TAUREANS, GO TO BED!
The Pedant Class and Your Stars
THE Banting craze, far from flopping like an over-egged soufflé, has risen into the grotesque proportions of an over-yeasted loaf. With its spread have come numerous requests to reprint this open letter to a certain paleophiliac professor, originally published in April 2014 but still relevant to cake eaters.
DEAR Tim Noakes. Are you Timothy, Timoteo, or Timeus? Perhaps you are Timnath, which means “forbidding”. But you choose Tim. You have carved the crusts off your name, in the way that you seek to trim the dough from our diets.
I do not fear your sacking of our bread bins. Many have neither bread nor bins to start with, so your message falls on stony ground there. What I fear is that, having slaughtered all the bakers and torched all the granaries, you and your army of carbohydrate-hating crusaders — crazed by the smell of charred toast and screaming the war cry “Pally-o!” — will turn your attention and your bloody knives to language.
If you have your way, all words related to farinaceous products will be banned and those who utter them condemned as heretics. Breadwinners will be burnt at the steak unless they call themselves beefwinners, or chickenwinners.
The French, robbed of their boulangeries and patisseries, will be hardest hit. Any queen who lets her subjects eat cake will have her head lopped off with a poultry cleaver. As for the Romans, let no man ask to borrow their ears, lest he is mistaken for a lover of wheat.
The phrase “government loaf” is already obsolete (it used to be thick and white), but parliament will not escape your purge. We will hold elections without a voters roll, because you will certainly ban the word “roll”. Americans will rediscover buttocks: anyone who says “buns” will be flogged. Don’t even think of calling any woman a tart: comparing a person to a carb-laden foodstuff will be akin to hate speech.
Under the new dispensation, parties seeking reconciliation will come together to break bones, not bread. Workers might demand a slice of the cauliflower, but not the pie. Never the pie. Pie is right off the chart. A successful businessman will have a finger in every crustless quiche: he can have his hake and eat it.
Television shows will also suffer. Krusty the Clown will be fired from The Simpsons and replaced by Fatty the Fool. Rebel artists will be punished. Bands called Bread, Bongo Maffin, Limp Bizkit and the Red Velvet Underground will have their albums put on a pyre along with travel guides to the Sandwich Islands, novels called Catcher in the Rye and films called Life of Pi or Layer Cake. Jazz will be forbidden, in case the trumpets make us think of crumpets.
Just wait till you get your meat hooks into religious texts. You will strike the word “alone” from the statement “man shall not live by bread alone”, thus making it unlawful to live by bread, or on it. The first book of Chronicles will be excised from the Old Testament, because “begat” sounds too much like “baguette”. The devout will pray: give us this day our daily sashimi.
At the risk of incurring your wrath, I have to say that this breadbashing goes against the grain. Can we butter you up to stop you from this grisly course of action? Will you be tempted by a feathery cheesecake, perhaps, or a sugary spoonful of semolina pudding?
No? Then on your own loaf be it. Wheat shall overcome. We are bread to rule and we will rise. We shall not crumble. We shall march on the meatheads, and our anthem shall be Pete Seeger’s 1955 protest song: Where Has All the Flour Gone? LS
A fresh batch of Pedant Classes will begin next Sunday.