Monthly archive: January 2007

A short play.

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I know, I know…

Not worthy to be called a homosexual. I have tried to watch the Wizard of Oz a few times and always fell asleep. Mind you, it might have been because it's usually on at Christmas when I have overeaten.

But on Thursday Dr B. is taking me to see Wicked, and has asked me to stick the DVD on and watch it until the end.

So here we go.

Not sure what the quote right at the beginning means. Ah, sod it. Can't be too important.

What, Over the Rainbow already? That's disappointing.

Oh, a storm. Look, "special" effects. Don't be silly, this is 1939, some respect for what at the time must have not looked like a small-scale farm swinging from a thread.

Uhm, it's going to be all a dream, right?

Wow – colour! Hey, we've found out how to shoot in colour, so we'll oversaturate everything just to prove it. Getting just a little bit of a headache.

Brilliant: a huge bubble is about to land and Toto is completely oblivious and looks the opposite way, then wonders off screen!

Those little people give me the creeps. It's the costumes, and the voices.

What the beejesus is happening to Dorothy's hair? Longer one scene, shorter in another, then long again.

Uh-ho – snoozing off. Not even Emerald City is bright enough to keep me awake. Must resist.

How camp is that lion?

Enough with the lion now. We get it.

And now monkeys. Now, those do give me the creeps every time. Dressed monkeys. Flying monkeys. Good Lord, I am not going to sleep tonight, aren't I?

Rewinding the last half hour because I fell asleep.

Rewinding the last half hour because I fell asleep.

Rewinding the last half hour because I fell asleep.

Rewinding the last half hour because I fell asleep.

Falling in and out of sleep, just enough to follow what's happening.

The end. Whew. Finally off to bed. Don't feel any gayer yet.

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

A few things I learnt by avoiding imported food and drink for a week:

• your choice of fresh fruit and vegetables is obviously limited, understandingly as it's winter, although I wonder if it gets any better at al in the summer;
• it is very, very difficult to find sandwich meat (sliced ham, chicken or turkey) that has not been put together from more than one animal "from the E.U.", without paying through the nose for someone to decorate each individual slice by hand with mustard grains or something;
• Spain and Italy have similar climates and I would have expected them to export in a similar way their produce, and yet most of the tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, garlic and chives I found were from Spain, with only some top-of-the-range cherry tomatoes on the vine coming from Italy. Either Spain is cheaper, or Italy is so entangled in bureaucracy that people have given up trying to import stuff from there;
• certain issues are still not very clear and would require further investigation. For instance, are the living condition of Danish chicken supplying cheap frozen breasts any worse than the previous owners of the fresh British ones that cost three times as much and claim to be reared to the supermarket's own standards? What are these standards? Perhaps that they never let chicken rot in their own shite in the dark with no space to move for longer than a week? I will have to look that up;
• also, is it carbon-gentler to eat a local apple that has been grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse, or to let it grow naturally in a sunny country and get it into the UK in a plane that is carrying passengers anyway? I think apples are kept in a chilled room since autumn (carbon emissions of a chilled room, anyone?) but Dr B. insists they are grown in greenhouses.

I have enjoyed and will stick to some of the choices I made during this week:

• leading brand yogurts (made in the UK with milk produced near the factory) versus cheaper imitations from France. I find no difference in taste, and I like the idea of supporting local employment and reducing the need to transport so much stuff. Although they are 15p more expensive each, which at the rate of two per day on a work day comes up to about six pounds a month. Ouch;
• fresh chicken breast is juicier, firmer, altogether more pleasant and savoury than frozen ones (around four pound 50 per kilo), and I might stick to it but look out for special offers and price reductions, because at full price it would cost me about 16 pounds more per month. Ouch;
• I did not really need to bake my own bread to make sandwiches to eat for lunch at work, but it was so delicious that I might treat myself for a bit longer;
• I am now so very off sandwich meat, I cannot stop picturing big vats of leftovers from more succulent cuts being liquidised along with a few bones and the occasional feather, then pasted together with gelatine for my, uhm, pleasure. If I can afford it, it's Wiltshire ham and if I can't, it's London Quorn.

There are just a couple of limitations I am not prepared to put up with:

• I like my fresh salads, I have a large mixed one three to four times a week, and I might cut that down but not give it up entirely. My wellbeing depends too much on that lovely mix of leaves, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers;
• similarly, I like fruit so much that it is an absolute pleasure to enjoy a larger variety. I'm not talking strawberries every day in January or even exotic stuff, but the occasional orange and satsuma, and a few pears now and then.

In short: I am prepared to pay more for national nicer meat, and possibly dairy produce, but will keep making concessions to fresh fruit and vegetables that we cannot grow ourselves.

And now would you please excuse me, I've got a breakfast of Sri Lankan mango, Venezuelan papaya and Indonesian starfruit (peeled and chopped in Kenya, then packaged in India) to attend to.

A hostile invasion; a raid. An advance, especially at another's expense; an encroachment. Often used in the plural.

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I was tidying up stuff on the server yesterday and I found this series of photos I had taken between December 2003 and January 2004.

They used to be part of a gallery I scrapped when I redesigned this website and migrated to WordPress. I have now uploaded them into a set at Flickr: they are nothing much, but they are still very meaningful to me and manage to take me back to a rough patch I had to go through to get to where I am now.

• Dec. 2003 – Jan. 2004: a Flickr photoset

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

I had little time for Sunday lunch, so I just ate leftover steamed vegetables from the previous night, cold from the fridge, still in their plastic container while I was sitting at the computer.

Then I cooked some of the half-price fresh UK chicken that I had bought on Saturday. It was saved from burning at the very last minute as Dr B. inquired about the smoke, and it was in the end very nice, meaty and slightly chargrilled. I wondered if I would have enjoyed it so much had I not known that it was meant to cost three times as much as my usual low-cost frozen Danish chicken breasts.

The afternoon snack was three cans of Stella (brewed in the UK) from our local Royal Vauxhall Tavern. We just popped in for the show and a friend's birthday, then rushed home because Dr B. received a call from work (he is on support all week long) and I had to go make a pizza.

You see, Sunday night is 'share a pizza and Weight Watchers frozen dessert' night (formerly known as 'two pizzas and a tub of Haagen-Dazs each' night). Having established that the Weight Watchers desserts were made in Belgium and got rid of them on Saturday (they were lovely, thank you very much), all was left to do was concentrate on making a pizza from scratch.

I did not really have to make it, but it was fun, we have a bread machine and this way I could make two and top Dr B.'s one with imported produce like tomatoes. Yes, mine was what I think they call a 'white pizza' in Italian.

We ate watching part of 'The Trial of Tony Blair', but I grew very quickly tired of the caricature treatment that cancelled the surreal aspect they were trying to get across. So I switched to Project Catwalk and fell quickly asleep.

I have to rush to work now, but please come back later for a final post on the lessons I learnt by trying to eat only British food for a week.

Having great variety; diverse. Versatile.

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I made this last night for Dr B. while I was having hearty British food (leeks, potatoes, sliced green beans and beef).

I have adapted the quantities and part of the preparation from the Thai beef salad recipe at iVillage.co.uk, and this usually is as a generous main course (sometimes the only course) for our dinner.

Serves two. Approximately 650 calories per portion.

Ingredients

• 400g to 500g beef (steak, not too thick)
• two teaspoons olive oil for frying
• about 150g mixed salad leaves
• 8 spring onions, chopped in large chunks on the diagonal

Ingredients for the dressing

• juice of 2 limes
• 1 tbsp Thai fish sauce
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
• 2 tsp grated root ginger
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 red or green chillies, sliced lengthwise, deseeded and chopped finely along the width
• 2 tbsp freshly chopped coriander leaves
• 2 tbsp freshly chopped mint leaves

Combine all the ingredients for the dressing in a jar and shake well. Pour half on half of the lettuce leaves, toss and serve on two plates.

Fry the beef as much or as little as you like it, then slice it into strips and place on the lettuce. You may let it cool beforehand if you prefer. Pour the rest of the dressing on the beef and top with the chopped spring onions.

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

On Saturdays I usually have a healthy version of a fry-up breakfast (low-fat bacon, poached eggs, sliced beef tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms in scant oil and baked beans) instead of lunch.

But yesterday the bacon was Danish, the mushrooms probably Irish (anyone know what WM6 IRL means?) and the tomatoes Spanish, so I had a couple of eggs and a roll of bread (multiseed, home-baked and still steaming hot). I also had forgotten to buy baked beans (surely they must be made in the UK – are they eatin in any other country?).

Frustrated and very tired mid-afternoon (I'd been up since sometime after four in the morning), I had one of the frozen éclairs I'd bought for tonight (Weight Watchers, the most delicious thing I've ever tasted that has only 81 calories). Half-way through, I noticed it was made in Belgium. Drats. Did I stop eating it? Well I was not going to send it back half-eaten across the Channel wasn't I?

I prepared a Thai beef salad for Dr B. while a hearty no-nonsense British dinner for myself was cooking in the steamer: baby potatoes, leeks and sliced green beans, to go with some pan-seared beef.

As I was watching Dr B. reach heaven with his meal (that I denied myself because all the ingredients except the Beef were imported) I knew that, Belgium or no Belgium, the two remaining éclairs were going to be my dessert last night.

Yesterday it was an extraordinary feat not to get depressed about the faded green/mousy brown colour of every single item I ate.

But as I walked past the frozen aisle without picking up the usual kilo of frozen chicken (I think it comes at under a fiver, and it is made in Denmark) with my half-price fresh breasts from poultry 'raised by Tesco's standards' (whatever that means) I felt like Noah single-handedly saving the whole animal kingdom.

A woman regarded as ugly or terrifying.

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1. The average life sentence under Labour is 11 years (The Independent, 27 January 2007)
2. Captchas (distorted scattered characters on patterned background that users have to type to prove they are not a machine) have become more complex. This week I was asked to identify symbols and write the matching numbers from a correspondence chart provided underneath.
3. Biscuits and cakes are considered a necessity by UK law and are zero rated. Chocolate covered biscuits however are a luxury and subject to VAT at 17.5% (BBC H2G2). Jaffa cakes sparked a court case, and MrVities won by demonstrating that Jaffa cakes when stale go hard like a cake, not soft like a biscuit.
4. A low number of credit searches damages your credit rating. Lenders see it as an indication of not being credit active and will not be interested to give credit to you. My credit report only shows one such search in the last twelve months. Should I set up a recurring reminder to apply for credit every three months just to improve my credit rating?
5. Fruit juices and sodas (even sugar free) are acidic and damage your teeth. According to my dentist, their effect can be minimised by reducing their contact with the teeth (drinking quickly or through a straw), or by combining them with alkaline foods eaten at the same time (for example, a few nuts).
6. People still write their cards' PIN in the front page of their diaries. The woman next to me on the train the other day had four handwritten figures followed by 'Nat#8217;, and underneath another four next to 'HSBC#8217;. I felt like mugging her just to teach her a lesson.
7. People still have paper diaries.

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

Hurray for pears, and for my local supermarket that stocks two (two!) varieties, both from England. Gawd bless our plentiful land.

I wonder if you can tell that I am getting a bit bored with the lack of variety in the selection of affordable fruit.

I spent the morning on a training course for work, and when the mid-morning break beverages arrived, I sighed with relief when I saw that there were no fancy pastries (likely to be shipped frozen from France) but just a big thermos of coffee, some hot water and teabags.

And then a helpful participant popped out to get us all Jaffa Cakes and Chocolate Digestives. I had to have a couple, it would have been rude not to, and even more impolite to check where they were made, or if they contained as I thought with imported oranges and cocoa – and then say no.

Lunch was my usual home-made roll (of which I shall have to bake more on Saturday, as they have proved to be quite popular in the household this week) with roast chicken. Not something I've never had before, but I think it was the first time in a very long time that I was eating sliced chicken that had not been put together from several carcasses. This unheard-of luxury comes at a price, though.

I made an effort to half-heartedly cook a boring evening meal even if I was very tired (did this week feel unnaturally long to you too?), if you can call that the act of slapping a couple of steaks (UK beef) in a pan and grating a few carrots. On a more positive note, that was the last of the carrots I'd bought at the beginning of the week, and I'm glad to see the back of them.

I miss my salads. I cannot wait for Monday night, when I'll allow myself some leafy lettuce, crunchy cucumber and tender tomatoes, which I am now learning almost always come from sunny Spain – the lucky buggers.

But finding out for the first time that sandwich chicken can taste nicer than the packaging it comes in made me understand why some people spend more than I normally do on their lunches.

To snarl; growl.

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I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

If my previous update mentioned that I now eat the same breakfast every day, this one can do the same about lunch, which was the same as day 3 (home-baked bread and Wiltshire ham), only this time the ham was "hand decorated with golden breadcrumbs". It is so obvious I do not want to think much about what I'll eat, and I am happy to grab the same stuff over and over if I find it filling and easy to get.

Dinner was good but I fear it was purely because I ate later than usual, as I was busy playing with Rabbitful who yesterday made me a very proud daddy when he learnt how to stream audio).

I had only had a small packet of smoked-ham flavoured Quorn on the way home from work, and I was starving. So I just threw some turkey strips in a pan, grated a carrot and microwaved a potato and it was surprisingly pleasing.

After dinner we felt like having a glass of wine, and it is only now that I realise that it was imported from California. Not even for one second did I wonder whether the grapes of that (incidentally rather good) Shiraz perhaps reached their plump juiciness in sunny Kent.

Yesterday I missed the kick of a couples of satsumas mid-morning, and the tang of some orange juice on my grated carrots.

But I enjoyed very much sinking my teeth into slices of Quorn knowing I was biting into something that never had a daddy and a mummy.

(Slang) A chaotic or confused situation.

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I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

I won't mention breakfast or mid-morning and afternoon snacks, because they tend to be the same all the time (see choice of yogurts and apples from Monday).

Let's get straight to lunch. A very well deserved lunch, after a run with a colleague along the canal that still had some of the snow that fell early this morning along its banks. The run was very pleasant and the home-baked granary bun I had afterwards was very good too. I had filled it with some ham that was made from "assured pork from farms in the UK, Wiltshire cured and matured on the bone for succulence, hand decorated with wholegrain mustard", which I suppose sounds more appealing than my usual supermarket's own brand "reconstituted ham made in Denmark from pork of EU and Brazil provenance" (or something like this). Yes, "hand decorated with wholegrain mustard" – I guess they had to justify the 2 pound 68 price tag.

Dinner was mouth-watering scrumptous: sauteed thinly sliced UK potatoes, pan-fried UK turkey strips, grated UK carrots. I was going to cook the turkey with mushrooms, but I had to change plans when I looked up the "WM1 IRL" next to "Produce of" on the packaging and found out it was not a UK postcode.

Yesterday I found it hard not to pop down to the canteen for a can of Coke Zero (haven't entirely figured out where it's made yet).

But man, that Wiltshire ham was worth every penny.

(Australian) A young animal, especially a baby kangaroo.

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I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.
Yesterday sourcing breakfast was easier (I just quickly went for the same stuff as day 1 ).

Lunch was leftover beef from the previous day's dinner, with some of the bread I baked on Monday night.

I had apples and yogurts and fairtrade coffee and tea throughout the day as on Monday.

My usual snack of supermarket own brand cheap sliced ham to eat on the way home from work and keep hunger pangs at bay had to be replaced by some leading brand roast chicken that I fortunately found at half price.

Dinner was lovely: hot smoked Scottish salmon slices (70% off normal price), roasted parsnips, boiled Brussels sprouts (produced not in Belgium but in the UK) and horseradish sauce.

Yesterday I found it boring to stick to just one type of apple. Boring, but not too hard. Oh, how I long to be able to alternate the pleasure of biting into a tangy Granny Smith and a juicy Pink Lady.

But it was surprisingly refreshing to upgrade from my usual tinned tuna to the lovely salmon.

Not doing too bad after all. However, my efforts could prove to be absolutely useless, as some people claim that it is more carbon efficient to import tomatoes from sunny Spain than grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain. I'd argue that yes, that would be cheaper because tomatoes are not in season in England now.

Although I am not entirely sure there is ever a season in this country for home-grown tomatoes.

Breeches. 'Too big for (one's) britches' (idiom): Overconfident; cocky.

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Yesterday I started an experiment: I want to see how hard it is to nourish myself entirely with British produce for a week.

These days you can carbon-offset everything you do by paying somebody to plant a tree for you every time you fart. I just want to see how hard it is to avoid food that has been flown across the world and rely on nationally-grown produce for a week. I am also interested to see if there is a difference in price.

The day was off to a not very encouraging start when I had to have a cup of coffee. I was planning to have some herbal tea, but I noticed it was 'blended and packed from imported ingredients'. The oats in my porridge were Scottish though.

At the supermarket on the way to work I struggled to find some British fruit (unsurprisingly for mid-January), but left with a bag of English Cox apples that even had the name of the growers on it (I checked them out, they happen to be located in the main town as the supermarket's headquarters – a good sign).

Finding meat for my sandwich was harder. I had never read the labels, but it turns out I've been eating meat from a variety of countries. In the end I scavenged a couple of packs of English roast beef (made from 'assured topside of beef from farms in the UK' – and half price too), to be eaten on their own because I could not be sure any of the loaves on sale were made entirely with English ingredients. Even the buns I bake weekly, and that I was planning to eat for lunch, were made with Danish butter.

I did not know that the supermarket's own brand yogurts for my elevenses and afternoon snack are made in France, so I went for one of the leading brands instead. They are practically the same, but the raspberry one is smooth (what's wrong with crunchy pips?). Oh, and they cost 44p instead of 27. No indication of where they are made, their website tells me that not only are they made in the UK, but they also use milk from local farms. I like that.

I resisted the urge to pick up a Double Decker chocolate bar (made in Birmingham, I think) and settled for some sugar free Airwaves (made in Plymouth). Later in the day I also had to politely refuse a shortbread biscuit a colleague offered me, because I did not feel like asking him to read out the ingredients first.

I continued to make an exception for coffee throughout the day, but I switched to fairtrade. Not sure it makes a difference environmentally, but it sure silences a guilty conscience for a bit.

I stopped at our local large supermarket on the way home, and it took me more than twice as long to pick up the usual stuff because I had to read all the labels.

My dinner consisted of more UK beef, UK carrots and UK beetroot. Non-UK lemon juice on the carrots, and the meat was fried in olive oil (so cheap that the bottle does not even say where it is from, but I bet it is not Yorkshire).

In the evening I baked another batch of bread for my lunches, this time with English butter.

The first day was not too hard. It certainly took longer to shop, but the novelty factor kept me going. I think condiments and spices will have to be imported, unless there is a choice.

Yesterday I found it impossible to buy lettuce for my usual evening meal big salad; all I could find was from Egypt and Morocco.

But I was surprised that I enjoyed very much my roast beef at lunch (not a choice I would normally go for).

• Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page

To harass; beset. To surround with troops; besiege.

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Lately, I have been waking up between two and five times a night to go have a wee.

My paranoid nature, fuelled by decades of ominous forecasting by my diabetes-obsessed family (my dad had it, and it made most of our lives a bit hellish) interprets this as a sure sign that I have not managed to escape the genetic predisposition to stop producing insulin.

My hypochondriac side alerts me instead that it must be a prostate-related problem. After all, I am not exactly a spring chicken, and I am fast approaching the age for it.

My level-headed live-in boyfriend (who keeps being woken up by my shuffling back and forth to the loo) suggested that I might simply try stopping drinking cup after cup of tea up to the very moment I go to bed.

So last night I had one last cup at 6pm, and that was it. I skipped my usual bottle of water with dinner, and I also refrained from snacking on fruit after dinner, which was quite hard as there is a very ripe melon in the fridge with my name across half of it.

It felt like when I was a little bed-wetter, and was not allowed to drink anything in the evening. If I was sent to the kitchen to fetch some water to bring back to the dining room, I was instructed to whistle to prove that I was not sticking my face under the faucet guzzling down gallons of water. A harsh measure perhaps, but as a working mum the last thing you want to do in the morning is start a machine of pissed-on linen – every single bloody morning.

Back to last night. I was falling asleep but, prompted by Dr B., made an effort to go and see if I could squeeze a few last drops out. I did – and then I slept uninterrupted the whole night. Just a coincidence? Time will tell.

To give a thorough beating to; thrash. To strike; wallop.

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One of the aspects that we were most excited about when we moved into our new flat last May was that at last there was room for a dining table.

I was very keen to buy one straight away and would have settled for anything, as cheap as possible, just to get started. However, I managed to save myself for the right one.

We looked and looked, but nothing satisfied our requirements of dimensions, shape, functionality and design at our silently agreed budget.

So we raised the bar a bit, and found a table that we liked at Habitat. I'd link to it but their website is a mess of Flash-induced dimensions and I am not able to.

We measured it, went home and built the same exact volumes (closed and extended) out of occasional tables, bedside tables and settee cushions. We liked it.

So we went back to the shop today, asked to order it, and it turns out that every single store they looked up on their network only has one in stock – which means only the one on display. We would have to wait until August.

There's a promising link on the website whereby you can enquire about availability of an item. Unfortunately all that does is open up a form to send a request for information via email, which Dr B. did.

I'm afraid I have not got much hope to stop using our tv-dinner trays any time soon.

Spotted or blotched with different shades or colors.

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1. Firefox lets you select an unlinked URL, drag it in the address bar and it will open it for you. Similarly, you can drag and drop an image from Firefox into Photoshop, or into a Windows folder. Also tried these in IE6 and IE7, but they both went 'Huh?'
2. T9 stands for text on 9 keys (via kottke remaindered links)
3. The cartoon Dora the Explorer has bits in Spanish and a computer interface-inspired arrow that points and clicks at things. Might knock Lazy Town off the top spot as my favourite Saturday morning entertainment.
4. The iPhone ringtone sounds like holy angels tinkling.
5. Jacques Lu Cont, Les Rythmes Digitales, Thin White Duke, Zoot Woman, Paper Faces, Man with Guitar, S.D.P., Man Behind the Mask and Pour Homme are all Stuart Price monikers (via Brugo)
6. Jade Goody is of mixed blood. Ah well, that proves it then that 'she is not racial' and therefore did not mean any harm at all when she called Bollywood star and fellow Celebrity Big Brother contestant Shetty 'Shilpa Poppadum'.
7. Julius Caesar was a hungry bottom (via Towleroad)

Subject to debate; arguable. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.

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A few days ago I was searching my laptop for a recipe that I had remembered saving while watching Taste (the designer food programme repeated on Sky Three around 5am).

While doing that, I came across a recipe I had devised a couple of months back as a healthier and cheaper alternative to the tub of icecream we had fallen into the habit of having every other night.

Before you reach for the ingredients yourself, let me warn you: it's not worth it. However, just as a reminder to myself, here it is.

Bitful's Berry Delight

Ingredients:

• 500ml fat free yogurt
• 250g fat free quark
• 250g strawberries
• 2 pots sugar free jelly

Instructions:

1. Blend everything together;
2. pour into 6 ramekins;
3. freeze;
4. when you are ready to eat, mix it again in blender until it reaches frozen yogurt texture.

Makes six portions (96 calories, and 79p each). Feels like eating glass shards.

Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia low fat frozen yogurt

Makes four portions (177.5 calories, and 87p each). Feels like you are in heaven, spoon-fed by angels.

No contest, really.

And the recipe I was originally looking for? Stir-fried aubergines and tofu in bean chili sauce: good, if a bit on the mushy side perhaps.

• Taste programme page on Sky

(adj.) Of or relating to a period of 150 years. (n.) A 150th anniversary or its celebration.

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Some series of Big Brother (Celebrity and 'normal' – whatever that means) I watch, some I ignore.

I lost all interest in the current Celebrity Big Brother one when Leo Sayer kept bouncing about declaring he's such a happy, positive person and he can see himself spread some joy in the house. That was his video introduction before he even entered the show.

A little over a week later, I switched on the TV and found him hunched over, every second word he uttered bleeped out, demanding for an effing producer to effing come and show him his effing contract, because there's no way it says a celebrity can be treated like that. Only it does say so, and he effing signed it.

Now, even people with no TV know that there is a issue of racist comments being made on the show, and this has sparkled debates in the House of Commons and threatens to endanger diplomatic relations with India.

I do not know exactly what happened. What I know is that ratings for the show finally went up, after it seemed that nothing could get people interested in it. I would not be entirely surprised if whatever was said or done by the contestants was intentionally blown up by the production company's cunning use of the art of editing.

After all, television is what they make, and we will probably never know what exactly has happened in there.

• BBC News: Big Brother crashes into politics