Losing things of value

Often pleasure can be gained from the simplest of things. A weekend breakfast treat I have enjoyed for most of my life is a soft boiled egg together with, what most people refer to as “soldiers”, but which my mother always called “dip fingers”, that is to say buttered toast, or sometimes bread, cut into finger like strips which can be dipped into the soft yellow yolk.

Personally I find the best results are achieved if you part boil the egg and then coddle it in hot water. To do this I bring the water to the boil, carefully drop the egg in to it, and leave it to to boil at full heat for one minute, before turning the heat off and allowing the egg to rest (coddle) in the hot water for between five and eight minutes depending upon the size of the egg and how runny or not one likes the yoke to be.  For my taste a five minutes and ten second coddle produces a perfect egg, whereas my husband, who I suspect, as a teenager, may have been scared by Edwina Currie prefers a firmer yolk, so his eggs receive a seven minute coddle.

One of the simplest breakfast dishes possible, certainly one of the simplest ways to cook an egg, but one which, for those of us who like eggs, is unfailingly a pleasure to eat.

Boiled eggs are, of course, eaten all over the world, in Singapore, soft boiled eggs are known as “half boiled eggs” but they are eaten in a very different way, tipped out of their shell's into bowls and mixed with Soy sauce.  The Swedish on the other hand cook their eggs until they are hard and serve them with “kalles kaviar” - otherwise known as cod's roe.

However, a boiled egg served in its shell, with the top sliced off, sitting in a china egg cup, and served with buttered toast soldiers strikes one as being quintessentially English. Certainly it is a breakfast dish which has been served to British children, and secretly enjoyed by British adults, for many decades, maybe centuries, and has signified the breaking of the night fast in Britain and in every corner of what was once her Empire for generations.

Egg and soldiers, buttered scones, Yorkshire pudding, crumble, custard roast beef or muffins. The simple pleasure of such simple treats, enjoyed before us by generations of English men and women is something we can share with those who went before us, even if was are no longer permitted to share their certainty of their role within the world or their pride in what we are as a people.

However, much has changed, not only in the way we are required to perceive ourselves, but also in how we view our food.

Although, in recent years, some of the better chefs began to rediscover the forgotten glory of English cuisine, in the last forty years or so it has become fashionable to mock English food and and portray it as amounting to little more than a dried up pork chop served with soggy cabbage and boiled potato. Of course, the reality is in fact very different, even if  we ignore some of the delicious regional dishes which food critics are beginning to revisit and enjoy, but concentrate upon the most derided of British recipes they include some of the most ultimately successful comfort food ever invented.

Created in a world before central heating when for nine months out of twelve a family needed warmth and substance to sustain them, there is little in the world as comforting and appetising as food like Shepard's pie, steak and kidney (or steak and ale if you prefer), rhubarb crumble or bangers and mash.  Such food may now be viewed as “heavy” but in a different time, before cars and sedentary lifestyles, that is what was required, in the same way the more exotic flavours from far away places such as Asia or Mexico were designed to hide the taste of putrid meat, much of British food was designed to get one through a British winter, and were massively successful in doing so.

Traditional British food can be as appetising as any nations, with flavours and ingredients which can easily adapt to a health conscious, centrally heated modern life style, but it is not "cool" to say so.  

Multicultural zealots crow that the British now love curry, the subliminal propaganda in their message being that curry is a benefit only possible due to mass immigration, an assertion which ignores the fact Britain was a nation of tea drinkers for centuries before we thought it necessary to import the half the Indian sub-continent to live amongst us.  Furthermore, do the same fanatics ever suggest that the international popularity of hamburgers and Coca-cola means that America should invade the world?

The denigration of simple English food is but a part of a far larger and more sinister campaign, to downgrade all things traditionally viewed as British, or even European, whilst promoting all things imported.  It is a malevolent campaign which exploits the natural instinct to enjoy the exotic, with the implicit suggestion that the “the other”, the foreign and the exotic is “better”.

When it comes to music, for instance, we are told that music which appeals to the baser instincts is somehow more democratic and less elitist than that which touches other instincts, which are less easy to define.  For centuries European musicians and composers have strived to appeal to the heart and to touch the soul, yet in this age their music has been eclipsed by rhythms which caresses gyrating loins and lyrics which worship the posturing, gangster, aggressions of other cultures.   

Even songs of love are now viewed as being of less value than those which celebrate other emotions.

It is of course easier to teach the lazy and the stupid to enjoy what pleasures their groin rather than their soul, but is it better?

In few areas has beauty been so starkly rejected in favour of ugliness as it has in art. When we look at the great art of our forebears what are the feelings and emotions the images create? Are they similar in any way to the feelings and emotions evoked by paintings made with dung, crucifixes in urine, unmade beds or animal corpses in formaldehyde? I don't think so.

Why is beauty no longer considered appropriate to art?.

The same applies to our architecture. In a thousand years from now will people flock to view the glass, steel and plastic architecture of our age as we still flock to view the great cathedrals of Rome the triumphal Viennese palaces  or the stately homes and castles of England?

Are any of these changes really for the better, and is that really the point? Is the whole purpose to create something new or is the destruction of what went before what its really all about?

Like our heritage, so much within our culture is now actively denied.  Speak of British culture and some baying moron will jump in with some mocking sarcastic quip about morris dancing or cheese rolling.  To hear them speak is as if Tallis and Elgar never existed, as if English choirs never sang as if Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens and Austin never wrote and as if haunting folk songs never echoed along our coasts.

To respect other cultures it is not necessary to disrespect or deny our own, but that is what is happening, so maybe respecting other cultures is not the point at all.

The point is to so devalue our culture in our eyes that we will not care what happens to it.  After all, a man will only fight to defend that which he loves whilst he still loves it, if he ceases to love it why would he fight for it? Of course, if he is never taught what he has he will not miss it when its taken from him, and if he's never seen the stars he will never know their beauty and will not care if they cease to be.

You can only miss what you know, or what you can remember.  If I was never allowed another boiled egg on Sunday morning, I would miss them, but if I had never had one I would not know what I missed, and it I was told that they were nasty, why wouldn't I believe it? On a more mundane level if instead of boiling my egg, I had broken it into an omelet and mixed it with fried onions, pepper herbs and spices, it might be nice, but it wouldn't be the same.

That may sound a tiny issue, but there are a million different different experiences, feelings thoughts and objects which come together to create a national identity, we can lose them one by one until we lose them all.  

Our enemies seek to take away what we value by changing how we view it. The louder they play the music the less easy it is to hear the words and the spicier they make our food the less we realise what we are really being fed.

As the music around us gets louder and our food is more exotic, we are told that its better, but it isn't better, its merely different.  However, if it carries on long enough we won't know that any more.