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Rainy Day, No Sunshine

It has been raining all day, the kind of rain that keeps threatening to stop but never does. Tennis has finally been abandoned so no doubt the rain will stop shortly, just as everyone has moved on.

Sitting typing, writing and generally whiling away the time watching the bird feeders.

The common birds appearing regularly in the garden include:

Blackbird, Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Cuckoo, Great Tit, Green Woodpecker, Herons, Jays, Magpies, Nuthatch, Pigeons, Robins, Rooks, Song Thrush, Sparrows, Wren

And since my feeders hang up in the tree (to keep them safe from cats) it’s always entertaining watching the robins and other ground feeders find their way, following other older birds to precisely the right branch from which to hop across to the food.

Food so close, yet so far

Alas the blackbird knew the route but remained just too large to access the food.

Food

Arancini

Having made risotto for a cold night, and being as yet entirely unable to cut down my recipes for just the two if us now that the girls are away at university, I thought I’d use the leftovers for arancini.

My risotto is always made wet i.e. on the soupy side of acceptable so it did take some drying off, but the recipe for arancini is so straightforward that it seems easy enough to include the risotto recipe as well.

Felicity Cloake's perfect arancini
 Felic

(Makes 10 medium balls)
800ml vegetable stock
250g arborio rice
½ tsp salt
Very generous pinch of saffron
50g parmesan or vegetarian alternative, grated
150g mozzarella, chopped into chunks
Fillings of your choice (meat ragu, pesto, sauteed mushrooms)
1 egg
170g plain flour
500g dried breadcrumbs
Vegetable oil, to cook

If you are using leftover risotto, skip this step. Otherwise, bring the stock to the boil in a medium pan, then tip in the rice, salt and saffron. Bring back up to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer on a medium heat until the stock has been absorbed. Stir in the grated parmesan and season to taste, then leave to cool completely, preferably in the fridge – you can spread it out on a tray to hasten this if necessary.

Stir the mozzarella into the cool rice and check the seasoning. Roll a tablespoonful between wet palms to form a ball of your chosen size. Poke a hole in the middle and spoon your filling in, then plug the hole with extra rice. Repeat until all the rice is used up.

Beat together the egg, flour and enough water to make a thick batter (about 175ml), and season. Put the breadcrumbs on to a plate.

Heat the oil in a deep pan, no more than a third full, to 170C, or until a breadcrumb sizzles on contact. As it is heating, dip each rice ball into the batter to coat, then into the breadcrumbs, heaping them on top until it is well covered.

Cook in batches until golden brown, making sure the oil comes back up to temperature between batches, and drain on kitchen towel. Sprinkle with a little salt while still warm and serve hot or cold

Food

Butternut and sage galette with orange caramel

For some unfathomable reason, my kitchen has no heating so in Winter it is the least hospitable part of the house. It means that at this time of year, I want to eat hot comforting food but I really don’t want to be cooking too much.

So inevitably I end up cooking too much and using the leftovers to make a meal on the following today, whether that’s boiled potatoes being roasted into a second meal, or as in the case roasted vegetable being used to make a tart on the following day. One of the great advantages of a cold kitchen is that the pastry inevitably turns out to be easy and very short. because it’s a free form tart, it’s quick and easy to knock up.

So either follow the recipe as written and cook the vegetables from fresh, or feel free to use it with any cooked vegetables left over from the ninth before. Butternut squash is great with oranges, but most root vegetables react well to a citrus lift.

 


Prep 30 min
Cook 1 hr 50 min
Serves 4

For the tart crust
100g plain flour
30g wholemeal flour
20g polenta
1½ tsp caster sugar
¾ tsp flaky salt
1 tbsp sage leaves, finely chopped (about 6 leaves)
80g unsalted butter, fridge-cold and cut into 1½cm cubes
20ml olive oil
60ml ice-cold water

For the filling
1 butternut squash, halved, deseeded and cut into ½cm-thick, skin-on half-moons (680g net weight)
2 carrots, peeled and cut into 1cm rounds 
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra to finish
2 tbsp finely chopped sage leaves, plus 3 whole, to garnish
2 tsp caraway seeds, toasted and rushed 
Flaky salt and black pepper
1 head garlic, top cut off to expose the bulbs
1 banana shallot, skin on, top trimmed to expose the flesh
2-3 oranges, zest finely grated, to get 1½ tsp, and juiced, to get 160ml
50ml maple syrup
125g mascarpone
1 small egg, beaten

Heat the oven to 240C (220C fan)/465F/gas 9. For the crust, whisk together the first six ingredients with a good grind of pepper. Add the butter and oil, then incorporate the butter by squashing each cube between your fingers – don’t over-work it, though: you want chunks throughout the dough, so only squash it lightly. Add the water, stir to combine, then use your hands to gather the dough together – it will be quite sticky.

Transfer to a very well-floured work surface and roll into a 28cm x 18cm rectangle, flouring the rolling pin, surface and pastry as you go. Fold the longer ends in towards each other, so they meet in the middle, then roll out once. Now fold in the shorter ends to meet in the middle, roll out once more, then fold in half, so you end up with a square. Use your hands to stretch the dough into a 14cm circle, then wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

While the dough is chilling, toss the squash and carrots in the oil, a tablespoon of chopped sage, the caraway, a teaspoon of salt and plenty of pepper. Spread out on two large oven trays lined with baking paper; don’t worry if there is some overlap. Drizzle the garlic and shallot with a little oil, wrap both separately in foil, and put on one tray.

Roast the butternut and carrots for 25 minutes, or until golden brown, then remove from the oven. Leave the garlic and shallot to roast for 15 minutes more, then remove and, once cool enough to handle, squeeze out the flesh and finely chop. 

Turn down the oven to 220C (200C fan)/425F/gas 7. Transfer the dough to a well-floured surface and roll out into a 30cm circle, dusting the rolling pin as you go. Gently lift the dough on to a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and refrigerate for another 30 minutes.

Put the orange juice and maple syrup in a medium saucepan on a medium-high heat and cook for about 10 minutes, or until it reduces to the consistency of a thick, sticky syrup.

In a small bowl, mix the mascarpone with the chopped roast garlic and shallot, the orange zest and remaining chopped sage. Season with a pinch of salt and plenty of pepper, and stir again to combine.

Spread the mascarpone mixture over the dough, leaving a 4cm border around the edge. Scatter the butternut and carrot haphazardly over the top, to cover, then drizzle over the orange caramel.

Fold the edges of the pastry up and over the filling, brush the exposed pastry with the egg, then bake for 30 minutes, until crisp and golden brown. Leave to cool for 20 minutes, then serve with the remaining sage leaves roughly torn over the top.

Home, Rants&Rambles

Money Gap

It’s quite trendy to talk about the gender gap but in the UK at least it’s still culturally difficult to talk about money, especially personal money. It is considered less rude (though still not advisable) to ask about someone’s sex life than their salary in my country, which might be just one of the reasons that women continue to be so badly served by the financial system.

Finance is a feminist issue. There are many reasons for why women are not well served by the financial sector, some historical many due to the sheer inertia and failure to adapt of a famously adaptable business sector.

The gender pay disparity is put down to the disruptive effects of raising a family on a woman’s career prospects and earnings potential. Whilst obviously making a family takes two people most usually representing both genders, the cost of having a family is borne almost exclusively by the woman . The astronomical cost of childcare and the stress of juggling work and family life are further factors — big problems, with no easy solutions.

But the imbalance in earnings is then further magnified by the “gender pensions gap”, which many women won’t fully wake up to for decades to come.

So what can be done? Maybe the biggest solution is raising awareness. The problems are not women’s “fault” and the consequences will fall on both women and the people in their lives, their partners, their parents, their children and friends – we are social creatures at the end of the day and society fails when we make one group disproportionately bear the cost.

Mistake 1: Not saving enough for retirement

The “gender pensions gap” is nearly 40% — more than double the gender pay gap. Let’s take defined contribution pensions. Workers build up a pot of savings over their lifetime, which can be accessed in retirement — but when you’ve spent it, that’s it. Women have a double problem here. Not only do they save less (factors include lower pay, the impact of career breaks and part-time working) they also live for longer. The obvious solution is saving more, but that can be tricky (see above).

Starting to save earlier will help. Higher earners could fund a pension for their partners. If you’re taking a career break to raise the kids, make sure that your partner is also funding pension contributions for you. They can contribute the maximum of £2,880 a year for a non-tax payer. Tax relief is added to your contribution so if you pay £2,880, a total of £3,600 a year will be paid into your pension scheme.

Older, wealthier readers could consider funding a stakeholder pension for their daughters and granddaughters. My daughters both have existing pensions, started on minimum contributions when they were born and annually topped up whenever we could – let time do the heavy lifting. Whilst at one level they will find it frustrating to have money set aside that they can’t touch until they’re at least 55, it should provide some comfort in their middle age when they’re busy funding their kids and struggling to save for themselves.

The UK government’s much-lauded policy of automatically enrolling workers into a company pension excludes millions of low earners and part-time workers unless they specifically opt in. Many of these will be women. Three-quarters of women have “no idea” how much pension income they need to retire and nearly half said they were relying solely on the state pension as they “couldn’t afford to pay into another pension”. This means women could be losing out on “free money” from an employer’s pension contributions too. The answer here is to be aware and prioritise pension saving appropriately. If your partner has a pension, then you need one as well.

Mistake 2: Pensions, marriage and divorce. The pensions system hasn’t kept up with modern family life.

Couples today are more likely to cohabit than get married or form a civil partnership, which can present serious problems if one of you dies — see the case of Denise Brewster in Northern Ireland who successfully took her late partner’s employer to court when they failed to grant her survivor’s pension benefits. Make sure that you have a will in place that specifies who inherits what in the sad event that one of you dies.

One obvious action point is to make sure all of your pension providers have an up-to-date “nominated beneficiaries” form. Since my partner doesn’t need my pension assets, my daughters are my nominated beneficiaries. Over time, when they become self-sufficient maybe this will become my granddaughters. If you are unmarried and cohabiting in a property over £325,000 in value, also consider the impact of inheritance tax if one of you were to die suddenly. Be aware and make plans.

Pensions assets are also often overlooked in divorce. Research by Royal London found that divorced women have, on average, one-third of the pensions wealth enjoyed by married couples. Pension assets should be regarded, along with the main residence, as assets to be valued and shared in the event of a divorce.

If you are financially independent by the time you marry, and hold significant assets either a residence or pension pots, then consider a pre-marital agreement. Make sure both of you take appropriate legal advice. It will only be regarded as advisory in the UK, and will obviously be adjusted to take into account the interests of any children, but with one in three marriages ending in divorce, usually to the financial detriment of women, it’s important to protect yourself.

Mistake 3: Not claiming child benefit If one half of a couple earns more than £60,000 then you lose your entitlement to child benefit.

Stay-at-home parents with a high-earning partner will lose out on valuable state pension credits if they fail to register online — even if they do not qualify for child benefit. Make sure you sign up — and while you’re at it, click here to sign the petition to reform the system and allow backdated claims.

Check your contribution record for the state pension via HMRC and keep your contributions up to date. The UK state pension is not overly generous at around £8,500 pa but it is worth having. It would cost a lot of capital to generate that amount of annual income, index linked from an annuity. It takes 35 years to accrue that full amount, but it is possible to “buy” missing years’ contributions to boost your record. The cost per year varies, but with each extra year worth around £240, you don’t have to live very many years post retirement age for it to be worthwhile

Mistake 4: Being too fond of cash

Another reason women can end up with less in retirement are the poor returns on cash savings compared to stock market-linked investments. HMRC statistics show that women save much more into cash Isas, where years of poor interest rates and inflation have hampered performance, whereas men are more likely to hold a stocks and shares Isa. The stats also show that women are more likely to favour cash for children’s Junior Isa accounts. Considering Jisas are designed to be invested for up to 18 years, returns on stocks and shares are likely to be far superior.

Mistake 5: Not having a ‘f*** off fund’

This term was defined by the US writer Paulette Perhach as having enough money to leave a bad job or failing relationship, and her article on the subject should be compulsory reading for all young people regardless of gender. In it, she chronicles how prioritising saving over spending causes short-term pain, but long-term gains in the form of financial independence — far more fashionable than a splurge in the mall.

If you have daughters or granddaughters consider setting them up with a savings account with enough “drop dead” money to give them some choices for the hard times.

Mistake 6: Not asking for a pay rise

The only good thing about the gender pay gap is that many companies are much more receptive to boosting women’s career prospects and pay packets. But if you don’t ask, you won’t necessarily get. And whilst asking for a raise, consider asking for training too, as we all need to invest in building our skills for the future as well as our retirement funds.

And if you’re not working, make sure that the income earned by your partner is fairly distributed to include adequate savings in your own name. Make sure that when they receive a pay rise, so do you and salt that away into a pension or other savings – value yourself and your contribution to the family at least as well as that of your partner.

Because you’re worth it!

Rants&Rambles

Sorry

What’s the worst part of apologizing?

A) Working up the courage to admit we were wrong.

B) Standing in front of the other person and saying that we’re sorry.

C) Waiting for a reaction from the other person after we’ve spoken.

You’re on your own for (A) and (C) but there’s some quite good advice out there about (B).

The winning suggestion is a simple “why-because-and” framework.

Start by looking the other person in the eye and say why you’re sorry. 

For example: “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your party …” or

“I’m sorry I handed in my work late …”

Explain the because behind your remorse, which is not the reason you screwed up, but the reason why it was a screw up – an apology is not actually all about you. 

For example: “… because I know you were so excited and wanted to celebrate…” or

“… because I know you need that detail to figure out the budget …”

Finish with an and. 

For example: “… and when you have another party, I’ll be there.”

or “… and I’ll send you the information tomorrow and I’ll be sure to meet all future deadlines.”

In cases such as a silver-wedding anniversary dinner, there is no obvious and to offer, but you can say something like “… and I’d love to celebrate with you and Mary in the future.”

Through your words and tone of voice, you should make it clear that you’ve thought about your actions and you’re truly sorry.

Which is obviously the key point, and maybe why we all struggle so much with apologies:

you need to genuinely feel sorry rather than simply trying to get through some social awkwardness. You need to understand and empathise with the person you have offended and/or upset because that is what apology means.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Brexit Lessons – Summary

Brexit means brexit: it means leaving an organisation and all that we’ve built up over 40 years and it will be both difficult and time consuming. It’s a big deal. People who have been told they should expect an easy negotiation, a straightforward transition with no need for a period of adjustment will react badly when that turns out to be untrue.

Sovereignty is not a one-way street; neither is brexit. Having chosen to leave, we cannot sensibly expect the EU to change, to alter its behaviour for us. We have chosen to become independent and compete with the EU: we need to accept being treated as independent competitors

The EU is very good at process, and we need to start taking the process seriously, to get much better at managing the process, if we expect to come out the other side of brexit with anything worth having.

It is not possible to suggest that there is only one way to leave the EU that happens to be the way the government of the day, or certain leave campaigners, choose to leave. The method, the distance from the EU etc were not on the ballot and it is dishonest, disenfranchising and fundamentally and unnecessarily limiting to insist otherwise. Where we end up, our post-brexit relationship with the EU will be as a result of political choices made by our government, not by the electorates vote in the referendum.

WTO rules are not good enough for the UK. It is not possible to argue both that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else……. AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable. .

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services. And make no mistake, the current plan sacrifices the UK’s trade in services where we run a healthy surplus, for limiting freedom of movement.

There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it and are simply not true.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave people in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face. The electorate need to be aware of the choices and inevitable trade-offs that the UK will need to make.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy. And we haven’t seen much honesty from either side of the debate in the UK so far. That has to change.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Nine lessons and No carols: Brexit Lesson 9

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy.

The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides.

The Prime Minister’s call for opponents of her deal to “be honest” and not simply wish away intractable problems like the backstop, which was always, and will remain, a central question in any resolution of the issue, is reasonable enough.

And at the extremes we have the “no dealers” quite happy to jump off the cliff, lying openly about the extent to which WTO rules provide a safety net if we did, and producing fantasy “managed no deal” options which will not fly for the reasons I have set out.

And the “people’s voters”: they want a second referendum with remain on the ballot – for which one can make a case, given the dismal place we have now ended up, and given possible Parliamentary paralysis, but must surely understand the huge further alienation that would engender amongst those who will think that, yet again, their views are being ignored until they conform.

Where is the great idea or plan to address that alienation?

And even now we can hear a Shadow Cabinet Member promising, with a straight face, that, even after a General Election, there would be time for Labour to negotiate a completely different deal – INCLUDING a full trade deal, which would replicate all the advantages of the Single Market and Customs Union.

And all before March 30th. I assume they haven’t yet stopped laughing in Brussels.

Too much of our political debate just insults people’s intelligence and suggests that every facet of Brexit you don’t like is purely a feature of only the Prime Minister’s version of it, rather than intrinsic to leaving.

The Prime Minister’s deal is obviously a bad deal. But given her own views and preferences, her bitterly divided Party and the negotiating realities with the other side of the table, I can at least understand that she is on pretty much the only landing zone she could ever reach.

Those aspiring to a radically different one owe us honest accounts, not pipedreams, of how they propose to get there, and the timescale over which they will.

But the dishonesty of the debate has, I am afraid, been fuelled by Government for the last 2½ years.

It took ages before grudging recognition was given to the reality that no trade deal – even an embryonic one – would be struck before exit, and that no trade deals with other players would be in place either.

Even now, though, the Prime Minister still talks publicly about the Political Declaration as if it defined the future relationship with some degree of precision, and defined it largely in line with her own Chequers proposal, when it simply does neither.

It is vague to the point of vacuity in many places, strewn with adjectives and studiously ambiguous in a way that enables it to be sold as offering something to all, without committing anyone fully to anything.

Any number of different final destinations are accommodable within this text, which was precisely the thinking in drafting it, to maximise the chances of it being voted through, when all the EU side was really determined to nail now was within the Withdrawal Treaty: rights, money and the backstop.

For the same reason – the desperate inability to acknowledge that it was going to take very many years to get to the other side of the Brexit process – we have had the bizarre euphemism of the “implementation period” after March 2019, when there is nothing to “implement”, and precisely everything still to negotiate.

I dislike the “vassal state” terminology, but anyone can see the democratic problem with being subject to laws made in rooms where no Brit was present and living under a Court’s jurisdiction where there is no British judge.

And if we are to avoid the backstop coming into force, we are now going to end up prolonging the transition, because the FTA won’t be done by the end of 2020, and the EU well knows the

U.K. won’t be keen on cliff jumping in the run up to an election.

We have had the several bizarre contortions over trying to invent a Customs proposal which enabled us to escape the Common External Tariff but still derive all the advantages of a quasi Customs Union. Even the all U.K. backstop proposal has ended up being called a temporary Arrangement, when we all actually know it to be a temporary Union, as nothing else could fly under WTO rules. But the U word is too toxic for polite company evidently.

On the backstop itself, it was obvious, reading the December 2017 Agreement document from outside Government that this must lead inexorably to where we have now reached.

There was no other endgame from that point.

But we got sophistry, evasions, euphemisms and sometimes straight denials at home, whilst in the EU, the PM and senior Ministers several times appeared to be backsliding on clear commitments as soon as they saw draft legal texts giving effect to agreements they had struck.

That deepened the distrust and if anything hardened the EU’s resolve to nail the issue down legally. And, from the apoplectic reaction to the Attorney General’s advice, which elegantly stated the totally obvious, you can now rather see why.

There is no point in my speculating here precisely on what might now get manufactured and its legal status. The EU is always very adroit at such exercises in solemnly reframing things which have already been agreed in ways that make the medicine slip down.

But however they re-emphasise their intention, which I believe, that the backstop should not be permanent, it is the very existence of it in conjunction with the cliff edge which will dictate the shape of the trade negotiations.

We may well now be beyond the point at which any clarification Declaration or Decision can sell.

And if we are, it’s largely because the whole conduct of the negotiation has further burned through trust in the political class.

That should force a fundamental rethink of how the next phase is conducted; whether this deal staggers, with some clarification, across the line in several weeks time and we go into the next phase with the cards stacked, or whether we have a new Prime Minister who attempts to reset direction, but will find, as I say, that whatever reset they attempt, rather a lot of the negotiating dynamics and parameters remain completely unchanged.

Either way, the final lesson is that we shall need a radically different method and style if the country is to heal and unify behind some proposed destination.

And that requires leadership which is far more honest in setting out the fundamental choices still ahead, the difficult trade offs between sovereignty and national control and keeping market access for our goods and services in our biggest market, and which sets out to build at least some viable consensus.

The time to lose ourselves in fairy tales has ended. Our politicians can no longer get away with strutting and fretting or with sound and fury. It’s time to wake up from the dream and face the facts.

Food

Breakfasts Pistachio, rose and strawberry buns

Every morning, rows and rows of fresh fruit greet us as soon as we leave Warren Street tube station.

The fruit-sellers are there come sun or dreadful rain, making the morning that much nicer and giving our day a colourful start, with mounds of apples, pears, persimmons and mandarins in autumn, British berries in the spring and all kinds of peaches in the summer.

Makes eight muffin-sized buns

Ingredients

For the basic bun dough

  • 70g unsalted butter, diced and at room temperature
  • 20g fresh yeast (or 1½ tsp dried yeast)
  • 1 whole egg
  • 30g caster sugar
  • 80-100ml milk
  • 300g strong white bread flour

Pinch of table salt Place the butter, yeast, egg, sugar and 80ml of the milk in a large mixing bowl, then top with the flour and salt. Use the dough attachment on your mixer or your hands to bring it all together to a smooth, shiny dough, adding the remaining 20ml of milk if it looks dry. Don’t worry if you still have some flecks of butter running through the dough; they will make your final bun super-light.

Once the dough has a nice texture, (after about 2-3 minutes with an electric mixer or 5-6 minutes working by hand), wrap the bowl in cling film and place in the fridge to chill for at least 2 hours. You can leave it there for up to 12 hours but not much longer or it will start to prove.

Ingredients For the sugar syrup

  • 100ml water 100g caster sugar
  • 1 tbs glucose or honey
  • 1 tbs rosewater

For the pistachio cream

  • 80g pistachios
  • 80g unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • 80g caster sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tbs plain flour
  • 8 tsp strawberry jam

To make the sugar syrup, heat the water, sugar and glucose/honey in a pan and stir to dissolve sugar. Bring to the boil, skim off any foam, remove from heat and reserve.

Blitz the pistachios in a food processor until they resemble breadcrumbs. Add all the other pistachio cream ingredients (except the jam) and pulse until they form a paste.

Butter an eight-hole muffin tin or eight individual pudding moulds. Remove the dough from the fridge and roll out on a lightly floured work surface to a rectangle of 40cm x 20cm. You may need to flip the dough once or twice to create a smooth, even rectangle, but try to work with as little flour as you can so as not to dry the dough out.

With a sharp knife, cut a 2 x 4 grid into the dough so that you have eight squares of 10cm x 10cm. Lift each square into a pudding mould or cup of the muffin tin and push it all the way down. Allow the excess dough to hang over the sides. Divide the pistachio cream between the squares, then top with a teaspoon of strawberry jam. Fold the corners over lightly to cover the filling. You can freeze these if you want to, but if you are ready to bake today, preheat the oven to 200C.

Allow the buns to prove in the muffin tin/moulds (30-40 minutes). You can tell they are proved when the little dough triangles on the top start poking up. Place in the centre of the oven and bake for 10 minutes, then turn them to bake evenly. Reduce oven to 180C and bake for another 10 minutes. Remove from oven. Brush generously with the sugar syrup laced with rose water and allow to cool slightly in the tin or moulds before serving.

Home, Rants&Rambles

Hoarding

In everyday life I am the opposite of a hoarder. At a certain level, “stuff” even my beloved books, becomes oppressive and I take great delight in sorting, ordering and chucking out (usually to some church fete or charity shop) the vast majority of it.

But I am considering hoarding, or to give it the more respectable name, “stockpiling” stuff for the brexit handover months of March/April. Attis time of the year. 70% of the UK’s fresh food is imported, and whilst I do not expect people to starve, I do think there may be empty shelves in supermarkets fro the first time in 40 years.

It isn’t so much a matter of essentials (though there are some I’m thinking of stocking) but rather a list of stuff I do not want to go without because of brexit.

The list starts with hygiene: toilet roll, sanitary products, toothpaste, mouthwash, deodorant, shampoo, soap, bleach, laundry detergent, washing liquid.

These things may never run short, but if they did life would become horrendous pretty quickly. They’re also easy to store.

Then it continues with basic medicines and supplies: paracetamol, ibuprofen, antiseptic spray and cream, vaseline, sudocrem, contraceptives.

And it moves onto basic foodstuffs for the spare freezer in the garage, fruit, vegetables and proteins mainly, but also ice cream and some party snack type food.

Before reaching basic store cupboard items: cereals, rice, pasta, lentils, beans, long life fruit juice and some cordials.

Not forgetting cat food and cat litter for the pets.

As the Chinese curse says: we are living in interesting times.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Nine lessons and No Carols: brexit lesson 8

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate.

At virtually every stage in this negotiation, the EU side has deployed transparency, whether on its position papers, its graphic presentations of its take on viable options and parameters, its “no deal” notices to the private sector to dictate the terms of the debate and shape the outcome.

A secretive, opaque UK Government, hampered mainly by being permanently divided against itself and therefore largely unable to articulate any agreed, coherent position, has floundered in its wake.

It is a rather unusual experience for the EU – always portrayed as a bunch of wildly out of touch technocrats producing turgid jargon-ridden Eurocrat prose up against “genuine” politicians who speak “human” – to win propaganda battles.

Let alone win them this easily.

But, in fairness, bruising experiences over recent decades as it has had to cope with demands for vastly greater transparency in its conduct of trade policy have forced Brussels to up its game.

Failure to do so would mean losing all public support for driving trade liberalisation and signing trade deals – which, whether U.K. politicians wish to believe it or not, is what the EU does more of than any other trade bloc on the planet at the moment.

There is absolutely no chance of doing deals with Japan, Canada, the US or Mercosur – or indeed, the UK when that moment comes – unless you can explain comprehensibly to your publics what is in it for them.

The battle for free trade policies – always difficult in the US – has, after all, gone rather convincingly backwards in both major US parties in the last 20 years. Alas, much of the Tory Eurosceptic Americanophile Establishment appears not quite to have noticed that.

To be clear, this is not an argument that by applying lipstick to the pig of the Chequers proposal, or the proposed deal now on the table, the course of history would have been changed.

You can’t redeem a bad deal by advertising on Facebook.

But the negotiation process, politically, in and beyond Parliament, had to be different from the outset. And it will have to be different at the next stage. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave most supposed insiders, let alone a much wider public, in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face.

At extremely sensitive stages negotiators of course have to disappear into a “tunnel”, to have any safe space in which to explore potential landing zones. That is inevitable.

But this Government has repeatedly failed to explain to a wider audience what the real constraints and trade-offs are in arriving at the sort of landing zone the Prime Minister views as some combination of desirable and unavoidable.

And because of that choice, the electorate are vastly unprepared and frankly bitterly disappointed by each and every compromise the UK makes as part of those negotiations.