The New Years (Dis)Honours List or How to Get a Knighthood Without Really Trying...

Well, another Honours List is published and yet again, amazingly I know, my name hasn't appeared on it. According to the you.gov website, the majority of honours went to 'ordinary' people which may explain it. I'm obviously not ordinary enough.

Clearly having too much time on my hands, I've actually read through the full list and it does, indeed, contain the names of many ordinary people who have done extraordinary things but equally, it seems the quickest way to a knighthood these days is to be a civil servant, party lackey or donor or work in the city.  David Cameron's idea of  The Big Society, you know, the one where we all work for nothing to ensure the continuation of public services that the government should be paying for, seems to mean Big Wallets and Big Bungs.  Of course, any suggestion that our Dear Leader(s) has used the Honours List to scratch the backs of the party faithful would be horribly disingenuous, but since the Coalition came to power, the number of w bankers and city boys who have been honoured has risen to about a third from just handful previously.

So here is my own personal list of the Undeservingly Honoured:

Andrew Witty - The Chief Executive of GlaxoSmithKline, which agreed last year to pay a record $53bn fine in the US. This was in relation to charges that GSK have defrauded the US health system, Medicaid, by overcharging, paying doctors 'advisory fees' to ensure they recommended GSK drugs, tried to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs that were not approved by the regulators for certain conditions such as anti-depressants as  slimming aids and marketed drugs which had known, dangerous side effects. 

Paul Ruddock - wait a minute, I hear you say, Mr Ruddock is an expert on medieval art, chairman of the V&A and on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surely he should be honoured for his services to the art world?  But this same Mr Ruddock made his money from hedge funds and short selling and he personally profited from the collapse of Northern Rock, which you and me, but probably not him, have had to pay to bail out. Oh, and he also donated $500,000 to the Conservative Party but that's probably just a coincidence right?

John Buchanan - Chairman of Vodafone and the man who has overseen the disappearance of billions of pounds of profit, money that belonged by rights to the country, into a tangled network of offshore avoidance schemes. A rough estimate of the amount lost to the nation's coffers is £25 million but that doesn't include the lastest 'scam' uncovered by Private Eye (simply the best £1.50 you can spend) which looks to be every bit as big.  Fortunately for 'Sir' John, his very cosy relationship with Dave Hartnett, who sounds like a secondary school history teacher but really is Britain's top tax man (honoured with a CB in 2003), meant that he could persuade HMRC, over a very expensive lunch or two, to look the other way. If you're with Vodafone, leave now, vote with your feet, don't let Vodafone get away with it again

James Lupton - one of the elite group of Conservatives who got to have dinner with Dave in return for a £50,000 donation to Tory funds. He liked it so much that he donated £105,000 and got a CBE for his troubles.  He could have had lunch with me for a fraction of that and I'd have been a damn sight more entertaining!

Ruby Macgregor-Smith - never heard of her? Me neither, but as the boss of Mitie, an outsourcing company, she signed a business leaders' letter backing Herr Chancellor George Osbourne's austerity programme. The letter promised that the private sector could provide employment for all the redundant public sector workers, a claim that has subsequently proved to resemble the contents of my septic tank. A DBE for you, my girl!

Jamie Bowden - one of the 'extraordinary people' in the public sector who were honoured, Mr Bowden, our man in Bahrain,  became and apologist for the Bahraini government's brutal crackdown on dissidents during the Arab Spring uprising.  In a newletter to local businessmen he commented that 'It was a great relief to all of us when the government was able to re-establish order on the streets', scant relief to the families of the hundreds of protestors who were killed or arrested and tortured by the state.  Mr Bowden also welcomed the use of Saudi tanks against protesters in order to stop those naughty little A-rabs getting above themselves.  Don't they know that Western democracy is the only way forward? How about a CMG for your troubles?

Andrew Tyler - Chief Operating Officer at the MoD's purchasing organistion and the MoD's second highest earner, he was responsible for procuring the kit for our boys in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011. His procurement skills were such that he was brought in front of the public accounts committee to answer questions on some of his more 'inspired' procurement decision.... like refuelling planes which can't fly in combat zones and the multi-billion pound delay to aircraft carriers. As he quietly slipped off back into the private sector with a CBE in his back pocket to try out his exemplary procurement skills there, he commented that the MoD procurement unit was ''the most efficient and effective defence acquisition organisation in the world'. Oh really!

Helena Bonham-Carter - she's a bloody actress, for God's sake!

and finally...

Peter Bazalgette - From his early days at Auntie Beeb, 'Baz' as he's known to his friends, rose through the ranks to the heady heights of Chairman of Endemol UK. Sir Peter was knighted for his 'services to broadcasting'. These 'services' include bringing into our homes such pinnacles of broadcasting achievement as Big Brother, which gave us the universal delights of Jade Goody and Deal or No Deal, possibly the most pointless show on television. Although we can't actually blame him for creating them; we have the Dutch (BB) and the French (Deal or No Deal) to blame for that, he was instrumental in turning them into the global formats they now are. Baz is a scion of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who invented sewers in Victorian times and who was knighted for his system that removed sewage from every home in the capital. How ironic is it then, that two generations later, his great grandson is honoured for bringing a pile of shit right back into our homes!

Well Curry My Weevils!

I know that the Showaddywaddy encounter was probably the one that you most want to hear about but I really want to find the photo which I'm sure is lurking in one of our many boxes so bear with me while I give you my failsafe recipe for Weevil Curry, a speciality of the Middle East in general and Bahrain in particular.  It was The Native's story of the curry cook-off at her local pub that reminded me and, had I had the chance and the odd weevil, I might just have entered myself.

A bit of background... In my 20s I moved out to Bahrain to work for Gulf Air, where I got to wear probably the most ridiculous uniform in aviation history. Sadly it seems that it was so ridiculous that no photos of it exist on t'interweb. 'Oooohhhhhh.....' I hear you groan. No, really, don't worry because my lovely friend Trish kindly let me use this one of her and her friend modelling said uniform.

Smile laydees!



What the photo doesn't show is our lovely 'winter' uniform of nylon A-line skirt and fitted jacket in a strange faecal shade of brown.   We lovingly called it 'minky brown'. The summer uniform, as modelled by Trish and Susan, was marginally more attractive and, even better, in the presence of a lighted match it could put on a great firework display before melting onto your skin and causing first degree burns.



Time for bed!

Rumour has it that the airline had approached a famous French fashion designer who produced a design for a new uniform to replace the pyjama suit, as modelled on the right, which was a standing joke among other aircrew in the 70s and 80s, then the airline nicked the design and produced their own budget version madee with more synthetic materials that your average Hollywood starlet, ideal for the hot, humid Middle Eastern climate.

But check out the hat in the new(er) uniform.  The hat was our signature piece - as well as being a fire hazard.  The veil was not quite long enough, or the fabric fine enough, to drape it in a chic manner and the crown was stiffened by a bit of old Cornflakes packet (almost).  After a few months it would start to collapse and we would cut up the onboard safety cards and feed them into the crown to make it rigid again. I don't think the management ever quite worked out why the safety cards kept disappearing and it's not as if anyone ever really reads them anyway.

Party on!

The late 1980s were the end of the best years in the Middle East when our tax-free salaries were high and our benefits even better. It was during the Thatcher years when money was king.  As a 20 year old I was earning more than I could have dreamed of and living a hedonistic existence of speedboats and sunshine, 5 star hotels, lavish parties and foreign travel. Money was no object.  Bahrain was a strange sort of place. It was the financial centre of the Middle East and home to around 3000 single women under 30 who worked for the airline and a similar number of predominantly young single men who worked for the banks. My four years there were like one long party - well except for the time when I was stuck in Bangladesh for nearly two weeks during anti-government riots. We played Trivial Pursuit so many times that in the end we were giving the answers and guessing the questions.

The weekend was only one and a half days long so we always played hard and one of our favourite pastimes was hiring a fishing dhow and poor unsuspecting crew and sailing out to the islands where we would spend the day water skiing (drinking), (drinking), jet skiing, (drinking) before retiring to the Yacht Club for sundowners. 

Well of course you can't actually
waterski behing a dhow, as
demonstrated here

I should point out at this juncture that prior to moving to Bahrain I didn't drink. An unfortunate encounter with a bottle of Martini and a Catholic priest (no, not like that... be quiet at the back!) at a party when I was 16 put me off drink for life, well most of it at least. On-board sanitation was basic, consisting as it did of a cabin strapped onto the back of the dhow with a hole in the bottom which emptied straight into the sea.  You always made sure to check which way the wind was blowing before you ever used it. Many an unfortunate received an unexpected watering when some newbie had forgotten this important rule.

Come Friday, the start of the weekend, we'd load up the Eskies with cold beers, picnics and another local favourite, Drunken Watermelon. 

Drunken Watermelon

Take one large watermelon and slice off the top.

Using the handle of a wooden spoon, make deep holes in the flesh of the watermelon

Fill holes with rum

Replace 'lid' and leave in fridge overnight to marinate and voila Drunken Watermelon

When ready hire one fishing dhow

Sail out to islands

Waterski/swim/jetski!

Slice up watermelon, eat and get very drunk!

Drunken watermelon was an absolute essential to get through the onboard entertainment which usually consisted of some elderly arab gentlemen blowing on the bladder of a sheep (dead) and wailing incoherently while probably secretly plotting jihad against the immoral westerners.



What? No more?



On this particular dhow trip, having consumer huge quantities of Drunken Watermelon, I decided to invite my friends back for one of my famous curries.  You know how some people get the munchies? Well I get the urge to entertain.

Back at our flat, I bumbled around the kitchen in a semi-drunken stupor getting together the necessary ingredients for a marmalade chicken curry, a deliciously fruity affair with lots of  err.... fruit, while my houseguests went home to change/sober up/think up a suitable excuse for not returning.

Weevils!



 I chopped up my chicken and marinated it in spices while I peeled some apples. It wasn't easy but I found that if I closed one eye it wasn't quite so hard to focus.  A healthy dollop of marmalade was added I put it on the hob to start cooking. After simmering for 10 minutes it was time to add the all-important sultanas.  It's an unwritten rule in the Middle East that you  never add dried ingredients unless you have checked thoroughly for weevils who, along with the cockroaches, existed solely to make life interesting and usually for all the wrong reasons. On this occasion, mental function being somewhat impaired by rum, I just tipped of good measure of dried fruit into the gently bubbling curry.  The sultanas appeared to be moving.  I tried shutting the other eye but nothing changed. I took a closer look.  The mixture was full of weevils doing the front crawl, the backstroke, even the butterfly.  I vaguely thought 'Oh bugger' before the realisation dawned on me that it was the weekend so no shops were open, I had no spare ingredients with which to make another curry and I had about 10 people arriving in half an hour. 

I scooped the chicken out of the saucepan and rinsed it under the tap to remove the weevils before starting the futile task of trying to scoop out the remaining ones which were now cooking gently in the curry.  It soon became apparent that I was completely outnumbered so I took the decision to just stir the rest of them in and have done with it.  Without the unwelcome influence of alcohol I would probably have realised that serving up a generous portion of weevils to my friends was a bit anti-social but hey, what you don't know can't harm you... can it? 'Extra protein' I told myself in order to justify my actions.

My friends arrived and, with thoughts of the unusual extra ingredient pushed firmly to the back of my mind, the curry was served - to them at least. I told them I wasn't hungry. Well what did you expect me to do? I couldn't knowingly eat weevil curry, could I?

As the last person scraped their plate clean the curry was pronounced "the best yet".  "Ah, that will be my secret ingredient" I told them, smiling sweetly.  To this day, they don't know just what that secret ingredient was.

So, who wants to come round for dinner then? I've got Fly Fricassee, Coq(roach) au vin or Bug Bourguignon.....

Click on any photo to enlarge it..... if you dare!