I refuse to let politics destroy the Silly Season
On an early morning walk in the Surrey hills the other day, I spotted a puma lurking under a hedge. I shrugged, walked on and headed for home, ignoring all the dogs overtaking me on skateboards. These things don’t matter any more. The Silly Season has been abolished. We used to count on the press and television, in the absence of any other news, to devote July and August to stories about sightings of mystery beasts and to weird-looking vegetables. This year, however, they will be fully occupied reporting politics.
The famous Beast of Bodmin always used to have a prowl-on part in the summer, but it will be lucky to get a mention. You could say the Beast of Bodmin has become the elephant in the room. Wannabe celebrity big cats will miss their chance to appear in blurred photographs and there’s really no point in the Loch Ness Monster showing its face. Who needs the Loch Ness Monster when we have Nicola Sturgeon? Ostriches and rheas in captivity will shrug their shoulders and decide not to bother going on the run.
I got home from my morning walk and made breakfast and I happened to notice that my slice of toast, quite uncannily, bore the image of Donald Trump. I went ahead and ate it anyway.
Suddenly it occurred to me that we should not give up such a great British institution as the Silly Season without a fight. Amid the boom and clamour of politics, someone must stand up for the irrelevant, the peripheral and the inconsequential. Then I realised that person must be me. The country may be crying out for leadership, but it is also calling for pointless distraction. The puma I saw by the hedge was appealing to me for help and I am answering that call. Let the blurred big cats roam again. Pursuing my mission to bring the trivial to the people, I noticed a news report in the paper last week which would have received more attention in normal times. It said that the carrot curler is making a comeback. This gadget, looking like a pencil sharpener, produces coils of raw carrot that you can then use to decorate your food and pretend you are still living in the Seventies.
This will be a splendid addition to the kitchen drawer where we keep the pizza wheel, the boiled egg topper, the mango splitter, the fishbone tweezers, the olive stoner, the pineapple slicer and wedger, and the four unsatisfactory garlic presses. Take care not to confuse your tomato huller with your strawberry huller and, when baking, don’t use a spatula when you have a perfectly good bowl scraper. Ah, the wonderful world of spatulas. They come in a hundred different shapes and nearly as many colours. Are you a plastic or a beechwood spatula person?
There are some gadgets I am still looking for: I’ve always wanted an oven glove with a fitted smoke alarm and a plastic fish slice that utters a pitiful cry when it starts to melt. It would also be good to have a bottleopener that came to you when you whistled.
It’s such an adventure when you open the gadget drawer. Do you find, when you spend 10 minutes fumbling around, trying to track down the tin opener, that the first things you always lay your hands on are the lemon zester and the wooden honey dripper? Silly accident of the week: I was sitting in my armchair the other night watching television when the remote slithered off the arm of the chair and fell straight into the glass of red wine on the stool beside me. I fished it out quickly and dried it on kitchen towel, but it was no use, the TV was stuck on BBC Two and resisting all control. Remembering advice someone once gave me, I buried the remote in a bowl of paella rice.
The next morning, I tried again but the remote still didn’t work. After a lot of online palaver, I managed to order a new one, to be delivered in five days. That meant five evenings with only BBC Two, doomed to watch highlights of the day’s rain at Wimbledon.
It left me time to ponder. I wondered about the wine. Might the remote have worked if it had fallen into a crisp Chablis instead of a rather ordinary claret? I also wondered about rice. Would basmati have worked better? Could it be that the increase in sales of rice is actually the result of more people dropping their mobiles into the lavatory or tipping their laptops into the bath?