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Saturday 9 October 2010

Mint Sauce And Health And Safety

On Friday night, on top of all the stress I was already under, I received a text from my dad who had been to Goose Fair.

Mint sauce in a bloody bottle! Goose Fair will never be the same again!


As a son of the best city in the UK, I suddenly was all fired up about this piece of news. Although the rest of the country sees a bowl of mushy peas with mint sauce and thinks of traditional bonfire night food, in Nottingham it is more closely associated with Goose Fair. Health and Safety has already sanitised our annual fair, as I have written before, but bottled mint sauce. No fucking way! The worse part was that my dad was referring to the mushy pea stall. Not any old mushy pea stall, the mushy pea stall…

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…where they don’t know how to spell ‘additives’ but do know how to make their own special mint sauce that the customer ladles out of a big steel bowl. A squirty bottle of mint sauce is a further nail in the coffin of this once great country of ours. They will be stopping them making the peas in the old stoves next.

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On the way to the fair I was all fired up, I wanted to argue in favour of traditions and the importance of keeping them alive. I was already mentally writing a letter to Nottingham City Council’s health and safety idiocy department:

If the Italians were told that they could no longer eat pasta, and the Scottish were told no more deep-fried confections, there would be an outcry. What about local culinary delicacies that make our country great? The parmo in Teesside? The using a Yorkshire pudding as a receptacle in Yorkshire? By insisting that mint sauce is served from a squirty bottle, rather than a steel bowl, you are tearing the heart and soul out of not just Goose Fair, but from Nottingham itself! (And so on, I ran out of a proper point here, I just wanted to write a letter of complaint.)

As it turned out, the reason was that they were experimenting with squirty bottles as it made less mess, and they were just seeing if it worked. I quite firmly told her that it didn’t work and the bowl and ladle method should return next year.

Before today, I had never had a go on one of those crane operated toy grabbers. I assumed them to be fixed somehow, in the owner’s favour. Today I had my first ever go and won something straight away.

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