101 YEARS OLD AND CAN TELL SHOULDERS FROM RUMPS...

IONCE heard tell of a travel agent who mistakenly sent clients to a city in Denmark instead of the Mediterranean island they wanted. He was dismissed from his job because he could not tell his Aarhus from his Elba. Telling rumps from shoulders however is a different matter entirely.

According to a survey just conducted for the delicious people at Donald Russell (donaldrussell.com), 61 per cent of meat-eaters cannot identify the correct location on a cow of a rump steak and only 36 per cent know that a pork shoulder steak comes from the shoulder of a pig. I would have thought that in the latter case the words “pork” and “shoulder” gave the location away, so I thought I should find out more about the well-informed 36 per cent and headed for my database of surveys conducted this year where I discovered the following:

36 per cent of people feel rushed and pressured for time for more than half the working week;

36 per cent of workers across Europe begin their working day between 8 and 9am.

My admiration of the 36 percenters grew as I read these items. Getting up early and working so hard, they could easily be excused falling asleep and being flustered when asked where pork shoulders come from, yet they remain alert enough to give the right answer. Furthermore, 36 per cent of travellers have felt disadvantaged when taking a holiday alone and the Donald Russell survey also tells us that 36 per cent of people like their steak well done.

With those facts in mind, we should hardly be surprised at their feelings about taking a holiday alone. They probably want to order a well-done pork shoulder steak and have no one to ask what the words for “pork” and “shoulder” are in the local lingo.

Furthermore, despite these difficulties, 36 per cent of people say they are happy most of the time. I imagine that is the time when they are neither stressed out at work nor on holiday having to eat food they do not want because they lack a companion with the linguistic aptitude to order pork shoulder.

All this may also tie in with the fact that 36 per cent of people say they may pretend to like songs only because their partner does. These poor people are so desperate to have their partners come on holiday with them to act as translators that they’ll say anything to keep the relationship sweet.

Moving from pork shoulder identifiers to those 61 per cent of people who cannot find a cow’s rump, my metasurvey database again adds valuable information:

61 per cent of single women are happy with their unmarried status;

61 per cent of non-UK nationals are from the EU;

61 per cent of people eat much the same foods every day.

The solution for the rump-losing 61 per cent is therefore simple: when they have decided where to go on holiday in Europe, they can marry someone from that country, who will be made even happier when they are introduced to a properly translated rump steak or pork shoulder instead of their usual fare.