Spectator Life

The Great British Bake Off (GBBO) is like a steaming spotted dick, moist and dense and delicious, and speckled with dried fruit. Paul Hollywood is the flour. He binds it all together. Mel and Sue are the milk and butter. They’re rich and creamy, and maybe a bit naughty in their comedic charm. Mary Berry? She’s the sugar, of course. Were she not there, the pudding wouldn’t be a pudding at all. It would just be a mound of carby sadness. Spotted dick is a fine pudding. And so terribly British, just like GBBO. Yesterday, gasps were heard when it was announced that the show will, as of the end of series seven, move to Channel 4. The maker, Love Productions, could not agree a deal with the BBC. Shockingly, the disagreement between the BBC and Love Productions is over money.

Researchers can now predict where in Scotland you are most likely to encounter ticks that carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. If that wasn’t enough to make you reconsider those picnic plans, then they have also forecast that this risk will increase as global temperatures rise. In a recent paper, the researchers predicted that people were more likely to come into contact with an infected tick in the months of August and September. They also identified both the Highlands and Tayside as areas of particular risk. Their map can be viewed in full here.

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’ Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination.

A few months ago, Nigerian migrants housed at a government hostel in Milan suddenly refused to eat any more of the free food on offer. Italian food is monotonous and indigestable, they explained. Then they went berserk. This was not a one-off case. Far from it. There have been hunger strikes, demos, sit-ins and the odd riot in protest at the stuff. Recently, a group of mainly Pakistani migrants based in a Reggio Emilia hostel were given their own taxpayer-funded chef ‘specializzato in piatti pachistani e africani’. They had complained that Italian food was making them ill. Many migrants en route from Libya to who-knows-where are marooned in Italy for now, and they are getting fed up. They know that other EU countries have better food.

Blancmange. Poor, maligned blancmange. The slimy, over-set staple of children’s birthday parties and school dinners, destined to be pushed around a plate and loathed for life. Blancmange has become shorthand for an age of blandness: the dessert equivalent of Chris de Burgh. Even its name sounds heavy on the English tongue. But we do the blancmange a grave disservice. It is, after all, essentially a panna cotta. Shouldn’t a milk jelly by any other name taste as sweet? It is slightly lighter than its Italian counterpart, yes, but that’s all to its credit. So why the bad reputation? The culprit, I think, is packet blancmange. No amount of careful preparation can mask the cornflour. In theory, English blancmange is set with cornflour and French with gelatine.

Being a family doctor is sometimes the least glamorous job in the world, dealing with the unpleasant, mundane and sometimes just downright boring health issues that exist. However, for the patients suffering from these problems, it’s a big deal and one of the typical common currencies of minor problem I see almost every day in my surgery is the issue of warts and verrucas. These are caused by a harmless viral infection in the skin called the human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV causes keratin, a hard protein in the top layer of the skin, to grow too much, giving the typical roughened texture of a wart. There are more than 60 different types of viruses known to cause warts.

Thanks to Stephen Fry I had never wanted to be on television. Around the time Fry made the transition from print to screen, and hence real fame, he wrote a piece lamenting the irreversible step he had taken. Now, as a result of his face being familiar, he explained, he could never again complain in a restaurant without being accused of throwing his weight around. To put his bins out risked snoopers going through the contents. He even feared cutting his toenails, he said, in case someone got hold of them and knocked up ‘an army of clones’. Joking aside, Fry knew he had lost the precious gift of privacy and would never regain it. ‘If only I’d stuck to radio,’ he said. His words had a terrible ring of truth and I’ve always remembered them.

One of my teachers in medical school kept saying: ‘A treatment that has no side-effects is already a good one.’ These seemed to be wise words worth remembering. But today I think he may have been not entirely correct: there is no therapy that does not have potential to cause adverse effects. What really counts, in life as in medicine, is a reasonable balance between risk and benefit. Chiropractic treatment is an excellent example of the importance of this balance. Chiropractors rely heavily on manipulating their patients’ spines, and the benefits are not at all clear. Practitioners usually insist that their manipulations are effective for a bafflingly wide range of conditions.

On 2 September 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down after trying to explain away his latest bout of sucking up to Hitler and the deputy leader of the Labour party, Arthur Greenwood (standing in for his absent boss Clement Attlee), rose to reply, the infuriated Tory MP Leo Amery shouted: ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ It’s telling that it took the threat of imminent fascism to make a member of Parliament a) speak plainly, and b) offer support to a member across the floor. To this day, such incidents are rare, to say the least. Instead, Parliament is plagued by a ceaseless cacophony of casual cat-calling, rising to a pitch of parasexual excitement when one side smells blood.

Evgeny Lebedev’s famous friends are eager to tell you what a darling he is. Piers Morgan says that he is ‘one of the most charming, well-connected, exotically attired and fascinating figures in English society right now’. Stephen Fry says that ‘for a man of his power, status and wealth, he is endlessly teaseable and humorous’. Boris Johnson says that he is ‘a major force for good’ and ‘a very generous soul’. And Boris’s sister Rachel calls him ‘a wise old beard (or two) on young shoulders. He’s much smarter and funnier than people think.’ You get the picture. Evgeny likes to be ribbed, especially if the person doing the ribbing is a celebrity.