Chris Worfolk's Blog

I had some hopes for this book. Russell Brand and I are superficially alike. That is to say, we both have long tangled hair and a tendency to stand up for justice rather than kowtowing to authority.

However, the revolution that Brand proposes is perhaps-unalterably bound up in a movement towards a religiously-inspired spiritualism. Brand would argue that that is the point. They need to be connected together.

He opens the book with a prayer and talks about his belief in god. Which god you ask? Doesn’t matter. Brand seems to accept all the contradictory claims of various religions as true. But what does that matter when you believe that science cannot explain everything. Especially Consciousness. I’ll be writing to Dan Dennett for my money back then.

Some of the claims drift into the beyond ridiculous. Whether or not you think that the entire working class is being oppressed and knowledge of other alternatives is being carefully controlled and discredited, a group of people doing mediation does not drop a city’s crime rate by 20%. I couldn’t even find the study that Brand was referencing, but you do not need to know that it does not make sense.

That’s the bad stuff though. There is also lots of good stuff in the book.

He writes in an engaging style. It’s entertaining, it slips in and out of poetry and moves seamlessly between the fun and the serious. It is self-aware enough to realise that many will regard Brand as a champagne socialist.

Some of which is contentious. For example, he claims that the US election has been won by the side with the most money. He points out that isn’t claiming this always has happens. It is just that it has happened every time ever so far. Thought provoking, though you could argue that the side with the most support should be able to raise the most money.

Other points are less contentious. Wealth inequality is increasing. We are severely damaging the planet. The currently democratic process fails to engage people. We all know this he states again and again. And we do. That is to say, most people would accept these ideas (though not all). Few would argue that 85 individuals should have the same net worth as 3,500,000,000 others.

Every election we discuss low voter turn-out. People don’t seem to care. Except clearly, people do care about democracy in general. The nation phones into premium rate lines to vote for X-Factor every week. Even I voted in Eurovision. It’s the current political system, a feeling that they have no voice and no power that people are disenfranchised with.

Whether his socialist utopia will work is another question. His experiences with the Buy Love Here project does not bode well, nor does the evidence that human nature is rather unpleasant.

However, at worst you can argue that Brand becomes the reductio ad absurdum to his own ideas. That does not mean he doesn’t have a point.

When W. Morgan Petty, resident of 3 Cherry Tree Drive, Canterbury, heard there might be a nuclear war soon, he took the most sensible course he could. He declared his house and gardens a Nuclear Free Zone. With Roger, who helps out in the garden, by his side they set about preparing for the post-nuclear period which his house would of course now survive intact.

It’s very funny and a reasonably-short read so does not get old. However, been set in the 80’s it is now dated and the young people will struggle to get the references more and more.

So, it’s happened then. For half a decade of working in sports betting I have gone no more into golf than my every-other-year concession to watching the Ryder Cup. However, I’m currently working with Sky Sports and it it is impossible to ignore not to get caught up in the buzz. This year I actually sat down and watched some of The Masters.

I say sat, I was really lying in bed. However, I managed to get through nearly an hour of it without failing asleep, which I suspect means I am getting old.

Not like Jordan Spieth. 21 years old and now a Master champion. I should point out at this point that he is ageing, he hasn’t found some magic cure for that. However, his fresh young face puts even Sebastian Vettel to shame. He dashed any hopes of Rory McIlroy completing his set of all four major championships (not that McIlroy even managed second), and now aged 25, it’s probably game over for him…

I wanted to document some of the challenges I had had registering myself as a candidate. It’s not impossible, but if you haven’t done it before, there are definitely some things you need to be aware of.

You do not have much time between the election starting and getting your forms in. Leeds City Council opened submissions on 1 April and closed them on the 9th. However, this was over the Easter weekend, so you actually only had 5 working days to submit them.

I downloaded the forms from their website and then went to the town hall to hand them in. The man on the front desk said I could give them to him and he would pass them on. However, the next day the elections office phoned me back saying that I had filled out the wrong forms and I had to submit them in person.

This was on the 2nd, and on the 3rd they closed for Easter, so I had to go down on the 7th and get the forms back and make an appointment for the 8th to submit them. This left me only the evening on the 8th to get them all filled out.

This is all doable, though it is very difficult if you have a job. They are only open 10am to 4pm and because they are busy during elections, you have to go down and speak to them if you want a response. When I tried to phone them back on the number they had called me on I got an automated message saying that the number was Leeds City Council, but you had to phone the “published number” and then hung up on me. The problem is they do not publish any numbers. I had to go onto their live chat to get their number, and then the number said it was going to be over 20 minutes before they answered it.

Again, none of this is impossible. However, it is difficult if you have a job. I am quite lucky that I work in Leeds and my current client is fairly flexible. However, there is clearly a lot more that could be done to make the democratic process open to ordinary working class people.

Al fresco dining has returned to our household for another year! Actually, it was still mightily cold out on our balcony, but not cold enough to keep us inside any longer. We celebrated with a sea food day.

Fried cuttlefish with mixed leaf salad and cajun fries. That ink does not come off your hands. Luckily, it’s edible, so it doesn’t need to.

Elina also knocked up some awesome milkshake slash smoothies. They were milkshakes, but so heavy on the strawberry and milt that we couldn’t actually fit much ice cream in.

Dinner consisted of a dover sole that I was mostly successful in gutting, alongside some soy sauce mash (an accident, but turns out to be awesome) and freshly prepared sea urchin.

Turns out that sea urchin tastes pretty horrible. Slimy and salty.

Without the years of training we spent playing Tetris, how will the next generation cope with grocery deliveries?

Turns out, that the three bird roast isn’t the only “thing of a thing” roast you can do.

This is an east coast red mullet, inside a mackerel, inside a halibut. It does not work as well as birds, because you cannot get as a big a cavity. The other problem is that it is difficult to get the stuffing (which I made with sausage meat, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper) to cook as quick as the fish. I felt it was rather uncooked, though Elina thought it was fine, and we haven’t died, so it seems to have been okay.

Elina thought the haddock had a rather defeated look on his face.

I’ve done all the recipes I want to do from Hugh’s Veg Every Day book, so I’ve started going back over them while combing in extra ingredients that I have found lying around during the Saturday inventory.

This one was the new potato, tomato and boiled egg salad. I swapped out the mustard in the vignette for honey and mild chilli powder. Then I (and by “I” I mean my sous chef Elina) fried up some turkey that we had marinated in some kind of substance. I think I put sunflower oil, freshly-ground black pepper, Jamaican jerk, lemon pepper, cayenne pepper and smoked paprika.

It’s been ten months since the last edition of the guide was published, but the drought is over. This edition features 14 brand new reviews and is available now in the Amazon Kindle store.

Added

• Almost Famous
• Bem Brasil
• Bird & Beast
• Buca di Pizza
• Bulgogi Grill
• Bundobust
• Byron
• Cabana
• Griffin Hotel
• Kerala
• Meat Liquor
• Teppan 260
• Tharavadu
• The Man Behind The Curtain

About a decade ago Worfolk Online was running a series of web portals that brought a lot of lovely content together from across the web and put it in one place so that we didn’t have to go through that tedious process of typing in the first few letters of URLs before auto-complete finishes it for us.

One of which was Frinks. Then, years later, it closed down.

Since then many people have asked if and when it would return. I mean, they didn’t exactly state it per se. However I could see it in their eyes, hear it in the intonation of their voice, and feel it in their embrace.

Well never fear, because Frinks has indeed returned. It is mostly syndicating large pictures of my face at the moment, making it largely only of interest to Elina, but I hope to expand the content in time.