The late and the very late

I seem to get annoyed so very easily these days, and by such trivial things. Bigger things don’t seem to bother me in the same way, the big things worry me and concern me but do not irritate me like the trivia do.
One current gripe is TV advertising and the way that they set and describe prices. What once was say five hundred pounds has now become four hundred and ninety nine pounds; irritating enough but when spoken is has become just four nine nine. Is the language becoming digitised along with everything else? I can see no justification for this trend but the practice is firmly embedded now and seems unlikely to change.
Another cause of my discontent lies in the media as a whole, and refers to perpetrators of crimes and also their victims. It seems now that should you be unfortunate enough to be murdered, robbed, raped or pillaged, you are judged according to your way of making a living. Beth Scroggins is never referred to as simply Beth Scroggins, she has to beBeth Scroggins, solicitors clerk. Why? Why not beth Scroggins, lovely girl, or Beth Scroggins stamp collector, or even just plain and simple Beth Scroggins. I once saw an ad in a local Portsmouth paper, offering a job in a Tampax factory as a fitter. Imagine that. It would be bad enough being murdered but then being referred to as Bill Sykes, tampon fitter would compound the misery.
We as a society seem obsessed with success that is measured in terms of our earning potential, and in the eyes of the press our worth is not in who we are but in what we do to make a living. When I am murdered, probably for irritating the wrong person, will I be reported as unemployed or as a retired teacher, ex farm hand, ex factory worker, ex fruit picker, ex Portsmouth Football club sweeper, ex barman or what? I think that Corpse would be more appropriate.

Cheese on toast

I love to cook. When i go out to eat, I find myself analysing the dishes that I enjoy and trying to work out the ingredients and the methods used by the chef. I then take those ideas and attempt to replicate them at home. I read cookery books and steal ideas from them too, but when it comes to cooking, I rarely follow a recipe. I see cooking as a creative art and love to invent and tweak dishes. Mostly it works quite well and most people consider my food acceptable at worst. Good food need not be expensive, and most things that I prepare are done on a low budget.
Not long ago, I went with the family to Pizza Hut for lunch. I am renowned for my attitude to pizza, which I often refer to as cheese on toast, which fundamentally it bears a striking resemblance to, though in the latter there is more cheese. A pizza may look wonderful when it arrives at the table, but my word what a mark up in price. A handful of dough is flattened, baked and smeared with tomato slurry, various scraps are thrown on and the whole thing is baked again for a few minutes, and for that you can pay up to ten pounds. A rapid analysis suggest that the ingredients could cost up to a pound, unless of course you are buying in bulk, in which case you can probably halve that. Ok they taste nice but why are we prepared to pay such inflated prices for something so simple?
Try lightly toasting some bread, smearing it with tomato puree, sprinkling some grated cheese, some chopped olives or anything else that takes your fancy, popping it under the grill and voila - faux pizza, cheap and cheerful.

Hair

I have been listening to the soundtrack from Hair. It was a wonderful show, and in the sixties it was full of hope, colour, freshness and melody as well as protest and pathos.
The 1960s did seem a time when a generation looked at the rotten world of politics and through protest, both physical and in song, hoped to change the world for the better. Let the sun shine in was the mantra and many believed that it would happen.
Yes some changes did take place, there was a break away from the previous generation and the greyness of post war life. Pop music became a phenomenon, fashions and lifestyles slowly changed and there was a sense of liberation and optimism that now seems so misplaced.
The planet is still polluted, there are more wars going on than ever, black people are still seen as inferiors by huge parts of the American population, ignorance and apathy are rife, and still the politicians bleat on about how much better their policies are than others.
We are in a worse mess than we were post war. Yes then the country was in deep debt, the population living largely in basic accommodation and yet there was that ray of hope that things would get better. It seems now that things can only get worse, and still the men in suits are making decisions that feather their own nests at the cost of the rest of us as well as the planet upon which we depend. It is not the planet that needs saving, it is us.