About 3 weeks ago I was at a dinner party at some friends. Was lovely. One woman had just produced a ‘healthy eating’ cookery book, which is fab. We had a copy and actually ate some of the… errrr… pages. Well, the recipes, apparently. As pictured on those pages. All good, fab and quite delish. And as we spoke about food, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, one lady spoke of how, when a child, her mother used to serve up ‘voorscht’. You might call it ‘salami’. But to do so would be to give an unwarranted Italian cullinariness to what is actually an abused German word for an abused, enlarged ‘sausage’. Wurst. Abused? Yes, because ‘w’ in German is pronounced ‘v’ (Bratwurst, Kaiserwurst, etc), particularly in salamis, and if you turn it into Yiddish, it becomes phonetic because Yiddish was never a written language. (A fact I learned this morning as the abandoned tennis match due to rain became a lesson in the history of Yiddish, and cappuccinos). And this lady’s mum would serve her, for dinner(!!) some voorscht, possibly even fried, with eggs!!!! Today, such levels of ultra-processed, high-fat, sodium-laden, additive-riddled meat(ish) would, if served to a child, have social services round faster than you could say Jimmy Saville. Its awful stuff. The colour gives it away. Natural food wasn’t meant to be that colour.

And for 3 weeks, I’ve barely thought of anything else. Because my mum, either ‘God bless her’, or possibly, ‘God forgive her’, used to feed me such things as well. And these were the types of food we did not eat with any reluctance. These were the comfort foods, the favourites, the ‘special’ things. I wasn’t even totally sure they still made it. Because quite frankly, they probably shouldn’t. It was perfectly acceptable when life expectancy was pretty short anyway, but now we all want to live to 120 you’d think voorscht would be banned. Yet I walked into my local kosher butcher and there it was. My mate the butcher (he’s everyone’s mate, other than vegans) even gave me a ‘taster’. And I bought some. Figuring once every 15 years shouldn’t be fatal. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Or not!!!

But it was a celebration. To mark a special event. That being Spurs wonderful ‘thrashing’ of West Ham. The match was a three-way event. A cross between a football match, the Keystone Kops and Rocky (parts 1 and 2). And yes we ‘thrashed’ them because the score was 4-1 and that’s a thrashing. But it was filled with what neutrals call ‘excitement’ and what Spurs fans call ‘panic’. Then there was the sending off. Initially only given a yellow card, Mohammed Kudus attack on 3 of our players was correctly upgraded to a red for ‘violent behaviour’. He kicked Mickey van der Ven whilst he was on the ground, then pushed him in the face. He, possibly inadvertently, head-butted Richarlison on his way round to pushing Pap Sarr in the face too. He may even get a 6-match ban instead of the usual 3 because of so many ‘events’ which may be counted individually. I’d give him 9 months, nasty little shit.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx