that foot being chopped off on sight by a German bayonet or a French guillotine. For his part, however, M. Hollande must be at a total loss how to behave now that the elections are won. He made clear promises to his voters; yet everyone who counts for anything in the corridors of power where votes are fully immaterial – the Brussels Elite, the Financial Markets, the Rating Agencies, the IMF, the international conspiracy of Bankers, the jubilant employers’ organisations – recognizes in those promises a frontal attack on their recent unopposed supremacy and will fight the man’s petty ambitions nails and teeth… 

In Greece, the old dilemma is back again: stand up, Thermopylae style, against the New Barbarian Invaders from Brussels and end up like Leonidas’ heroic Spartans (i.e. world famous and convincingly dead), or bend over forwards once again to be given IMF-director treatment in the catamite way… And finally, there are normal European men and women, who work for a living and worry about their children, who can’t make head or tails of what is going on, but are wondering where to go with their savings now that the venomous Euro may still go bust…

Et maintenant, que vais-je faire…?

The truth is that nobody knows.

Nobody, Alfred?

No, not nobody, dear reader! One body of fine folk knows perfectly well what they will be doing… Guess who? Indeed: the boys and girls in Brussels: EU commissars, bureaucrats, MPs, PR managers, translators, personal assistants, grandmothers, liaison agents, lobbyists, champagne suppliers and caviar caterers… You know: the entire parasitic lot that lives marvellously off the fat of our continent without having to show any sort of utility or performance. These ones know with absolute clarity what they wish and will do. To wit: save the Euro. For the Euro – much as it proved to be the poison of the European economy, a completely failed experiment, the millstone around the neck of 500 million people, an idiotic pipe dream of the Frankenstein type – to them is a blessing. It is the incarnation of their ambitions. It represents their mindboggling success so far. It is the political bubble that must not be allowed to burst, whatever the cost (to others)… A single step back, a single restriction, even one tiny nation stepping out of this house of cards, would mean that Progress is Not Only Forward, that questions may be asked, that the Trek towards Ever Closer European Integration may be revealed to be a March of Folly…

No such thing must ever be allowed to happen! Above the gates to Brussels there is a sign, which reads: ‘Abandon Doubt All Ye Who Enter Here!’

Do I mean that these folks are Evil? No, dear reader! Certainly not! They are merely very happy with how things have been going so far. And they believe in themselves, with the certainty of those who think invariably well of themselves…

Let there be no misunderstanding: these Eurogues would rather plunge a nation or two into unseen misery than to retreat one inch from their ambitions. But they do so because they operate under a very special mindset. They consider themselves to be the most benign agents of the ‘European Ideal’, a somewhat vague paradisiacal notion of a continent at Permanent Peace, Prosperity and Happiness, which has not had its equal since the Garden of Eden. This Ideal is an Absolute Good. Whatever serves the ideal is desirable. Whatever does not serve the ideal must be rotted out with fire and sword. The Ideal is above law divine or human. It is beyond Good and Evil. It justifies whatever measures the Brussels Crowd may take, no matter how inhuman, horrid or corrupt. I found a most instructive parallel to this self-serving and self-deluding attitude in chapter 4 of John Hooper’s book ‘The Spaniards’, where he explains how the Spanish officer corps saw itself just before the civil war of the 1930s:

Whether [a Spanish officer] was serving in the hills of Morocco or behind a desk in Madrid, it was obvious that the distance between him and his fellow citizens was growing. This posed a special problem for a body of men accustomed to regard themselves as instruments of the collective will and they began to evolve the curious belief that, even though they might not reflect the circumstantial preferences of the electorate, they none the less embodied the eternal virtues of the fatherland. And the fatherland, according to this theory, was infinitely more important than the sum of its inhabitants. A distinction was beginning to be drawn between Spain and the Spanish which in 1936 would serve to justify a war against the majority of Spaniards as a war in defence of Spain.

Put Beurocrat in the place of Officer, and Europe in the place of Spain, and you have a perfect description of how our Brussels’ leadership regards itself and the populations they are supposed to be accountable to. They serve a Higher Notion of Europe which the Europeans are told either to swallow or to suffer.

Imagine how such fine supercilious folk will treat a mere French president who dares to stand up to them an inch! And then – once you have shaken your head in disbelief - guess what they would do to a petty Mediterranean nation if the local populace dared tell them, in the eternal words of yet another French chansonnier:

‘Va t’faire, homme incorrec

Voir par les Grecs’

Saturday Snapshot: No Smoking Guns Allowed!

The young don’t know this, but there used to be a fabled time, think the late 50s, the 60s and the 70s, when most things people liked to do were simply… allowed! Imagine that! Only the kinkiest sorts of sex, overt racist insults, and jokes about the Royal House were strictly forbidden. 

Ever since, the Anti-Pleasure Mob has made a mayor comeback, and we are pretty much looking at a definite Triumph of the Nerds on two or three continents and in places that used to vie with Sodom and Gomorrah in happy hedonism. Ah, Progress, Progress, whimsicality is thy name! The stuff these Geeks in Office manage to prohibit! Smoking of course, and innocent sipping from wine bottles in the street! Sugar for children, pastries, cookies and French fries in the schoolyard. Being overweight now carries heavy penalties in airfare and health insurance. Walking your dog off a lease is a mayor offence that must be rigorously cracked down on by the uniformed henchmen of the dorks. There are cases of senior citizens being heavily fined for making a picture of their own grandchildren in a bathing-suit…

Meanwhile a few other minor offences, which do have an occasional doubtful side-effect, do not perhaps receive the full priority which a man of taste and sophistication would hope they’d get. Such as the idiotic ease with which psychos can acquire automatic weapons, which results in massacres of the Breivik kind… Our forces of order must be too busy rotting out intolerable Nicotine Crimes in public places to give that their due attention… I congratulate them on their sense of priorities.

Anyway: so as to end this post with a twinkle instead of a lamentation, here is a snapshot I took at Prague airport back in 1997. The place had just been liberated from the Soviet regime, and was rife with mafia-style crime and leftover Bolshevik weaponry. Hence the formal forbiddance of guns in the precinct. I guess that nowadays, the prohibition sign for guns has been removed, and replaced by one which bans ice-cream cones. Because, as long as a gun doesn’t smoke, there ain’t no reason to object to its presence, right?

Golden Quotebook: On the law of valid neologism

The only true way to travel

Throughout my considerable writing career, dear reader, I’ve often been taken to task for using creative, unconventional words. The list of my lexical critics is comically lengthy and varied. It includes such pundits as G.B. Shaw, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce’s wife, Monsieur Céline, the confessor of Don Camilo José Cela, a fellow called Jerry, a friend called Colin, and many more funny folk. For some reason, all of these, while cherishing their own so-called ‘language experiments’, or cheering all ‘ground-breaking, non-conformist, experimental’ authors as long as those authors’ sales-figures, media-exposure or prestige in the cocktail-circuit are great enough (read: ‘If the other hip people applaud, then I must not be seen to lag behind…’), invariably balked when one more modest than they, yet more courageous than many, had the audacity of using a word not found – oh dear, oh scandal, oh horror of horrors! – in the latest edition of the OED… (1)

It somehow always reminds me of that funny French General who vetoed the inclusion of the word ‘défaitisme’ in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française because this was a disposition totally alien to French soldiers…

Anyway: the latest bout of silly censure I received concerned my inclusion of the word ‘Camping’ in a recent post. How dare I use that, one of my readers challenged me in a furious comment. Did I not know that the officially permitted word for such an institution in the linguistic canon of the proud English-speaking nations is ‘Camp Ground’? Never mind that anyone who has ever travelled by other means than First Class Pullman Cars, luxury 6-door taxis and five star hotels, is aware that the word ‘Camping’ is what all Campers, Camp Ground Owners and Camping Guidebooks throughout the continent employ to indicate the sites in question, since it is shorter to write on a sign post, easier to pronounce, equally accessible to speakers of all languages and simply clear enough! No, it was WRONG, absolutely dead wrong! And it would seem that the use of this single taboo term was a deadly scriptural sin which not only disgraced but also disqualified the entire text. Needless to say: no breath was wasted by this grand inquisitor of correct spelling and orthodox vocabulary on the actual message of the post, its humour or its significance. None of that mattered. Linguistic purity is what makes the world go round! One wonders what would happen if Shakespeare or Gibbon were to rise from the dead with a new masterpiece under his  elbow… After all: both were lousy spellers and shockingly creative wordmongers…

What shall I say in answer to such silly allegations, dear readers? With what kind of precious stone must you retaliate when you get pelted with mud? Must I babble about language being a living organism, which constantly renews itself, no matter what the purists of the dictionary think or say? About the right of every native speaker to improve and refine that living language? About nobody having the right to tell me what to do, least of all the dry-brained pale-faced guardians of petrified linguistics who - burrowed snugly in their overheated Oxbridge studies and wallowing in their own mediocrity - bother the world with needless opinions nobody asked for? (2)

Naaah – forget about it! I will merely quote here the refreshing views of two wise men, who knew what they were talking about and had no fear of speaking out. The first of these is Charles Baudelaire, who on the subject of neologisms and lexical renewal famously said:

            If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

To which we may add:

If a newly coined term is good and useful, it should be a word. If it should be a word, we ought to use it. If we use it, it will become a word. (3)

No more needs to be said on that subject!

(1) Incidentally, I have also occasionally been taken to task because my sentences supposedly were too long. Can’t imagine why anyone would ever think so. But that’s another story, of which I will treat another time…

(2) Oh dear, no! Naturally I meant to write: ‘needless opinions for which nobody asked…’ Because, as everyone knows: this is nonsense up with which we all must put!

(3) From: ‘On the Death of the Dodo and the Bird of Nations’, in: The Collected Works of Alfred B. Mittington, volume xvii, p. 891.

First of May Gratitude

Thank you, my dear fans, family members and well-wishing detractors for the many birthday greetings I had the pleasure of receiving today! 

Of course, at my age (which out of modesty I will not reveal to any of you) one has grown a little jaded about the ominous date swinging around. But it is still better that it swings around than that it stops swinging, quoi?

I wish you all a happy, fruitful and most relaxed Labour Day! Like my dear mama had, all those many years ago!