The Sunday Ishmael: 16/04/2023

Multi-millionaire Cult Leader wages war on middle-class professionals.

Middle classes (Eng.) - a social group that consists of well-educated people, such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, who have good jobs and are not poor, but are not very rich: (Cambridge on-line dictionary)

Cult - a relatively small group which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed Leader, who excessively controls its members, requiring unwavering devotion to a set of acts and practices which are considered deviant (outside the norms of society). (Wiki)

Usually seen as the back-bone of society, relied upon to keep things rolling along, to manage the poor on behalf of the rich, the British middle classes are the sticking-plaster over the gaping wounds inflicted by the structural inequalities of a society in which wealth is worshipped and adored; they are the vent valve of the pressure cooker without which the working and non-working classes would explode and put to the guillotine the scum cream sitting atop the pyramid. 

While incomes have stagnated over the past decade, our national wealth has continued to boom..... UK households' collective wealth (was) £14.6 trillion. But that total is far from equally distributed: the richest 10 per cent of households own almost half of the nation’s wealth having benefitted most from the recent wealth boom. In contrast, typical households in parts of the North and the Midlands are still no wealthier than they were before the financial crisis. Resolution Foundation 2019

Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population. Resolution Foundation January 2021

Someone should explain to Sunak and Hunt that it really isn't a good idea to alienate the middle classes: if they make common cause with the poor people that they are managing, because they cannot maintain their standard of living due to Government intransigence and allegiance to a dubious economic model, then revolution becomes a possibility. In France, food prices rose by 65% between 1770 and 1790 but wages increased by only 22%. Price increases were attributed to government failure to prevent profiteering. Poor harvests throughout the 1780s, culminating in the most severe winter for decades in 1788/1789, created a rural peasantry with nothing to sell, and an urban proletariat whose purchasing power had collapsed. The other major drag on the economy was state debt. Sounding familiar?

With strikes predicted by nurses, doctors and teachers, the middle-class worm is turning on the wealthy upper class Government, a Government with a multi-millionaire unelected leader, a Government which precipitated an economic crisis by closing down the economy to prevent the spread of Covid and then became Ukraine's best friend, therefore prolonging a diabolical war, supporting America in its war on Russia.

Rather than clinging to some mad Thatcherian economic model, it is time for Sunak and Hunt to understand that increasing middle-class public sector wages will not increase inflation. It will, however, avoid a summer of strikes, and worse, by people who traditionally don't go on strike. And maybe save some lives.

....................................................................

Primavera

Literally - first greens. Italian for Spring. 

 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
(Canterbury Tales General Prologue, 1–12)

And get themselves down Tesco to buy some tendre croppes. Nice change after a long, cold, dark winter of rubbish turnips and roots. Here's a recipe full of first greens.

Green Gazpacho

1 sliced celery stick

1 small green pepper, deseeded and chopped

150 G  peeled and sliced cucumber

1 sliced courgette

100G white bread

1 green chilli, deseeded and chopped

A good handful of wild garlic leaves

A couple of chopped spring onions

1 tsp of sugar

50G walnut halves

100G young spinach leaves

30G tarragon

10G parsley

2 tbsp cider vinegar

100 ml olive oil

60G full-fat Greek yoghurt

200ml water

2tsp sea salt

ground pepper

Mix together all the ingredients and leave overnight in a bowl in the fridge for the flavours to mingle.

Next day, pour all the ingredients into your Nutribullet (other blenders are available) and whizz up, adding water if necessary.

Push the resulting mess through a sieve 

and discard the rubbish in the sieve.

Chill, then serve in little bowls, with a heap of something nice in the middle and artistic dribbles of cream, marie rose sauce or Greek Yoghurt and chopped herbs.

left - prawns in marie rose sauce and chive flowers, top- crisp smoked streaky bacon with chopped chives and dribbles of yoghurt, front - shredded chicken with yoghurt and chopped chives.

This is a particularly effective dish for constipated old buggers, having swich licour of which vertu engendred, but even if young and healthy, go steady with it, as it is a concentrated distillation of green juice, and if you've had a winter on the burger and chips it will go through you like a dose of salts. Utterly delicious, though, well worth the effort, no cooking involved, and, as Jamie would say, Mmmm, the flavours, chilli is besy mates wiv wild garlic, innit?

................................................................

Unpleasantries.

The crime reports in The Orcadian newspaper are usually good for a laugh. 

"On the evening of November 6th a young Kirkwall woman was featured in a foul-mouthed run-in with a 14 year old girl at Tesco. She exchanged unpleasantries with the girl, after which she seized her by her jacket and said your mother's a fat cow and your father's a big paedo."

"A Sheriff has hit out at a Sandwick pensioner who threatened to split another man's head with a crow bar."

"A Stromness woman denied repeatedly striking her former partner on the head with a boot to his injury, seizing him on the nose and twisting it to his injury. She accepted threatening and abusive behaviour, including breaking the window of his workshop, with him inside, with her bare fist. The victim said "I think she needs some sort of help."

 
"A 74 year old North Ronaldsay farmer subjected his ex-girlfriend to prolonged harassment and unwanted attention. Her parents arranged for someone to chaperone her because of concern for her safety, but when she reluctantly agreed to shake his hand to draw a line under things, he squeezed hard and caused her pain."

Age cannot wither nor gender stale their infinite capacity for violence. As Shakespeare would have said if he'd visited Orkney.

The Easter Crossword Solutions

Thank you, again, mr mongoose.

More Unpleasantries

On the Radio Scotland phone-in the other morning, the topic was gambling and whether there should be stringent controls on gambling because of all the Scots who have lost fortunes they didn’t have, re-mortgaged the house and spent it or ended up in the gutter because they wouldn’t stop gambling. Lots of hard luck stories from widows and orphans left destitute. Lots of confessionals from people who are in recovery. Then this bloke phones in and says these nut jobs shouldn’t spoil it for the rest of us who like a wee drink, a smoke and a flutter. The host severely admonishes him for his language and attitude towards those less fortunate than him, tries to make the case that gambling is an addiction out of the control of the gambler. Then he asks – what would you say to the young man who phoned in earlier, to say that his father had lost the house, the car, left massive debts and then killed himself because of his gambling addiction? The caller thought for a minute, then said, “Your dad’s a nut job”.

..............................................................................................................

Should you wish to read of mr ishmael's exploits, be utterly disgusted by his imagined accounts of the private lives of those who rule o'er us, be entranced and educated by his Zen Marxist Presbyterian philosophy and be prepared to endure ruptures engendered by remorseless, extreme excitation of the laughter  reflex, then there are three volumes of his Collected Works, selected, edited and anthologised by mr verge, the House Filthster.  

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
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.  
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

CAPTION CONTEST