Life imitates Peter Simple – again

Sharon Baker: The hype also rises

From today’s preposterous column by the Telegraph’s resident arty-farter, Rupert Christiansen:

Sharon Baker lives up to her surname. She cooks up marvels in her kitchen in suburban Epsom, sculpting dough like wet plaster. For the Experimental Food Society’s banquet next week, she will produce hundreds of bread rolls, cast from the hand of the survivalist television presenter Ray Mears.

Christiansen murmers approvingly: “Sharon showed me the prototype: the impression of wrinkled skin on the crust is quite uncanny.”

Of course, as with most “artists” these days, Baker  intends to follow her muse into unexpected, unexplored quarters, beyond mere loafing around with bread:

I don’t want to make art out of things that will last for ever. I prefer materials which, like human beings, have their life and then degenerate and die. And if I get bored with bread, I’m going to move on to jelly, icing sugar and toffee.

Well, unexplored except by Michael Wharton. This from his brilliant Peter Simple column Way of the World column, also published in the Daily Telegraph, in 1965 (!):

Over the cultural horizon of Britain, now the cynosure of the world, rises a new star (writes art-critic Neville Dreadberg). He is bearded, stocky, 27-year-old Neville Dreadberg, who has exploded into success – personal, social and financial – as current rave of the pop art “scenes” with his show of “structural” stale confectionery sculpture at the Kevin Blatsch Gallery.

The first artist to explore the inwardness – and the essential anguish, loneliness and non-communication – of cream buns, eclairs, custard tarts, liquorice all-sorts, chocolate caramels and similar artefacts, Dreadberg is a man of the avant garde with fingers deep in many different pies.

Perhaps the owners of the Telegraph, the mysterious Barclay Twins, may care to reflect – while stroking their equally mysterious twin white persian cats in their mysterious Channel Island castle hideaway, Brecqhou – that their no doubt highly-paid arts correspondent is merely recycling stuff that appeared in one of the papers they own 45 years ago.

They could alert the Telegraph’s editor, Tony Gallagher, but I would warn them that such action is bootless. The man’s a boofhead (© Nick Farr-Jones).

Health news nonsense from the Daily Churnograph

Drink a little wine, for thy stomach's sake

The Telegraph seems to be starting a health-news nonsense war with the Daily Mail:

Millions of couples who share a bottle of wine over dinner are unwittingly putting their lives at risk by underestimating the dangers of alcohol, a report has warned.

Some eight million British adults drink more than what is considered safe by experts, the study claims, raising their chances of suffering conditions such as cancer and stroke.

Many of those at risk are middle class drinkers, who are unaware that regularly drinking wine with their evening meal is damaging their health.

Women are at greater risk if they evenly share a bottle of wine with their partner because their alcohol tolerance is lower than men’s.

Tim Worstall makes the pertinent points about these “research” findings here. Of course, it’s not hard to see it as part of the Great Wowser Offensive, which started against smoking, continues with alcohol and “obesity”and will, if the usual puritan history repeats itself, end with targeting some modern form of witchcraft. It’s hard to know what the latter will be, but if I were Prince Charles, I’d be worried.

But this sort of pseudo-scientific reporting of press release flatulence has become increasingly common in the Telegraph over the last year or so (see Louise Gray et al) – to such an extent it really should be called the Daily Churnograph.

Personally, I don’t think the paper’s been the same since it was taken over by those mysterious oriental Barclay twins, Chang and Eng. I wonder what they’re up to, plotting in that mysterious opium den that is the isle of Brecqhou?