For years we have been told that technology was making us richer, but we eat less and drink less than we did 100 years ago, so where is the improvement. I remember when nearly everyone had three cooked meals a day and a substantial tea with cakes and scones and butter and jam. Perhaps people lived less long, but at least there was some purpose in their lives.Over the past few weeks I have been reading the - gloriously misanthropic, wickedly funny - ramblings of Auberon Waugh. That passage reminded me of that grand old tradition of English Tories eating great amounts of food with pleasure...
Auberon Waugh, The Way of the World
There was a boy. His name was Jim.
His friends were very good to him.
They gave him tea, and cakes, and jam,
And slices of delicious jam....
Hillaire Belloc, Jim
'... Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the human frame requires...'
With that, the Wretched Child expires.
Hillaire Belloc, Henry King
My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it.
G. K. Chesterton, Cheese
Ascetic Mr. Lewis' - !!! I ask you! He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was 'going short for Lent.'"
J. R. R. Tolkien on C. S. Lewis
There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
C. S. Lewis
(Indeed, I once read that when Waugh visited Australia he dined on a koala. But that story is probably too good to be true, rather than too true to be good.)
7 comments:
'Going short for Lent' great line, I wonder how many people under 40 even know what Lent is? I sometimes think that there are great slabs of 20th Century literature that someone starting uni would struggle to understand.
I'm sure the one-third of the population that attend or attended Catholic schools would very well know what Lent is.
A time to celebrate lentils? I went to a public school ;) SFW's right though, once-common cultural reference points like Lent must be alien to a lot of the current generation. Indeed I'm not even sure how many of C S Lewis's contemporaries knew about it either. Lewis once had an atheist tutor whose only concession to the Protestant tradition in which he grew up was to do the gardening on Sunday in his best clothes.
... a substantial tea with cakes and scones and butter and jam. Perhaps people lived less long, but at least there was some purpose in their lives.
Arrhh, gotta love that.
And hey, I got a new smart phone this week. Already wasted hours of my life. I could have been baking scones. Now I feel slightly ashamed.
Its still a confusion for foodies like me,
Whether to live to eat or eat to live!
LOLzzz
Caz, at least all these smart phone-pad-computer-thingies aren't smarter than us yet. That would be just annoying.
Now I'm working at home I've been more or less baking non-stop. Did biscuits two days ago, biscuits and a cake and a casserole yesterday, and I might brew some beer today. Maybe a ginger slice too. But only because I've got some leftover cream....
Maybe not smarter, but more obedient: wave and it does stuff; speak one word commands and it does stuff. I'm sure many people wish I was more like a smart phone. :-D
Ginger slice, so as to use up the cream? Damn, you're a fine, fine house husband!
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