Out of the mouths of miners and amateur chefs…
Jamie Oliver’s collected a fair bit of stick for his new Ministry of Food education campaign. Today’s Guardian has a long article on the reaction of some people in Rotherham to being offered advice on cooking – hint: it’s of the “tell the uppity southern poof to fuck off and meddle elsewhere” variety.
But I loved the final paragraph of this article from the miner Mick Trueman, someone who has enthusiastically taken up Jamie’s challenge and reportedly been transformed into a man who’s thoroughly at home in the kitchen, formerly the preserve only of his wife.
He describes the moaners as “the kind of people who would win the lottery and complain that they didn’t like the handwriting on the cheque” – a phrase that encapsulates a particular state of mind so well, and not just in terms of Rotherham and Jamie Oliver, that he had me cheering. Very early in the morning.