Sunday 4 October 2020

The Sunday Ishmael 4th October 2020

If we decline to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don't look like us, we diminish the prospects of our own children – because those brown kids will represent a larger share of America's workforce. - quotation harvested by mr ishmael
 
The scenes captured below, by mr ishmael, will soon become of quaint vintage interest only, as Britain's Home Secretary has plans to throw such distress and naked opportunism onto the compost heap of history:
 
Christmas in Calais Migrant Camp with Jamie Oliver  8/3/16
And it's over now to Channel Four's Caring Cook. He cares about everything, does Jamie Oliver, and it's time he had a knighthood, I think, all the stuff he's done caring about.
This time he's caring about  some very fragile people

People who are extremely vulnerable.
 

Headline: 
Christmas in Calais migrant camp: dinner cooked by Jamie Oliver and 10 TONNES of prezzies
CALAIS migrants spent Christmas Day eating food made by Jamie Oliver's staff and opening 10 tonnes of donated gifts as hundreds of Britons travel to the Jungle. 
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So, close on the heels of the Flying Scotswoman,
we learn that Priti Patel is considering the use of Scottish islands, such as Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, as sites for processing centres for vulnerable refugees. Angus MacNeil, SNP MP for the Western Isles, said:
 
“I am very uncomfortable with this idea of jailing people in these centres, particularly using Scottish islands which are usually ignored by Westminster to be used as prisons.This just underlines our need for independence, our islands can’t be the plaything for Westminster.” "
Sincere Big Al Carmichael, Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland said:
“A refugee facility requires a level of local social infrastructure that island communities, let alone ferries, simply don’t have, from legal services to counselling to voluntary support.These are absolutely vital services for people who are often fleeing war, persecution or other personal hardship. The Home Office has never had a great reputation but this takes them to a new low.The ‘Hostile Environment’ that we had been told was a thing of the past is alive and well, and bulking up on steroids in Priti Patel’s office.” Oor Gnasher  said: 

"The UK Government  can rest assured that any proposal to treat human beings like cattle in a holding pen will be met with the strongest possible opposition from me.” 
mrs ishmael isn't keen, either.
Apparently, the Home Office is considering a few "exploding cigar" solutions to the refugee crisis. These include a wave machine to push small boats back across the Channel, installing barriers across the Channel, using decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea and, most Dickensian of all, retired ferries as a 21st century take on the prison hulks that so graced our coastal waters in the nineteenth century. The use of Papua New Guinea and Morocco as holding pens has also been considered. 
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 Before they had refugees to pick on, the conservative Cameron-Clegg coalition identified a new Enemy of the State, as mr ishmael tells us:

 DISABLED PEOPLE,  THE NEW NIGGERS

 NIGGER, NIGGER, NIGGER
OUT, OUT,OUT.

Ever since the late  Brigadier Enoch Powell had his arse kicked by an emerging national sense of decency, British politicians, most of them on all sides unspeakably racist, sexist, elitist redneck cocksuckers, have steered clear of the N-word, as we have been taught to say it. 

In the bars and knocking shops of Westminster, and in the constituency offices, however,  they have found alternatives to niggers - immigrants, except white ones;  lone parents, especially Cecil Parkinson's bint, but any dirty wimmen without the protection of  a man have been fair game to redfaced Toryboy poltroons;  fat people, apart from themselves, apart from  bloated, whining, self-indulgent shitbags like Eric Pickles,

grown into great, fat, greasy fuckpigs on dinners and drinks which I buy him, too fucking bloated to make his way a few miles home from work, so we have to pay for a second home for the hulking lardarse;  Prescott, Lord John Pies, stuffing his face and waving his shrivelled cock at women young enough to be his daughter;  Reid, Lord John, pissed out of his bigoted Glasgow mind,  trying to kick down the doors of female colleagues, they're all sluts aren't they?  And then there's the racist, Haliburton  wars to which they are all signed-up, wars in which we don't even count the nigger dead, Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe - depending on how things go in Uncle Sam's pretend election campaign - those moslem niggers in Iran, well, it's not maybe, is it, just a question of  when.

And now this pathetic, rasping husk of a man, this ridiculous, failed fantasist, Ian Smith, has identified a whole new species of Nigger or Jew. The Disabled.

I can't comment on the death of a disabled guy manslaughtered by  the Disability Bounty Hunters, ATOS.  I just heard the start of his story on what passes for the news and I ran out of the room with my fingers in my ears, honest, not invent.  I couldn't bear to hear it.  Take all our money and quantitatively ease it into the pockets of financial terrorists, chastise the sick for their sickness, the poor for their poverty, and set ATOS on them.

Ed note: Atos conducted Personal Independence Payment  assessments, notoriously slip-shod and inaccurate, targeted to reduce the number of claimants. mr ishmael was distressed by the death of a disabled man whose benefits were stopped following his Atos assessment.  Following the 2010 election, Ian Duncan Smith was appointed  as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the Cameron–Clegg coalition.. Under his leadership, the DWP rolled out Universal Credit and a new Work Programme, as well as implementing a cut in benefits. He also looked at "how to make it harder for sick and disabled people to claim benefits" by giving DWP staff more powers to conduct benefit eligibility tests and to strip benefits from claimants with serious but time-limited health conditions. The DWP was criticised by The Trussell Trust, Oxfam and Justin Welby for "scandalous" and "unacceptable" rises in food poverty and forcing people to use food banks. Duncan Smith himself was criticised by the UK Statistics Authority and National Institute of Economic and Social Research for breaking the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.
Baron Eric Pickles stood down at the 2017 general election, but continued in his role as Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust issues, and Anti Corruption Champion.
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Stanislav: Something I said, was it?
 
Fuck me, come back in best part of England after  knees-up in Old country and snot-eating lunatic bastard  fucked off is and hiding in Jock loonybin, raving and drooling and biting nails up to elbow. Not so much right thing for country, now, wrong thing is, even for family and especially for NewLabour bastard, fighting like fucking rat in sack and still good for fuck all.
Just as good for fuck all as is Mr CallHimDave, fucking landowner bastard and jumped-up fucking layabout, never a day of proper work has done only write lies and smarm about like highclass rentboy and can't believe his fucking luck at fuckwit shitbrain Mr Suit-and-Haircut, dressed-up like it was Prizegiving day and him the senior prefect.
 Anyway is all in shit with each other now and part of NewBroom Sweeping; stanislav seventy-year old disabled bastard must have as assistant plumber, and disable fucking access in van so's  disable public enemy number one bastard up beside stanislav can sit and customers can all see dribbling bastard in sunfuckinglasses in middle of fucking winter and think Ah, stanislav welfare work has taken up and driving dribbling bastards to library is doing, in own time, see, not all Pole is fucking rubbish, coming over here in God's country and doing work, always said so, but no, new govament of SpivULikebastard is attacking sick and cripple bastard with pitchfork up arse and saying, Raus! Raus!  Come on, idle useless piece of disabled shit, nothing wrong with you is apart from being disabled and sick, you plumbing can do for living and stop parasite being, all in this together we are, only not Mr&Mrs SpivUlike.

 Fuck me with disabled ramp and sleeping quarters for HomelessAllInThisTogether but stanislav can't hardly get no fucking tools in fucking van.
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Recipe Corner: 

Mr verge’s recipe for Seabass, with hat-tip to stanislav and Jamie Geezer

(mr verge would like it noted that he wasn't really trying to tribute/pastiche but noticed as it happened that plumberspeak was seeping through unbidden, and attributes it to months of stanislavian immersion)

Preheat oven - best to turn it to 200 and then it's ready to go up just before you're ready to cook the fish.  Assuming you have a pestle & mortar for seasalt...empty the salt into temporary accommodation, leaving about half a teaspoon's worth. Or use the expensive Mason and Cash pestle and mortar that has been lurking in the back of the cupboard since you got bored with it.  Put in a small (or half a normal-sized) clove of garlic, paper skin removed and stumpy end cut away.  Grind into paste (looks a bit like - ugh - mashed banana.) 
If you have an unwaxed lemon, add the grated zest (remember to act gently when grating, you don't want to take the pith by mistake) and half its juice (through a tea-strainer to catch pips).   If lemon not unwaxed variety, no usable zest, so use a bit more juice - add the extra at the end as you want something more like a runny paste than full-on liquid.

  Also add a little good quality olive oil, and a teaspoon of dried herbs (oregano & marjoram & thyme) unless you have the requisite weed plantation out back, in which case  go down garden, pull up weeds, chop them up a bit first then stir with a teaspoon - the paste should be slightly runny but barely.  Using the teaspoon, share the marinade (salsa? whatever the fuck it is) over your seabass fillets, which you've patted dry with kitchen paper and laid skin-down flat on kitchen foil covering your baking sheet.  (If can be arsed, run clean finger over flesh to check for bone left by lazybastard fishmonger, and remove with careful application of tweezers.)  Spread the mix as evenly as possible over the flesh, and leave it while you sort out whatever veg - new potatoes, chips, steamed french beans, broad ones, etc - you have in store.  Any veg needing more than 10 minutes should get going in advance.  
Gently reapply any of the oil that's escaped the fish, and carefully turn the fillets over; they go in skin side up.  The oven should be increased to (honest, not invent) around 220 fan.  (If dirty bastard and oven cleaning needs, have broom handle ready to turn off bastard skriking fire alarm when bomb-bay door is opened wide).  If the fillets are thin, 7 minutes will be plenty - if they're thick, up to 8 minutes.  When cooked, remove carefully with oven glove and place tray on cooling rack - use bastard-hot oven to warm plate, but try to remove quickly so it's not cauterizing hot when you come to eat off it.  Using a couple of forks, carefully peel off the skin and gently scrape off the dark gunky stuff down the middle of the fish, unless gastroperv is with unaccountable taste for such stuff.  Use a spatula to transfer cooked fish to plate - fragile so it may not come away in one piece, but this is not fucking masterchef so don't worry about that.  Some of the herbs etc will still be on the foil, so scrape that off and add to plate for flavour.  Add sides of veg, pour modest glass of chilled non-filth white wine, and eat at table with TV on like civilised bastard.  Top Tip -  even if wrapped in newspaper and a plastic bag, the discarded skin will stink like a whore's drawers in the morning, so if poss put rubbish out before bed (in bin, not neighbour letterbox.)  Hope that helps - fiddly the first time, but easier thereafter and very tasty.

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mr ishmael's essays today are:

 if we decline to invest                                                          drafted 12/4/16

Christmas in Calais Migrant Camp with Jamie Oliver       drafted  8/3/16 

Disabled People - the New Niggers                                     drafted  28/9/12

 Stanislav: Something I said, was it?                                   drafted 25/6/10


Honest, Not Invent
- an anthology of writing by stanislav and mr ishmael, is now available. For reviews, go to The Sunday Ishmael: Publication Announcement: Honest, Not Invent:13/09/20
 
The book is available as either paperback or hardback; we've had proof copies of both and the production quality is very good.  Cover design is the same for both.  340 pages, each chapter dated in the list of contents; we have stanislav from as long ago as 2007, and some of the finest ishmael essays from the present blog.  For now (there are still a few hoops to go through before it appears elsewhere, at the same price) the book is only available from lulu.com.   No one's billing or delivery address, nor any payment info, will be available or disclosed to the creator of the book; all this is securely handled by the publishing platform. Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy should follow these steps:

Please register an account with them first.  This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the links provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer.  Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  If you follow a link, a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed.  If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box (found at the bottom left by scrolling down) has been checked.  You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.

The full title is "Honest, Not Invent - the best of stanislav, a young polish plumber", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Blog Dog.  

Link for Hard Back : 


Link for Paper Back : 


At checkout, try  WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  (ORDER10 might also work, for a 10% discount, if the 15% has expired.)
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £14.35; HB £23.74.   


19 comments:

Mike said...

Excellent Mr verge, and I can see the accent as Mrs I describes.

I will try that, though we don't get sea bass here.

I have a similar variant, and have just been prepping for ce soir, by coincidence. Based on a dish I've regularly eaten in Seville - across the Puente de Triana from the centro going west and its immediately the first side road on the left after the bridge, Especialades Ceveceria. Only open after 8pm. Prawns in garlic and chili oil. The locals have it with cerveza, or local beer, I quite like a chilled dry sherry.

Anyway: take plenty of garlic cloves, red and green chili, small amount of ginger, flat leaf parsley, salt and black pepper - now its trial and error until you get the blend that best suits - I like plenty of garlic and chili, The Memsahib likes less - but there is an easy answer. Put all in a blender and grind up. Add to an earthenware pot (in our case 2 pots adding the required amount of paste to taste) and add plenty of good olive oil. Put in the oven till sizzling, but don't burn. Take out of oven and add prepared prawns being careful not to scald the crown jewels. The prawns will cook in the hot oil. Serve with crusty bread and a nice cold pinot grigio.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, mr Mike - I initially misread your last line as "a nice cold pinta grigio", and nodded in approval of your splendid Australian approach to the wine-list. Unfortunately I'm allergic to chili (sitcom waterfalls of sweat with even a moderate dose) so I won't be able to give your recipe a go, sounds good though.

Delighted to hear Ishmaelites are beginning to receive their copies of the anthology, and hope it does the business. Please spread the word.

cheers

v./

Mike said...

You're lucky, Mr verge, being allergic to chili, I'm addicted. It all started years ago working in Singapore and Hong Kong. My golf mates thought I was joking this morning when I said I had green chicken curry for breakfast (I wasn't, leftover from Sunday, better on day 2). BTW the prawns were good this evening.

mongoose said...

Grrr. I wrote a post about things immigrational etc and it has disparrued.

Anyway, it was about the decadence of us all. If a child can be in poverty with a 48" telly and an iphone in his pocket, then we do not even value properly the words we speak let alone the values we hold.

Your breakfasts, mr mike, continue to horrify me.

mrs ishmael said...

Was it your error, mr mongoose, or is our Blog being censored? I haven't done anything to disparrue it.
The key word is relative - relative poverty is a term that denotes the lack of access to goods, services, housing, etc that are the norm within a society. It is not about being denied the physiological needs that a street child in India suffers, but about being excluded from the goods that allow a child to participate fully in the society in which he or she lives. Not justifying the shift in language, just explaining what they mean by it, those people that use the term.
And I totally agree with you regarding mr mike's breakfasts - haven't you heard of a bacon sandwich, mr mike? I suppose you could put some chili paste in it, instead of brown sauce, if you insisted.

mongoose said...

Oh, it happens from time to time, mrs i. Blogger eats a post every now and again to stop us getting too precious.

We already have a useful word for the less well off - "poor". Hijacking the word poverty for political ends means that those who do live that life are even more hidden from view than they would otherwise be. Which is a wickedness.

Mike said...

A bacon butty doesn't really cut it nowadays, Mrs I. I'm trying to eat healthily as I age. For example, tonight I am having a simple dish of spaghetti with the remaining oil+garlic+chili from the prawn recipe above. Classic Italian recipe. I'll make sure to make enough for a pre-golf breakfast tomorrow.

BTW I weigh less now (71kg at 6ft 1 inch) than I did over the last intervening years since my school days, despite a prodigious red wine consumption.

mrs ishmael said...

That's shockingly thin, mr mike. Get some pies in.

mongoose said...

What are they like up there in Scotland, eh, mr mike, with their pies?

And lo it came to pass. Dunderhead SNP Beckfod oaf was prattling at PMQs about "sever poverty". Having debased the word itself, he is now fecked for ameans to describe the reality he seeks to address. Useless bugger.

Bungalow Bill said...

I see The Lunatic is likely to lock down Northern England from Monday with some codswallop about three tiers; though he could as well say it’s about brillig and the slithy toves.

Don’t we have to get rid of these deranged fuckers once and for all, whatever it takes? We’re watching our lives and our world being dismantled and pulped by spivs and knaves, and we’re doing nothing at all about it. May God help us all.

mrs ishmael said...

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

Not that easy, I fear, mr bungalow bill. Democratic process and all that.

Nowt wrong with pies, messrs mongoose and mike, especially with mushy peas. I suppose you have to be from Northern, really, to appreciate these fine points of gastronomy.

Mike said...

Nothing against mushy peas, Mrs I. We regularly consume with beer battered flathead. Home made from split peas, and onion and some veggie stock, salt and pepper to taste.

BTW, there has been one good thing with Covid. We now buy our seafood fresh from the wholesaler delivered the same day, or at worst, next day. Excellent quality; better than what we bought retail - although that was good.

https://www.manettas.com.au

I don't think they deliver to Orkney.

mongoose said...

We'll forgive your breakfasts, mr mike, but if Orkney needs fish delivering then the world is about to end, I reckon. You are a thin lad for 6'2. I was 65kg until I was mid-thirties and I was but 5'11. I was certainly too thin but then I am an Irish midget stretched a bit by eating proper protein as a lad.

The madness, mr BB, can now be fought a little. The massed scientists and medics are starting to rebel. Why though? What is it all for? Surely not just to screw Trump and stop Brexit? These are myopic, homegrown conceits. Where is the plan for such an extravagant stupidity? Or are we witnessing the largest cock-up the world has ever seen?

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: I am a bit on the thin side. Ive always been a bit wiry, but 8 years ago I started walking the Camino routes. Over a 1000km walk I would aim to double my daily food intake to 5000 cals; even so, after a month I would be minus 5kg. Putting the weight back on is difficult, even with a high Guinness diet, because I find my metabolism is hyper for several months. It buggers up my golf; a loss of weight really affects distance.

Bungalow Bill said...

Ah, democracy, Mrs I. A fond notion.

The heroic Sunetra Gupta, Mr Mongoose, and a few others have been consistently rational. They are accordingly ignored.

mrs ishmael said...

Thank you, mr bungalow bill. Sunetra Gupta is an Indian infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. A critic of lockdown, her view is that countries should follow the Swedish approach, shielding the vulnerable while those with minimal risk go about their lives and allow herd immunity to build up.

mongoose said...

Madly, and very many long years ago, mr mike, I was told that I was too thin to be a batsman. And golf is but batting with a stationary ball. Too many long(ish) moving parts with no corordinating momentum. I think there's truth in that. Batsmen tended to be shorter individuals and the tall ones had meat on their bones. These days the lads put gym-weight on.

Sunetra is absolutely a hero of the Resistance, mr bb, mrs i, and all. What worries me is that everyone talks of vaccines but there can never be a proper vaccine for an RNA coronavirus. Yes, we can have a sort of covid flu-shot but that's all. Why aren't the virologists shouting this from the rooftops?

Bungalow Bill said...

Mr Mongoose, why are so many people not doing the thing they must know to be true and right and instead doing what is false and wrong? What, to quote the pote (sic), has driven a nation mad? Who or what on earth, or otherwhere, would be so fixated on our degradation?

Deep waters.

Bungalow Bill said...

Culture, not nation, but the madness is the same.