THE GOLDEN AGE OF GREASE GRISTLE N FAT WHEN CHOLESTEROL WAS AT IT'S HEIGHTS!

    In the beginning when God gave Adam and part of his walking, talking ribcage, Eve a rent free patch of grass under a tree in the 'Garden of Eden' it must've been a very odd situation. They wouldn't have had a lot to talk about. Think about it , most couples today live in a high speed crowded whizz-bang exciting maelstrom of a world of which they steadfastly ignore, but prefer to watch the world around them on telly and goggling on computers and text everyone all around the country ,if not the world on various (un)social networks ignoring the people in the same house.
    Adam and Eve living in quiet idylic peaceful paradise wouldn't've had a sniff of anything anything like the 'paradise' we take for granted now. Conversation would be about 'the weather ', which was wonderful in paradise and where the best fig leaves could be found....Then turn in for an early night!
      One thing that Adam and Eve did an awful lot of was 'filling their boots' ,but as they hadn't invented boots it was called Begatting!.....They must've enjoyed a good begat as the first few chapters in the bible are full of their begattee's or offspring who took after mummy n' daddy and got into the rampant begatting . So enthusiastic were they that their begatting peopled the planet.
         There is a culinary point to this rambling through the 'good book'. Adam and Eve must've used up enough energy to power a nuclear fusion reactor. They must've eaten something and a lot of that something. God gave them all the fruit in the trees to stuff their faces with, except for one tree he said to keep away from ,but Eve ...Typical woman....Gets enticed by the devil disguised as a serpent who convinces her to take a chunk out of an apple ,which she does and sure enough the shit hits the fan and man is booted out of paradise into the real world where he has to grow there own food. Mind you paradise must 've started to honk a bit if they were eating nothing but fruit.
          Cooking is basically the preparation of food by heating it up and us dead clever humans are the only ones to do it. It's argued wether the first cooking fires were 250,000- 3,000,000 years ago, or were the early fires just accidents or for warmth, the later ones showed cooking utensils , egg wisks , stake knives ,frying pans, etc.
             They say that by heating up ,or cooking their scoff it made it a lot easier to eat meats ,veg and nuts ,etc and brain development started with a good cooked rare steak in stead of mangling our Homo-Erectusian gums on raw nuts.
              I assume with the development of cooking meat s and veg as one side product is juices that lead to primitive juices and gravy ancestors and the mixing up of various 'stuffs' which would one day be christened 'ingrediants' which, in turn would one day lead to 'mum's home cooking' and telly chefs by way of 'fast food!'
                When i were 'nobbut a lad' the chip shops were ...Just that!....Chip shops were you went for your "Fish chips n' mushy peas with lashings of salt n' vinegar!"...I'm drooling over the keyboard now....Lots of grease ,gristle ,fat n' batter and it was the same at home as everything was fried using ,lard or various oils for your nightly half a hundred weight of chips, fried meat ,fried eggs ,etc.....Doctors and every daytime telly show cookery presenters would choke with horror at the prospect of a full congealed chip pan being used for weeks on end. As we all know we should all be eating our 'green' and eating fruit. Fat ,oil, sugar ,salt all shockingly bad for you and appealing to the goverment to enforce bans on levels of all the stuff that gives food it's taste.
               In 'them days' 'fast food' wasn't really a big thing in the U.K. We had the great old 'GREASY SPOON CAFFS!' and i deny anybody to say the didn't love a bacon butty and a sugary cuppa from a cracked mug in one of those august venues on city streets and dock roads everywhere . All kinds of places that , shall we say those fine heroes at the Health and Safety might frown dubiously upon fed the working man, but they produced their own food which made some places better than others and some , shall we say not so better than others. This was the golden age of grease ,gristle and fat when cholesterol reached it's heights.....Greasy spoons, ciggies and the boozers ....Happy days.
                 Then the arrival of McDonalds and there rivals at the time ,although it seems to have been a Big Mac T.K.O....Wimpeys. They would always be opposite each other ,even side by side. The 'Fast Food chain' had hit our golden battered shores.
                    The chip shops became fast food ;Chinese/Indian, etc take aways and the flood gates opened and we all live on take aways. I for one when i bought my house in the 90's used to eat a chinese every single night of the week and grew heartily sick of them....One evening going home i bought a chicken and had a go at cooking that. I always ,and still do love a roast chicken, but this spurred me on to be a little more adventurous. Home cooking is still best ....Even mine!
                  The chains have jumped onto the love of home cooking and theres chains and chains of fast home cooked take away food jut like mom used to make!!?!
                       The Greasy Spoons are extinct as cafe chains are everywhere. In the old 'Spoons' they'd pour you a tea or coffee when you asked, in thes StarBucks , Costa's etc ,to get a drink theres pipes ,tubes ,valves i'm not sure they're making me a coffee or torpedoing a British convoy in the 'Battle of theAtlantic' the staff look like the crew of a German U-Boat. All to get a black coffee.
                         Nowadays people are getting driven nuts to be more health conscious So less fry-ups and more radiation!!? The good old micro-wave oven is geared to cook most of the packaged stuff in the shops ,all the ingrediants are there a skilled chef like yourself has to perforate the plastic cover and irradiate it for a few minutes and you have a bubbling mush!......Golly isn't technology gorgeous?
                         Up until recently we had a nifty little get-up called a Halogen Oven which consisted of a glass bowl with a heater that fitted over the top ,a cross between an oven and a grill which 'The Lovely Lynne' encouraged me to use as she doesn't like a dirty oven. One little thing you should watch out for is that you shouldnt put it on a surface in contact with a spin dryer as a very strange thing tends to happen.....The vibrations hurl it off the surface and causes it to be smashed to smithereens....Bloody Jamie Oliver and them never mentioned that ,the Bastards!
                        I do like my food and on the whole i'm an out n' out carnivore, but i do like veg, in fact i'm proud to say "I LOVE SPROUTS!" On occasions i'v had vegetarian dishes and much to my pleasant suprise i enjoyed them......For a while until 'THE DIVINE WIND' hit.....After a veggie dinner i tend to get absolutly shocking wind.
                        Years ago i stated with me ol' mate ,the great HUNT EMERSON as i was working at the N.E.C. in Birmingham. Hunt is a veggie and we had a couple of meals together which was very pleasant, but i kept under control in Emerson towers, restraining my self until the N.E.C.
                    When i had a bad accident in India and was laid up in bed with my legs in stirrups like a pregnant woman they fed me the hospital fare rice and veg, The guts gurgled and exploded shall we say quite regulary which was made worse by the fact the door was at the bottom of the bed and nurses etc had to walk through the blast zone.
                    Now we've gone from grease, gristle n' fat and touched on gas n' wind within which i'll include the telly chef. Every channel and time of the day or night is crammed full of chefs all now lovey dovey telly celebrities who we all apparently love as they'll end up on 'I'm a Celebrity get me outta here!'. But i bet they're all absolute bastards in the kitchen. The best was always Fanny Craddock and monocled Johnny, but even better was Benny Hill and Bob Todd as 'Fanny n' Johnny!'

TIM LEATHERBARROW THE PETE TOWNSHEND OF SCRIBBLING CARICATURISTS AT THE SHREWSBURY CARTOON FESTIVAL

After returning to our dark gloomy n' damp ol' country after getting absolutly frazzled n' fried, boozing and stuffing our faces in Portugal, i had a night at home with a chinkey take away and a bottle of wine in front of the telly catching up on hours of SKY + recorded episodes of CORONATION STREET. Then the following morning i bade farewell to my beloved brood and made my way off to the fine town of SHREWSBURY, as it was time for the scum of the cartooning world to decend upon the pubs and backstreets of that fine and once respectable town. Whenever the cartoonists decend upon any place any semblance of ,class, style, order,decency, and general good n' nice things legs it out in the opposite direction as fast as their respectable legs'll carry them. This time would prove to be no different ,especially as a group of hooligans and deadbeats, generally refferred to as the IRISH CARTOONISTS' were coming over from the emerald bogs. I've not seen many of them for a number of years . I'm still recovering from the ravages of a variety of Irish cartoon festivals over the last 20 years or so.

Not long after arriving i got dragged into the main square ,where cartoonists were drawing on boards and sheets of various sizes from normal foolscap to 8 by 10 foot boards. I got dragged into the caricaturing for the public. There was a big queue ,so instead of carefully drawn brush pen renderings , i snaffled a couple of free A3 pads and some black markers and dived in doing ,as they say, 'lightening sketches'. People enjoy the fast almost frenetic scribbling. Once somebody called me a KEITH MOON of cartooning....I was telling one of my targets that, as i was stretching my arm ,swinging my drawing arm above my head . He said i was more like a PETE TOWNSHEND of caricaturing. I dont know if that was because of the swinging arm; The target badge i had on my shirt.....Or just my big nose! But being ever the showman i went into a TOWNSHEND WINDMILL AND LEAP in the air, very silly, but it got a laugh and a round of applause. I did consider ripping the drawing and smashing the marker pen on the deck, but i do draw the line, along with all the others.....I do have limits to my stupidity ,but it was probably the prospect of having to bend all the way to the ground to break this little chunky marker, doing me back in and probably smashing my fingers.

Then, at the first oppertunity we dissappeared into the boozer, finally meeting up with the Irish lads; GRAHAM KEYES, TOM MATTHEWS, JIM COOGAN and later TOM HALLIDAY. And much to my disgusted suprise GUY CARTER had been invited to film the chaos and disorder. The evening then degenerated into boozing, stuffing our faces then back to the boozing. The mixture of beer, wine and .....whisky ,all in vast quantities, at the time seemed a good idea, but time would tell...

And ,Jeez ,it did!....The following morning was a little like a scene from one of those zombie films. What the human being will do to themselves in the quest for a good night is beyond belief. But a good cartoonist is nothing if not experianced in the art of handling the worst of hangovers. After a few gallons of tea and coffee we hit the main square and scribble the fine people of Shrewsbury. Filled with stale drink; And festering hatred for myself, the suffering i put myself through and for the others who forced drink down my unsuspecting and innocent gullet; and hatred for everybody sitting in front of me , my jaws aching as i clenched my teeth with a couple of tons of pressure on my molars and fillings in an unflinching sincere friendly smile.

Its quite easy being a caricaturist in a festival ,as people are always saying things like,"Dont draw my spots, freckles, big nose, wrinkles, bald patch, double chin, etc, etc, ", half the time you dont have to look up. After a bit the locals genuine good humour bucks you up and its time to get 'THE HAIR OF THE DOG' down you. The LOVELY LYNNE n' THE LITTLE 'UN arrived in the afternoon. They had a wander ,as GUY CARTER, decided he wanted me to film the cartoonists and public. I took to it like a 'FISH TO CONCRETE'. Over the day and evening the language and pure insanity that came out on the attempt at serious investigative journalism was unbelievable. I reckon theres about 3 days of film, but by the time it gets edited down ,there'll be about 45 seconds of usable non offensive film.

That evening when we hit the hotel bar ,in the company of GUY CARTER and the EMPEROR DALEK, himself, JOHN LANDERS. John was driving Guy nuts, as Guy wanted John to introduce the festival in this incredible DALEK voice that he manages somehow and never fails to crease me up. He wouldnt do it so Guy was yelling n' 'effing n' blinding and ,after a while sounded more like a DALEK then JOHN, but for the second time in as many months i was in a totally uncontrollable fit of laughter ,crying and tearing of the ribcage ,but John picked up on it and took up laughing ,which set me off again and vice versa, neither of us could breath for an hour or so. Everybody looking over.."What the F*****'s wrong with them shit'eads? written across their faces . When i went to bed i was still in pain and the following day my ribs and throat were wrecked.

A good time, as ever was had by all, while the festival was on, afterwards you have to pay the ferryman for the overindulgences. As you get older the suffering lasts about 3 times longer than the sinfullness that was responsible for it in the first place.

The 'ace(but not pretty)face' HUNT EMERSON made a showing at SHREWSBURY, but after a mooch around the main square ,he looked for us in a few boozers, but couldnt find us, so returned home to BIRMINGHAM. Either Hunt needs to wipe the ink off his glasses;Missed us in the pub; Or he was in the pub when we were looking at museums and cathedrals and such places of cultural interest. It was a shame we missed him, as he's a grizzled veteran of the Irish festivals as well. Ah well, maybe next year.