Daniel’s Bonding like a man

Manners maketh man, so it is said. Or at least it was, many centuries ago, by one William Horman, a former head of Eton and Winchester College in ye olde Tudor tymes in a best-seller of the day called the Vulgaria. This immensely promising title actually hid the fact that the said slim volume was full of proverbs and thoughtprovoking quips and quotes handy for boring the ears off ye olde Tudor neighbours down ye olde Tudor taverne of an evening.

Vulgaria, at the time, having the meaning of “everyday things”, rather than anything more exciting about the home life of Henry VIII.

Old Bill, having hit the top of the charts with this page-turner, might well have gone on to produce a companion volume detailing what didn’t make a man. Which, according to one opinionated TV presenter who shall remain mercifully nameless, is carrying your newborn in a papoose.

Daniel Craig, no less, impersonator of big, butch 007 and practically a national treasure, was given stick by this wazzock for being seen out and about with his baby daughter Ella strapped to his manly chest.

How many grown women would have dreamed of being in young Ella’s position? It is not my place to comment. Suffice to say that the wazzock deemed it “emasculating” for James Bond.

And was, instantly, roundly chastised by many dads of this parish, quite secure in their masculinity, thank you very much and happy to carry – and be seen carrying – their little ones in any fashion at all. Such measured responses were beyond me, I have to say.

I was with comedian Harry Hill and the shaving foam pie with which he publicly decorated the smug fizzog of the pundit in question.

Now, in spite of his portrayal of an imaginary yet iconic character in a series of entertaining thrillers, I am sure Mr Craig has no pretensions to representing the ultimate male, whatever (and it’s a big question) that might be. He’s just getting on with the day job while his wife has a bit of a lie down.

But to emasculate someone surely indicates that the subject has the necessary masculine qualities to lose. Like, perhaps, strength of mind as well as body, common sense, a caring attitude to family and last but not least, male genitalia? Daniel Craig, on the evidence, and the dads’ army who backed him up, surely possesses these elements in abundance. Whatsisface off the telly? Maybe not so much…

Curried mac and cheese

Food never being far from my mind (or my mouth), I feel it necessary to add to the greater gaiety of nations caused by my revelation last week of the existence of the description “hangry”, the state, I am sure you recall, of feeling angry because you’re hungry.

Now I find that, not only have I been cavalierly shortening my already somewhat curtailed fuse by not eating enough and not often enough, but I have also been grating my cheese the wrong way.

The first question that sprang unbidden to my mind here, I have to admit, was not: “Really? What is it I should be doing? Tell me all at once!”

It was: “Who knew there was a right way and a wrong way to grate cheese?” And secondly (hardly a slim shard of extra mature behind my first knee-jerk reaction): “Who cares?” The answer, it would appear, lies with a company called Tastemade UK which has put up a recipe video for curried macaroni and cheese.

Now, before I go on to follow the thrust of this week’s deeply significant symposium (and there is a kind of mad logic to all of this, stick with me), what is all that about?

I am a great believer in people enjoying what they like in all aspects of living, but especially where eating is concerned.

Whatever, as they say, melts your particular cheese. In this case, however, I feel I have to take issue. I love curry. I love macaroni cheese. Just not anywhere near each other at the same time.

CURRIED? MACARONI CHEESE? No. Just no.

However, let us gloss over the rights and wrongs of this particularly rich and strange concoction.

As did most of the viewers of this presentation who ignored the actual dish being offered and homed in on the fact that whoever was making it was grating cheese by using a grater lying on its side instead of sitting up vertically.

What is going on here? I think I have the answer…

That way, you see, the cheese collects in the grater, “fewer random strands drop out” and “it makes less of a big old mess.”

It is all, it would seem, about “control of the cheese”. And there you have it, the hidden agenda of this seemingly harmless video.

If there is a better – and more suitably cheesy – metaphor for Brexit, I haven’t come across it.

Of course, you’d have to be careful what cheese you chose. Hard or soft? Seriously Strong and stable? Or a nice slice of Passport Blue?

Grater love, after all, hath no man…

I was with Harry Hill and the shaving foam pie with which he publicly decorated the smug fizzog of the pundit

Man’s man Daniel Craig who was mocked for carrying his baby Ella – by wife Rachel Weisz – in a papoose.