If you remember, last time I left you on a cliff-hanger: Did I go to Bottom Pub with the crowd, or did I respect my 25 year old ban, and stay away? Sorry, you�ll have to wait until next time for the answer to that. I have something topical to discuss this week. That is to say, it was topical when I wrote it. Subsequently, the UNRV website fell into its long coma. It�s no longer topical, but you can read it anyway:-

I�m not sure just how much this news has filtered into other countries, or even if the problem extends to mainland Europe, but there was only one story in the media in the UK of late (at the time of writing), and that is the Horsemeat Scandal. Apparently, criminal gangs have been infiltrating the meat supply chain, and supplying horsemeat instead of beef. This has been happening on a scale that is quite dizzying. You have to admire the sheer logistical effort that allows them to supply that quantity of any meat, let alone whilst seemingly remaining �under the radar� for quite a long time. I can�t help thinking that if they were capable of using these management skills in legitimate business, they could really make some serious money.

The horsemeat tended to find its way into ready meals with a high minced beef content (or claim to have a high minced beef content); burgers, lasagne, that kind of thing, and seemingly no food giant or supermarket was immune. Huge amounts of food was removed from shelves. So much that it makes you wonder where all the beef that would normally be produced to go into these foods had actually gone.

Now that is a terrible thing, and I�ve told you about it, and that�s as far as I want to go with the scandal itself. It�s the reaction of Joe Public that bemused me. They were horrified. Not horrified that they could no longer have any confidence that what they thought they were eating wasn�t what they were actually eating (which is what they should be truly horrified about). No . . . what really horrified them deep down to their very core was the thought that they might have eaten horsemeat. Now I know that my ample frame is testament to the fact that I�m not a picky eater, so I may not be best qualified to sympathise with that reaction. I have eaten horse, in a very pleasant little bistro in Nice�s Vielle Ville. It was very tasty. Very lean, slightly sweeter than beef; on the whole, not a low quality meat. In fact, I remember as a poor student regularly going down to the supermarket and buying a stack of 30 �value� burgers for a pound. I would have been delighted had I known there was anything in there as high quality as horsemeat.

It�s not all black and white

Looking at the title of this section, you might guess (or hope?) that maybe I�m about to blog about the latest �chick-*or*� bestseller, �50 Shades of Grey�. I am not. Don�t get me wrong, I have many insightful, amusing, controversial, and no doubt down-right risqu� things to say about �50 Shades�. But that is not the subject of this particular blog. I am only prepared to blog about �50 Shades� on request; so if you�d like me to cover that particular Magnum Opus, just ask, and I will. No, the subject of this blog section (�blog-ette� if you will, or maybe �blogella�) is the good old Black and White Minstrels. For those too young or too foreign to know about the Black and White Minstrels, they were a sort of song and dance troupe, popular in the sixties and seventies, consisting of men who would �black up�, but then give themselves huge white mouths (like a clown�s mouth may be red) and round white eyes. There may have been more than one dance-troupe, I don�t know . . . it may have been a . . . what�s the word? . .. �genre� of entertainment (that�s not the word!) There may have been huge gangs of these men roaming around the piers of England, offering post-bingo entertainment to holidaymakers. Anyway, their numbers are irrelevant to this blog. The key point is that you don�t see them anymore. At some stage it became racially insensitive to �black-up� for reasons of entertainment (soldiers attempting a night raid on a Taliban stronghold would still be fine). �That�s all well and good,� you say. �That�s cultural progress.� �Black people were probably never threatened or insulted by this sort of thing, but where racial intolerance is concerned it pays to err on the safe side.� And I would tend to agree . . . anything that helps me stay out of fights scores highly in my book. But that raises a question: What about that most ancient and venerable of thespian institutions, the Pantomime Dame. Surely if blacking-up for entertainment is racist, then dragging up for entertainment must be Trans-genderist, mustn�t it? And yet we not only tolerate it, we love it . . . take our kids to see it and everything. I dressed up as one once � had the time of my life. This whole blog was leading up to that one question, and I don�t even care about the answer. If there�s any real truth, it�s that this motley isle has a baffling culture where nothing makes sense if you try to analyse it. I, for one, intend to sit back and enjoy the ride.

�Oh, no you don�t!�

Oh yes I do.