Lady Collar's Handy Hints

Hello everyone. It is Lady Collar here. Bing has asked me to add a little colour to his blog by offering some advice on my own areas of expertice - and a jolly good thing too if you ask me. The finest of men, of course, (I did marry him, after all!) but he does rather have his head in the clouds and we all know that you sometimes need to speak to people on their own level, about things that they will recognize from their everyday, humdrum, insignificant little lives. We can't all be enormously successful politicians, journalists and businessmen, I always tell him. Every great man has someone standing behind him doing all of the real work - like Tony Blair had his Cherie and Hitler had his Eva Braun.


I thought I would start with a few tips from the kitchen. Now when I was a girl, cooking was easy. Irish cuisine involved taking something normal like bread and making it artery-cloggingly unhealthy by frying it. Scottish cuisine involved taking something that is already unhealthy, like a chocolate bar, and making it even more unhealthy by deep-frying it. English cuisine involved taking anything and boiling it until it becomes a tasteless mush – remember, as my husband would say, if you can count the carrots then they're not done yet. Traditional Welsh cuisine has always been mystery to us all.

Times have changed, of course, and now it is common to find many different dishes from around the world – all either fried, deep-fried or boiled to oblivion as above. Occasionally this works in reverse and you will take something traditional like blood pudding or battered tripe, and make it exotic by plastering it with curry sauce. That is what I recommend! Either that or order pizza!