Exclusive Delia Smith 'Cheat!' Recipe

It's worth digging out the Xmas TV Chefs piece on the little Reverbnation Player-thingy at the bottom right of this page, if you haven't already heard it. It is not bad it is 7/10.

Anyway. I can now share with you this exclusive Delia Smith recipe from her Cheat! series, in which she shows you all the quick and easy shortcuts in cooking. I can share it cos it never made it into the final cut of BBC3's Most Annoying People of 2008, which featured me for a glorious nine seconds. Anyway, here's the recipe:

DELIA'S QUICK AND EASY CHEATER'S LASAGNE

Ingredients:

1 Loaf Sliced White Bread
2 Tins Sardines
1 Ready-Made Lasagne


Method:

Hammer slices of white bread flat. Layer in a dish/bucket with mashed-up sardines. Scrape cheese off top of lasagne ready-meal and put on your slices of bread. Microwave for a bit and hey presto! Quick and easy Sardine Lasagne.

Heaven and Eartha

See? Always the same. One little cold snap and it's all over.

Eartha Kitt, I see, has pegged it, the chanteuse who graced us with such unforgettable songs as:

I'm just an old fashioned girl with an old fashioned mind
Not sophisticated, I'm the sweet and simple kind.
I want an old fashioned house, with an old fashioned fence
And an old fashioned millionaire.
And an old fashioned fur coat made from old fashioned skins
From some old fashioned small mammals.

Since she has little objection to wearing the skins of others, now she's dead, may I put in my request now for a bit of hers? I'd like at least a pair of gloves, or ideally a little Eartha Kitt helmet, made out of her face.

Maybe a sturdy pair of boots, made from the unsympathetic old cow's hide.

A Minute's Silence for Harold Pinter...

...Not that you'd notice.

You Get What You Pay For.

In the last week I have done four standup 'gigs' (industry term) and consequently caught quite a few of the last trains out of Charing Cross station in London. If you don't know Charing Cross, it's like a King's Cross Lite, in that instead of exciting overnight sleepers to the highlands, trains only go about 20 miles to Orpington.

That's not completely true - some trains go to Dover Western Docks, which is exciting, and makes you think of great industrial landscapes with ramps going all over the place and ships and horns and France and holidays.

But I get the Orpington train.

And they are very suburban trains - not sleek Pendolinos with dining cars. They look like Fisher Price versions of tube trains, all very plasticky and primary coloured. There have been various brouhahas about these trains, as rail companies keep trying to rip more and more seats out, so they can squish more people into each carriage, reinforcing the notion that commuting Londoners are little more than self-herding cattle.

One of the most laughable notions they had with these trains was the installation of a First Class Compartment. About a third of one carriage is given over to an area with very slightly bigger seats, which are coloured maroon = not a primary colour = classy.

The point is, these areas are generally regarded as the rail companies' little joke, an ironic nod towards the days when customers were passengers, and service actually meant something other than taking £3.40 off you to make you stand up the whole way and arrive consistently behind schedule.

So last Thursday, I'm on the last train home, it's the last Thursday before Christmas, and the train is heaving with drunk people. It's what I like to call the Society Train - a civilised affair where people enjoy sophisticated repartee and four-for-a-fiver lagers. By around midnight in Charing Cross, they leave the ticket barriers open, as if understanding that most people are fare dodging, and that it's simply not economically viable to let your staff be assaulted by 8,000 people.

I get on the train, and I'm fairly sober, having been performing. I go into the First Class section, as I have many times, having failed to see that this train is, astonishingly, staffed by a conductor, although presumably he is just cadging a lift home. And he says to me, he actually says to me: "Have you got a first class ticket?"

People have spattered the whole train in sick, and are openly humping each other, writhing around in a combination of Burger King wrappers and WKD Blue. And this guy is asking me if I have a First Class ticket? Of course I don't. Is now really the time?

Maybe it's like chess. Maybe he was trying to protect the King. Maybe this pretentious little compartment is the last bastion of civilization. When falls the First Class compartment on the 00.10 to Orpington, England falls. Or maybe he could tell I was a soft target. Damn.

I should have asked him for an upgrade.

Podcast

Hallo!

My first podcast goes live today on iTunes, courtesy of Comedy 365:

Click here to see it in iTunes

It's a bit rude. If you know any 15-year-old boys, they'll go ape over it. There'll be more in the new year. Oh, and if you hate Macs, then you can get it direct from here:

www.comedy365.co.uk

Ace.

Jake

Not sure I want to be all that in touch.

It has been an interesting year for self scrutiny.

Perhaps as you are asking yourself now, I've been asking myself "Who is Jake Yapp? What kind of guy is he? Is he the kind of guy who refers to himself in the third person, or don't I?"

I know what I am now. It's funny how precise you have to be with the English language. "Cat Woman", for example, conjures images of a slinky feline goddess, of Halle Berry in a skintight leather catsuit, prowling around and generally being inordinately sexy. "Cat Lady", however, suggests something quite markedly different, a bewhiskered, besmocked and bespattered (thank you Rogers and Hart) old lady having a row with herself and stinking of piss.

And that's essentially what I have become, I think. I am 35 and male, but in my heart, I am a crazy old lady. 

Yesterday morning at 4.59am (you remember at that time in the morning), I awoke to the smell of freshly-brewed catshit, so eyewateringly potent that it was like having two lit matches put inside my nostrils.

It was Chester, one of my two cats, who, for some reason (I've figured it out now), had decided to shit all over his back end, and stroll through my flat, gently pressing it into everything he could find; floors, carpets, laundry baskets, linen, like some kind of profane potato print. 

So at 5.02 I find myself wiping my cat's arse while he looks up at me bemusedly, with an expression that suggests the thought "Wow, Jake, I mean, I'm cool with this, but why would you want to do that? It stinks back there! Still, if it's really what you want to do..."

Fucking bastard.

So later, as I am conducting a not-terribly-pleasant fingertip search of my flat, complete with kitchen roll and the only remaining dribble of proper hardcore nuke-the-planet cleaning fluid I have left, I figure out how this has happened. 

This year, I started letting the cats outside for the first time in a couple of years. And, now I can bring myself to touch the little fucker again, I realise that, out in the cold, his fur has grown thicker with the onset of winter. So his little furry pantaloons, so cute and all, have now fluffed to such proportion there is no means of exit for his turds.

So last night, to cap off a perfect day, I spent the evening on my hands and knees, giving my cat's beshittened arsehole a fucking haircut.

He is sitting next to me, washing it now (oh NOW you're washing?), but occasionally he looks up, as if to say "Hang on... I'm sure this was fluffier before..."

Fucking bastard.

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