The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Whipped into a storm over fats
In the immortal words of Maxwell Anderson, set to plaintive musical accompaniment by the incomparable Kurt Weill, it’s a long, long, time from May to December – and the days grow short, when you reach September… And just how we’ve reached September already is beyond me, although it comes round every year at the same time, just like Christmas.
In fact, more and more like Christmas, as both seem to inveigle themselves into the calendar earlier and earlier, to no good effect.
But with the silly season of news and non-news (isn’t it strange how we’ve all started to sound faintly like Donald Trump?) still upon us, I’m delighted to note that old favourites are still rearing their ugly heads, and other parts of their sub-standard anatomy, in the shape of such “news” (or same-old, same-old) that those of us who eat a fair whack of hitherto forbidden saturated fats are more likely to live longer than those who don’t. Healthy... honestly! U-turn anyone? Or the kind of thing that’s been pretty self-evident all along if you just stuck to your guns and your love of cheese and ate most things in moderation anyway?
With that in mind, I intend to promote my own, personalised version of the Fitbit, that wrist-borne device that tells you how many steps you have taken/should take in any given time and has taken over from jogging and Jane Fonda videos as the method of choice of bullying the population into largely unnecessary movement.
I’m thinking of calling it the Fatbat. Far more appropriate to my lifestyle.
But back to the fats. I dunno, just when you thought it was safe to go back into the non-sparkling water, they hit you with this as gospel truth.
Then they up the ante, once you’ve decided to celebrate the imminent end of summer (if you spotted when it actually started in the first place) with the usual – and usually widely available – ice-cool seasonal treats. Harvest That means giving out the information that, following spring and summer shortages of First World essentials such as hummus and avocados, we are about to start feeling the effects of a poor Madagascan vanilla pod harvest.
No more tell-tale little black dots in your Carte D’Or; the world’s favourite flavour is under threat and I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to the husband, who has never knowingly consumed another flavour of ice cream in his considerable puff.
In his world, it is known as ABS – short for Absolutely Bog Standard which means no fruit, no chocolate sprinkles and no long wafery things stuck in the top like politically incorrect sweetie cigarettes my generation was sold as part of the infamous childhood “penny tray”.
All vanilla or nothing at all for him; which looks like the stark choice if the scaremongering food gurus are to be believed.
Me, I will admit to a bit of a passion for pistachio and the type of chocolate and chilli mix I once tasted in the backstreets of Florence.
Let’s face it, where ANY type of food is concerned, if it’s good enough for the Italians, it’s good enough for me, although the Scots have a bit of previous on mangling menu choices. Exotic? After all, can the nation that invented Irn Bru and Vimto and loves to slap a bit of tinned pineapple atop an otherwise blameless (if deep-fried) pizza afford to be sniffy over “exotically” flavoured ice creams?
Take Bubblegum and Nutella (or in these days of the walnut-less Walnut Whip), maybe just plain Ella.
Vanilla has, of course, wider meanings in the world of today, being used by those in the know to describe the more traditional types of after-dark activities between consenting adults, usually not found between the sheets of 50 Shades of Grey.
Having recently read (back to the silly season again, apart from the fact some poor soul actually shuffled off this mortal coil) of a festival of kinkiness taking place in (of all settings) Tunbridge Wells, I have now realised there may be more to the hitherto sainted existence of the perhaps more than aptly-named – and definitely vanilla – Mr Whippy.