UK in Iran, Poverty and School, Food Nonsense, Walter Savage Lander

                                                Iran

Persian Encampment, 

Ovid Curtovitch (b.1855)

Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

If you trip over a stone in the street you can be sure an Englishman put it there.

If you look under a mullah’s beard, you will find the words “Made in Britain.”

Iranian expressions, still in use, voicing suspicion of the UK’s past and present involvement in the country’s affairs. 

The first expression was related by John Simpson on radio 4 Today 9.3.2019.

The second comes from Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah’s Beard by Nicholas Jubber.

* … In the past century the UK occupied the country for five years from 1941-46, and has overthrown Iran's leaders and installed new ones. It backed the Shah's own oppressive regime. And it secretly supplied Iraq's Saddam Hussein with weapons after he invaded Iran in 1980, beginning a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. There's no collective memory in the UK about our actions. There is in Iran.

(Jack Straw, The i, 2019)

The Fourth Emergency Service

The Mask,
Alexander Hohenlohe Burr (1835-1898) 
Photo Credit: Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service [CC BY-NC]

Schools have become an “unofficial fourth emergency service” for vulnerable families across England and Wales, offering food parcels, clothing and laundry facilities to those worst affected by austerity, according to a new report by a head-teachers’ union.

Most of the 400 school leaders surveyed by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said they were seeing a “rising tide” of poverty among pupils, at a time when they were having to cut their own budgets and receiving less support from local councils.

Sarah Bone, the head of Headlands school, a comprehensive in Bridlington, east Yorkshire said: “We have far too many children with no heating in the home, no food in the cupboards, washing themselves with cold water, walking to school with holes in their shoes, and trousers that are ill-fitted and worn out, and living on one hot meal a day provided at school.”

Other heads reported pupils with no winter coats, while others said they “regularly” had to buy shoes for their pupils.

…Nine out of ten heads said they gave clothes to the most disadvantaged pupils, and nearly half said they washed clothed for pupils. More than 40% reported operating a food bank at the school or giving food parcels to pupils and their families.

One school leader commented: “In 24 years of education I have not seen the extent of poverty like this, children are coming to school hungry, dirty and without the basics to set them up for life. The gap between those that have and those that do not is rising and is stark.”

(The Guardian, 2019)
                                       Dickensian. Isn’t this an absolute disgrace?



Food

Butcher's Shop (Interior) (recto) 

James Adams (active 1875-1880)

Photo Credit: Biggar Museum Trust [CC BY-NC]

The sexy Butcher of Istanbul, Salt Bae himself, [real name Nusret Gokce] internet-famous for his flamboyant seasoning style, is showing me his signature moves. In his trademark tight white T-shirt and small, round black sunglasses, he sharpens two sword-like knives at my table before theatrically ripping the bone off the £220 tomahawk steak on the wooden board between us.

…Plucking a large pinch of salt flakes from a pot proffered by one of his assistants, he flicks back his hand to form an elaborate cobra-like shape, then – here comes the money shot – sprinkles the crystals down his tanned, muscular forearm and onto my steak.

…Today, he has 14 restaurants and more than 22 million followers… He will open his first European outpost, on the Greek island of Mykonos. Why there?
“Mykonos is prestige,” he says. “All famous people, all rich people.” On the same day, he’ll open his second New York spot on Park Avenue.

The menu at every Nusr-Et restaurant is the same. The cheapest item is a £24 burger; the priciest, the £790 24ct-gold-coated tomahawk steak. And nobody is even here for the food, which, to be honest, is only marginally above average. They come for the spectacle, the salting and the selfie.

…I’m busily texting my video of the proceedings to a meat-loving friend when I see Gokce bearing down upon me, with the £220 tomahawk. I say there’s no way I’m going to be able to eat it, but then realise that’s beside the point. Eating is not the point of this restaurant. And, as the steak is fed into my mouth with his fingers. I understand that I am now part of the show, too.

I ask for the steak to be boxed up so I can take it home (I’m ready to go, but no way am I wasting a £220 steak), when I realise I didn’t get that coveted selfie with Gokce. But I can’t see him anywhere. Gokce, I’m told has left. He’s gone to the gym.
(Jane Mulkerrins, The Times, 2019)

People go to a very expensive restaurant, not for the food itself but to see some man seasoning a steak with whom they want a selfie. Is that right?  And this man has 22 million Instagram followers? How bizarre.

*A €490 bill for a plate of pasta is among tourist rip-offs that have prompted raids by the Greek police on Aegean restaurants.

The charge was part of a €713 bill for two diners at a nondescript seaside restaurant in Mykonos that included €78 for grilled chicken. At the same restaurant an American tourist was angered at being charged €591 for six pieces of calamari.

…Officers operating under cover since the start of the month have already closed down dozens of businesses caught cheating customers and the state. They include a steakhouse recently opened by Nusret Gokce, a Turkish celebrity chef known as Salt Bae whose trademark flamboyant showering of salt on meat platters has become an internet meme.

The steakhouse was closed for 48 hours after tax officers found that the business, known for charging up to €760 for a hearty meat platter, failed to issue 34 receipts, amounting to €25,800, in undeclared profits for a single night.
(The Times, 2019)

Wales

Arenig,
North Wales, James Dickson Innes (1887-1914)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

On his departure from Llanthony the English poet Walter Savage Lander – fired off an angry letter to the Bishop of St David’s:

“If drunkenness, idleness, mischief and revenge are the principal characteristics of the savage state, what nation…in the world is so singularly tattooed with them as the Welsh?”

Not a bad descriptive attempt but doesn’t it need to be extended?