Wasted Tractor Tuesday

Today’s Blip is dedicated to The Right Honourable Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). What a lovely slippery fish our man is, ensuring the inhabitants of the United Kingdom have good, clean, cheap, world-leading food in their bellies and live in a good, clean, cheap, world-leading environment. To be fair, he didn’t use the words “world-leading” which are copy/pasted into every sentence in every Tory party document: Had a look at their 2017 election manifesto? Take out world-leading and the document shrinks from about 85 pages to 8.
 
No, Mr Gove was being very up-front and at long last one member of the Government attempting to do something other than Brexit, even if it was part of his “I’m the best future PM” campaign. He announced the UK’s “Recycling Revolution” and it was a truly British event. We won’t learn anything from any foreigners, we will do it our way. We will introduce a plastic bottle deposit system!! AND …. wait for it ……. It will be introduced in 5 years – 2023! Wow, that shows the Tory party can act fast when it wants to.
 
What our fishy Minister didn’t make clear was that it wasn’t legislation that would be put before Parliament very soon but simply a “Consultation Documentation”. Which is another phrase for “we will kick this down the road as long as possible”, along with everything else.  In my youth, we used the Yorkshire phrase “Where there’s Muck, there’s Brass (money)”. Sky News adapted it this evening for their southern clientele as “Where there is Waste, there is Wealth”. Everyone knows PET recycling is a money maker and could be introduced in months without any problem. Get on with it, it makes a damn sight more sense than Brexit and will bring rewards for everyone.
 
Today was a simply wonderful day – sun, sun, sun from sunrise to sunset and packed with enough Vitamin B to make rexit overheat. As Angie away, I was ordered to collect the sack of Vitamin C for the horses from Erkheim. A vegetable farming business in the vegetable growing area along the rich soil Danube, sell off their rejected carrots every week when they fail at the packaging stage. They have a weekly tour dropping off 20kg sacks of carrots at riding stables and the like. In almost all respects they are perfect and are 100% clean (which is actually a problem as they are slightly damp and tend to sprout if not stored well). We use them for ourselves too. We also often order a 5kg sack of potatoes which are much tastier than the ones in the supermarket.
 
Before we collected the sacks, Luna and I did a pleasant walk up the hill overlooking the town and with a spectacular view today of the Alps through the 0°C skies. The ponds are frozen but unlike the grandchildren on Saturday, I will not be trying out my pirouettes just yet, the ice won’t hold a well-fed duck. Also took a photo of a wooden horse at the local stables when we collected the sacks – especially for Nogbad who likes taking the odd spin on a horse. He may need to hone up his skills, living in Kent though should make tunneling under a wooden vault horse easier.

 
Afterwards popped into the local butcher who has a very good reputation but who we don’t use. I was determined to make my own sausage rolls, fed up with reading all the Blips from the UK. Even if not a single UK sausage roll has ever been legally exported across the Channel, I for one want to be prepared when the troops block off all access to Dover. Armed with pork belly and shoulder, I got to work at home creating a mince with some plastic “English style” prepacked streaky bacon and adding the secret ingredients. With the other hand cut the flaky pastry into a lovely ball of dough which after it had relaxed and chilled out a bit was rolled out and filled. Sadly I did make one mistake – I forget to snip the pastry with scissors or prick with a fork. So while they turned a lovely golden brown and tasted amazing (reality and memory after 30 years may not be identical) but simply not quite as crisp on the top as it had steamed too much.
 
Tomorrow Mr Kipling and his other sort of meat are in the Prepare for Brexit crosshairs.