Pies

Pies

Nigel Slater’s picnic pie recipe, for potato onion and anchovy pies makes twelve small pies. There’s cheese in there too (in the ingredients, not in the title given to the pies) but otherwise no surprises. Pastry, filling, twelve hole muffin tray, oven, that sort of thing.

As opposed to Rich’s chicken and mushroom pie:

Makes one pie. Serves: one. Take one EC pastry mountain. Line an above-ground swimming pool with pastry. Bung in enough boneless chicken to half-fill, enough boxes of mushrooms to bring up to three-quarters full, top up with enough chicken soup to float a battleship. Find the world’s biggest oven and one of those vehicles for moving rockets from the silo to the launchpad.

Cook on gas mark six for forty five minutes. Maybe longer. Check by inserting a skewer scaffold pole to see if it is cooked through. Remove on a forklift and serve. Knife and fork at a pinch, fork and shovel may be more appropriate.

Rich gets my vote. That’s a proper pie, right there, mate.

Thoroughly confused

Will Self was questioned by police while out walking with his son. The whole story confuses me. Most of all because Self is quoted as writing in the Mail on Sunday. Exactly. Whatever else anyone’s opinion may be, without a doubt Self has a brain. The Mail does not require or encourage brain.

The most confusing aspect of the whole thing is that the police mobilised at all, and mobilised a specialist officer from miles away, on the say-so of a security guard who overheard Self and his son discussing their walk and had concerns about what he overheard and how far in his opinion they had to cover.

We’ve personal experience of this sort of thing:

“Which way to so-and-so?”

“The bus stop is…”

“But walking…”

“Way too far to walk.”

Only to find the hour, hour and a half, all too easy. We route marched kids for miles every morning with dog or dogs before school and work and whatever. They have these things called legs with muscles in that allow them to kick on under their own steam. Regardless of what security guards or others who need a bus for anything over half a mile might think.

Will Self is, understandably, between cheesed and incandescent, but, I think, does himself no favours in casting himself as a victim who shouldn’t be ““treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever”. He lashed out at a national attitude in which “paedophile hysteria... seems to warp people’s reason. Can there be a more disturbing parable of the Britain we have become?”

The chief executive of the Bishop Burton College, the security guard’s boss,  Jeanette Dawson, has said he had acted out of “concern” because the two ramblers were “a long way from their intended destination”.

No apology. Good job of backing your security bloke. Otherwise poor.

Yesterday, before playing cricket, and the day before, I’ve taken the dogs on about 90 minute walks, despite being in the near grave-dodger bus pass age group, and despite limping for the majority of those miles. What is a long way to some isn’t all that far to others. Good on you and your son, Will. Forget the victim rubbish, attack a police force that can’t or won’t walk or run any distance themselves to put a security guard’s opinion into context. Take them on.