Thank you, Winter, you can go now.

Long time no write: the last two weeks were largely taken up with lying in bed nursing a bout of flu followed by trying to catch up with myself re. work and diagnostic journeys to and from hospital.

I had been looking forward to putting in a full two days at the allotment. Just in time for the weekend, temperatures dropped to freezing and it started to snow/sleet/hail (sneet? snail?) pretty much continuously since Friday evening. Nice one, Winter. Have another one on us.

I wanted to treat OH to an evening out so I suggested we'd try to get into the Hairy Bikers, who were back in the county after their Norwich gig in November, which we'd missed, and performing in King's Lynn. The two shows were long sold out but OH had a bright idea and rung the venue where he was told he could put himself on a reserve standby list and would be rung if tickets were returned. We hung around in King's Lynn town centre but weren't rung so I said to OH that we should turn up in person just before the start of the show, hover politely in the background and look really keen and persistent. Someone would take pity on us and let us in. 

And that's what happened! The general manager, who had to okay numbers for fire safety reasons, told us there were carers' seats available in the wheelchair section which had not been taken up so we paid, grabbed some chocolate and peanuts, for we hadn't actually had dinner yet -- and took our triple-A seats just as the fake smoke began to envelope the stage. Woo hoo!

I have developed a great fondness for the Hairy Bikers. I don't mind cookery programmes as such  -- I love eating! -- but over the years have developed several aversions, for example to bullying macho bastards, finger-licking food porn actresses, unsmiley Perfect Housewives, perma-gurning minstrel stereotypes... even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whom I still like watching, has grown up from a bumbling amateur forager into the ponderous pater familias, who cares a lot about fish. And I especially detest the anxiety-inducing cook-off competition-style programmes, which are completely without humour and actually seem to thrive on humiliating the losers -- very apt for Coalition Britain, but I utterly despise them.

When I chanced upon the Bikers during one bored telly night, I sat up. This was new. I remembered the Two Fat Ladies on the motorbike and sidecar back in the 1990s but they were posh. Nowhere else did a pair of autodidacts with broad Northern accents travel round the country, deliberately ferreting out working-class families and especially people working in health and social care and other public services, and cook them a great meal, the ingredients of which were distinctly and excitingly budget. In Coalition Britain, people on low incomes are defecated on practically 24/7 now – if it isn't some millionnaire minister blasting them as scroungers and skivers, it's some other self-serving muppet defending energy cartels' pricing structures or stealth currency devaluations which make food imports that much more expensive. The BBC bovinely parrots the govt line so I was very surprised that these two chunky agents of subversion managed to get themselves onto the tv schedule at all. The Che Guevara tattoos that they both sport said it all really and while they were very discreet about their politics, little remarks and comments dropped here and there made it obvious what they valued and whom these guys were rooting for. This was television made for me. Come the revolution, the current batch of tv chefs, like the highly-paid Möben kitchen clowns that they are, will likely be hunkering down together with the elite preparing the last amuse bouches before they all get forked with Alessi cutlery by an enraged mob. Whereas you could probably trust the Hairy Bikers to tow their mobile cooking range through the sea of placards and banners and feed gourmeted-up fish and chips to those camped out on the various small-town Tahrir Squares. Not long now.

The show was great. Che Guevara was in attendance again. Si lost the plot a few times and kept corpsing appealingly. Dave got to prance around in a gold-lamé onesie. They cooked delicious food, the aroma of which wafted around the auditorium and made everyone hungry, and fed it to four audience members – a cleaner, a bricklayer, a chef and someone who wrapped cars in vinyl for a living -- plugged their books a few times and compensated us for it by stripping frequently down to their underwear to allow about 400 attending cougars to admire and cheer the results of their recent diets. Good job, guys! Thank you! Stay safe on your bikes – the driving round here is lethal.

In keeping with the show's values, OH and I kept things appropriately proletarian and thus visited our Turkish friend A. for one of his friendship plates. A.'s was buzzing nicely. His new floor layout means that the takeaway customers stay near the door and are physically separated from the sit-down diners further in. “Slightly fewer but better customers”, he told us, less of the drunken, unpleasant, fight-prone kebab crowd, and more quiet types who appreciate A's cheffing.

For us, the week had been quite tiring so we turned in at around 11.30pm, said our good-byes to A., and headed home.