Aniseed Balls

Last year's University Challenge series was notable for the phenomenal knowledge of Gail Trimble , and also for the subsequent disqualification of her winning team from Corpus Christi College Oxford. This year I am proud to report that Emmanuel College Cambridge won the contest with team performances just as impressive as Corpus' last year. Emma lost their first round match but came back in remarkable style, and eventually embarrassed both Manchester University in the semis (315-120) and St John's College Oxford in the final (315-100). Their captain Alex Guttenplan was impressive, and has become a minor internet cult figure for being cute and for shutting Paxman up in one of the early rounds. Three cheers for Alex Guttenplan and Emmanuel College Cambridge!

I'll tell you what is rubbish: soups. Well not all soups obviously, but there is a certain kind of emperor’s clothes cookery book with ludicrous recipes, where soups are particularly vulnerable. As with a child's design and technology homework, like parents we are expected to feign approval. Curried Parsnip Soup There isn't much scope for inventing soups because people have been doing it for a very long time. The ones that work have stood; the ones that work really well have become the classics; and the ones that don't work have rightly been consigned to the compost heap. But the latter is too good for the soup recipes in some of these effete cuisine-style cookery books, usually with ludicrous titles like Taste of Dreams . The scope for novel soups lies in combining ingredients from disparate sources that have simply not come together before. The obvious example is Curried Parsnip Soup as popularized by Jane Grigson in the 1970s and still popular with restaurateurs f...

Whenever I visit one of the big chain supermarkets I come out thinking "serves you right for going in". The most recent experience is illustrative and by no means unusual. Yak's butter I wanted cornmeal. I already knew that the local M&S didn't have any, so I went to the huge Tesco Extra nearby. After hunting high and low amid hordes of thoroughly unpleasant people and eventually determining that there was no customer service counter, I managed to find a staff member willing to humour me by checking on the computer. All they had was ready-made polenta.  I drove to the equally huge Sainsbury's Superstore a few miles away and again hunted high and low, before eventually asking an assistant who unapologetically claimed never to have heard of cornmeal or polenta. Keeping things simple I explained that cornmeal is what mexican tortilla is made from, and she looked at me as though I had asked for yak's butter. I got the impression that she knew for ce...

To start with I am posting here the various rants I have previously emailed to all and sundry.  I am setting the post date to match the original email.  In future I will post whenever I feel moved - I expect it will usually be when I am in grumpy old man mode.

A story of age-related mental degeneration. My daughter's computer CPU fan failed, and I had to lend her a spare PC. She was feeling a bit down in the dumps because of exams, but mostly because her mobile phone screen had also failed. So I decided to copy all her iTunes music to her temporary PC to cheer her up. I took her HD out, and connected it up to another spare PC with the idea of first backing everything up to an external HD, and then copying the music from the backup. Obviously, being an experienced PC whiz, I didn't go so far as to fasten the HD into the drive cage; I just left it sitting on top of the cage. But like a complete idiot, instead of placing it upside down so that the only thing in contact with the cage was the HD casing, I left it right way up so that the cage was in contact with the unprotected control board. By the time I had put the flames out the control board was toast, and tests confirmed that it no longer functioned. I came up with the idea that ...

Sports commentators are well known for talking complete bollocks. They are much better than they used to be when the only qualification for the job was a plummy voice, but they still get carried away in the heat of the action like everyone else. However, I keep hearing tennis commentators say something that I just cannot let pass. It is not a slip of the tongue - it is a sentiment they repeat over and over: "One reason X is such a good player is that they make the opponent play one more shot". I don't understand this. In fact I cannot proffer any meaning for it other than "I like player X". Here is a challenge. Suppose that 'making the opponent play one more shot' really does mean something, and I claim that when I play my friend at tennis, I am better at whatever this something is than (say) Lleyton Hewitt (who is often said to have this mysterious quality). Tell me what it is that you are going to measure about our matches that will decide the issue. ...

Recent events in Devon have made me wonder if I am becoming an aging grumpy: my incredulity is genuine. How can the media report the escape of wild boar without even a passing mention of the glaringly obvious question? I have bought wild boar products occasionally - and now it transpires that I have been completely naive to imagine that the animals were as described: wild. Is this complete ignorance on my part? Does everyone else already know that wild boar are not wild at all, but in fact the complete opposite of wild, namely penned in? Is it too obvious to mention? Perhaps only the British would put up with such a deceit of nomenclature. I know Yorkshire pudding isn't all made in Yorkshire. But surely it isn't transparent that wild boar is farmed. Please tell me that I'm not a complete dunderhead. If I do turn into a grumpy old man, animal liberation will be high on my list of invectives.