Barmy Britain
Page 8
Western Morning News
The league table of British foods which have had the biggest impact on worldwide cuisine:
Worcester sauce
Cheddar cheese
Yorkshire pudding
Clotted cream
Black pudding
English mustard
Scones
Salad cream
Mint sauce
Jellied eels
Daily Telegraph
Mrs. A. Maurice’s first efforts at baking bread were not a total success. When a TV ad came on extolling a bread ‘Just like mother makes’, her children pleaded: ‘Please don’t buy it Mummy.’
Daily Mail
Dr K. R. Whittington, of Cambridge, attempted to cook porridge in a coffee percolator when in student digs in the 50s. His landlady was not amused when the contents erupted ‘volcano fashion’ into her piano on which the percolator was standing.
The Times
A Times reader expressed surprise when his electric kettle came with instructions that it was to be used only for boiling water. His letter was followed by one from hotelier Martin Armistead, of Ickford, Buckinghamshire, saying: ‘I have seen kettles in hotel bedrooms that have been used to boil eggs and even cook a curry. Perhaps the most imaginative was the trouser press used to reheat pizza’.
The Times
Mark Brightman told of a student who attempted to heat a can of baked beans in an electric kettle.
The Times
A packet of nuts on a flight to the US carried the instruction: ‘Open the packet. Eat nuts.’
Jo Morrison, London. The Times
The question is: Why, after eating asparagus, does one’s pee smell so extraordinary? One London club had for many years a notice reading: ‘During the asparagus season, members are requested not to relieve themselves into the umbrella stand.’
Guardian
My husband gave up on the bread machine immediately he realised that the bread did not come out sliced and wrapped in polythene.
Gloria Gillott from Cambridge in The Times
A jar of mincemeat I bought carried the following message: ‘The contents are sufficient for a pie for six persons or 12 small tarts’
David Morris-Marsham, SW12. The Times
A recipe of breathtaking complexity for making beans on toast comes from the Heinz stable. It requires a slice of bread 1.56cm thick from an uncut white loaf, 9.3g of unsalted butter stored at 16.8 degrees centigrade and 280g of beans heated to 64 degrees centigrade. Use an oven grill and not a toaster and when the desired colour is reached, leave to stand for 1 minute 8 seconds. Spread the butter to achieve a uniform seepage of 2.13mm.
Guardian
Lee and Mary Humphrey, both 84, have eaten at McDonald’s every day for 17 years. They even moved house to be within walking distance of their local branch in Eastbourne, Sussex. They turn up at 11am without fail for a double hamburger and fries to share. They have had the same meal 6,000 times.
Sun, under the headline: I’M LOVIN’ IT
Basil Marcuson writes to Simon Hoggart about a family he saw on the Tube. Mother and father were seriously obese and junior was well on his way. He heard the mother say: ‘No, you can’t have any more sweets. You’ll spoil your McDonald’s.’
Guardian
In a week when newspapers were full of scary stories about how salt is bad for you, one of Britain’s oldest women celebrated her 110th birthday. To the undoubted horror of health police, Mary Brown, of Godalming, Surrey, put her longevity down to having an inquiring mind, not driving, and enjoying plenty of salt on all her food.
Daily Telegraph
Another defiant old timer celebrated her 100th birthday with a cake decorated with candles spelling out 1-0-0. When the candles were lit, Beatrice Langley, of Croydon, stepped forward and lit her fag off one of them. She has been a smoker since she was eight. STILL FULL OF PUFF, said the Guardian headline.
Guardian
The world’s poshest grocery store – Fortnum and Mason – introduced baked beans in their Piccadilly emporium in 1886.
The Times
One of Terry Wogan’s fans came across a Senior Citizen Special Breakfast: two eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast, £1.99.
A woman ordered the Special, but said: ‘I don’t want the eggs’.
The waitress said that in that case the breakfast would be £2.49 – ‘because you’re ordering a la carte’.
‘OK’, said the customer, ‘I’ll take the Special at £1.99’.
‘How do you want your eggs?’
‘Raw and in the shell’, said the customer.
She was served the raw eggs as requested – and took them home.
Sunday Telegraph
Fanny Craddock, once the grand dame of TV cookery, campaigned against artificial flavourings and fertilisers. She fed her tomatoes on a diet of tea and pee (dubbed Madam’s Tonic).
Daily Telegraph
Steve Hawkes, retail correspondent of The Times, writes: ‘Britons are embracing the Government’s five-a-day message as never before – that’s one cheeseburger, medium fries, a Coke, ice cream and, go on then, chicken nuggets on the side.’
The Times
In February 2008 Billy Bunter, the bespectacled fat owl of the remove at Greyfriars School, became 100 years old.
Despite being the living embodiment of pride, envy, avarice, greed, sloth, wrath and gluttony, he still has his own fan club, known as the Friars. The club celebrated the centenary at a meal heavy with pies and puddings. Bunter would have called it tuck ‘and wouldn’t be satisfied until he had gorged on everything on offer’.
The Times
CHAPTER 12
WEDDED BLISS
A man wanting a happy marriage
should keep his chequebook open and his
mouth shut…
Divorcing couples are now spending more time fighting over who gets custody of the family pet than over furniture or the hi-fi.
Independent on Sunday
It was reported that Whitney Houston’s song ‘I Will Always Love You’ is the top choice for the first dance for newly weds.
Duncan Mackinven, of Romford, Essex, says he can only assume that they have never listened to the lyrics, which include ‘We both know I’m not what you need’.
Daily Telegraph
In an article headlined 12 WAYS TO ENJOY LIFE FOR LONGER the 8th item was:
Nag Your Husband:
Gerald drops off to sleep after lunch and says ‘Winston Churchill always had a power nap’. I say ‘Yes, well he had power and a country to run. All you’ve got to remember is to take the bins out.’
Women who nag their husbands are less likely to die of heart disease. Do you need another reason?
‘It’s fun.’
Daily Telegraph
Spotted in a parish magazine by Mrs Jean Gelder, of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire: ‘Irving Benson and Jessica Carter were married on October 24. So ends a friendship that began in their schooldays’.
Daily Mail
Rosemary Heaversedge, of Shrewsbury, reports that there was a time when ‘Strangers in the Night’ was the song played for the bride and groom.
Daily Telegraph
Groucho Marx on men: ‘A husband wanting a happy marriage should keep his cheque book open and his mouth shut’.
James Thurber on women: ‘I hate them because they always know where things are’.
W. C. Fields said that a woman drove him to drink and he didn’t have the decency to thank her.
Nancy Astor said to Winston Churchill: ‘If I were married to you I’d put poison in your coffee’. Churchill replied: ‘If you were my wife I would drink it’.
Mae West said: ‘His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork’.
Extracts from The Wicked Wit of Insults by Maria Leach (Michale O’Mara £5.99)
Daily Mail
Referring to a device which prevents drivers exceeding the speed limit, Richard Fuller, of Salisbury, wrote: �
��I have one. We have been married for 24 years.’
The Times
Cherie Blair, wife of the former Prime Minister, tells of the day he proposed: ‘We went on holiday in 1979 to Tuscany… we were leaving to come home and I was cleaning the toilet… I was on my knees and he just announced that maybe we should get married. It was terribly romantic.’
Sunday Telegraph
The three Douglas sisters (Agnes, 87, Peggy, 86, and Mary, 84, originally of Sittingbourne, Kent) have clocked up 185 years of wedded bliss. They have been congratulated by the Queen for all reaching their diamond wedding anniversaries, and Mary said: ‘I could manage another 60 years’.
Daily Mail
Joseph Smith played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room.
Keith Waterhouse ‘looking back on days of
perfect murder’ in the Daily Mail
In the first year of our marriage I sent my husband a Valentine. He spent all day trying to guess who had sent it. In 45 years I have never sent him another. Elizabeth Ditton, Suffolk.
The Times
Britain’s ‘ugliest granny’ celebrated 60 years of marriage in 2007. Kath Taylor, 81, was twice crowned World Gurning Champion at Cumbria’s Egremont Crab Fair. Her husband James, 84, reckons she is a stunner and says: ‘She’s a little beauty, even when pulling those funny faces.’
His love did not wane when Kath lost her teeth and took up gurning. ‘It’s fun,’ she says, ‘but you can get tired of frightening children in the street.’
Sun
In 2007 James Mason (93) and Peggy Clarke (84) of Devon became Britain’s oldest wedding couple – with a combined age of 177. They had both agreed that there was no point in a long engagement.
Mason said it was a perfect match: ‘She was after my body and I was after her money. And I’ve always wanted to marry a younger woman.’
They met at a Paignton day centre where he began the romance with the bewhiskered old time favourite: ‘Do you come here often?’
Three days later he popped the question, ‘But not on bended knees because of his creaky joints’, reported the Guardian.
Daily Mail
Writing about attacks on the clergy, the Venerable George Austin of York reported: ‘I once received a death threat from a man because I had given him 25 years of misery by conducting his marriage service’.
The Times
Police received a 999 call from a husband complaining that his wife would not cook him an evening meal because she was decorating.
Daily Mirror
Ten days after her wedding, a 20-year-old Arbroath bride found her husband in bed with her 44-year-old mother. Divorce followed and then the husband married the mother – with his first wife acting as bridesmaid. Bride number one said: ‘He never apologised, but everyone makes mistakes. I’ve lost a husband, but gained a father.
Independent on Sunday
‘Wedding dress size 16 – £75. Worn once. Big mistake.’ Seen in Kettering local paper.
Daily Mail
‘Beautiful ivory wedding dress, size 10, never worn due to pregnancy.’
Rugby Observer
With many more people going in for serial monogamy these days, the greeting card industry has had to change. There are cards addressed to ‘dad and his wife’ and to ‘mother and her partner’.
Independent on Sunday
A Yorkshireman asked his wife where she would like to be buried. She replied: ‘On top o’ thee.’
Bernard Breckon, Beverley, Yorkshire.
The Times
Growing numbers of bridegrooms are choosing women to be their ‘best man’. A best woman is considered to be less likely to organise a stag night that ends up with a plastered groom being tied to a lamppost minus his trousers. She is less likely to deliver a speech revealing the groom’s more outrageous bachelor indiscretions. But she must not try to look more pretty than the bride and must not let the bride see her trying on the wedding ring.
The Times
A man filed for divorce because his wife left him this note: ‘Gone to the bridge club. There’ll be a recipe for your dinner at seven o’clock on Channel 2’.
Reader’s Digest
It was reported that women spend a total of three years in their lifetime dressing up to go out – but it turned out to be nothing new. John Dyer, of Otham, Kent, recalled that Gladstone said that he was able to read War and Peace in the time that he had spent waiting for Mrs Gladstone to put on her hat.
Daily Telegraph
CHAPTER 13
WHAT’S UP, DOC?
Going bald? Try rubbing in
some chicken dung…
Jane Morrison, of Crieff, Perth and Kinross, writes of her father who was a GP on a Hebridean island. A crofter complained of a painful spine and was asked if he had undertaken any strenuous activities. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it could have been when I lifted a sack of peat on to the wife’s back.’
Reader’s Digest
Lottery winners Tony and Greta Dodd (67 and 69 years old) of Wallasey, Merseyside, knew exactly what to do first with their £2,438,155 prize. Get four new knee joints.
Daily Mail
Two patients a week leave hospital with surgical instruments still inside them. The list of lost items includes swabs, a catheter, a metal clip and a contraceptive coil.
Pensioner Victor Hutchinson spent three months with a two-inch scalpel blade in his chest after a heart operation in Plymouth.
Daily Mail
The NHS surgery used by Brian Binns, of Loughborough, Leicestershire, has a wall calendar supplied by the local undertaker.
Daily Telegraph
News of yet another cure for baldness hit the headlines on 17 May 2007, and The Times reminded readers that Hippocrates recommended a blend of pigeon droppings, cumin, horseradish and beetroot. The Ancient Egyptians had a remedy which included toe of dog and hoof of ass.
The Times
Back in the 1940s Jenny Parkin’s grandfather suffered a coronary thrombosis at the age of 50. His doctor told him to give up golf and carry on smoking.
He followed the advice and lived to be 93.
The Times
After being told that he had only 12 months to live John Brandrick, of Newquay, Cornwall, gave up his job, stopped paying his mortgage, helped out his family financially, gave away his clothes and enjoyed spending the rest of his life savings. He planned his funeral, keeping just one suit, a shirt and a tie to be buried in. He then learned that he had non-fatal pancreatitis and not pancreatic cancer – but was penniless and forced to sell his house.
His verdict on the past 12 months? Get a second opinion.
Daily Telegraph
The 1654 book prompted the Independent on Sunday to look at other ‘cures’ for baldness which have cropped up over the years:
Former Labour MP Bryan Gould claimed that hanging upside down (increasing the flow of blood to the scalp) led to a 50% regrowth on his receding bonce.
Hippocrates recommended a blend of pigeon droppings, cumin, horseradish and beetroot.
Queen Victoria was known to drink silver birch wine, made from the rising sap, to cure her baldness.
Independent on Sunday
According to The Path-Way to Health, published back in 1654 when Oliver Cromwell was ruling England, it seems that no self-respecting male’s medicine chest was complete without supplies of cat dung, snail blood and chicken droppings. They were recommended as remedies for everything from bad breath to baldness and fatness to flatulence.
The advice for getting rid of unwanted hair was to ‘take hard cat dung, beat it to a powder, temper it with strong vinegar, then use it to wash the place where you would have no hair grow.’
For curing stinking breath wash the mouth out with water and vinegar followed by a concoction of aniseed, mint and cloves sodden in wine.
For a stench under the armpits, pluck away the hairs and wash with white wine and rosewater.
> Going bald? Try rubbing in some chicken dung and/or snail blood.
Daily Mail
A Perthshire health centre was accused of insensitivity after issuing cards to patients that included an advert for the town’s funeral director.
The Times
If you think today’s adverts need to be taken with a pinch of salt, the Daily Mail reproduces some glorious golden oldies:
Groves Tonic ‘Makes Children and Adults as Fat as Pigs’ – 1890s
Joy’s Cigars Cure Asthma (with a picture of a sophisticated lady puffing on one) – 1890s
The Doctors’ Special Rum (Prescribed by the Medical Profession) – 1900
Whiteway’s Woodbine Blend Dry Cider for Rheumatism and Gout – 1920
A 6d bottle of Mason’s Wine Essence will make One Gallon of Delicious Wine for Children’s Parties – 1900
And a very pretty girl with a low cut dress advertises Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills.
Daily Mail
The doctor giving D. S. Busfield, of Yelverton, Devon, a medical examination admitted that he found taking exercise boring. He said that, if he felt the need, he took his gin and tonic standing up.
Daily Telegraph
Message seen on a wall at a Middlesex Hospital: ‘The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that they had a band.’
Guardian
In the Colonial Police Service our medical adviser insisted hands should be washed before having a pee, on the grounds that ‘you should know where your willy has been, but not always your hands’. John S. Wright, Macclesfield, Cheshire.