…begins this afternoon, wherein your Humble Narrator leaves the warmth and comfort of Hardy Country for the metropolis of Londonistan:
For no reason at all, I’m starting to miss my Springfield 1911…
Anyway, I’ll be spending a couple-three days here and crossing two items off Ye Olde Buckette Lyste (details to follow) before heading north to Scottishland to check off yet a third: the Royal Military Tattoo in Edinburgh.
For the past two weeks or so it’s been quiet here in Hardy Country. The Free Markets were sailing on their yacht somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean and I was pretty much left to my own devices here at the Towers. This meant that I could catch up with my reading, and the staff could recover from the floggings.
However, Mrs. FM returned home last night and Mr. FM remained in the capital to continue his calling, i.e. oppressing the working classes. This means that life will return to its quiet pastoral nature out here, except that the gardener is going to get soundly chastised for allowing the lawns to exceed the prescribed 2″ in height.
I think I’ll have some breakfast, watch the flogging and then go for a ride on the grounds. Colonel Brandon would approve.
I’ve put on weight in the month or so that I’ve been Over Here, mostly because I’ve been enjoying the foods of my childhood (South Africa, a onetime British colony, had a partial-Brit cuisine). Yup: we’re talking sausage rolls, steak ‘n kidney pies, porridge, fish ‘n chips, Full English breakfasts and of course, the occasional chocolate bar (Fry’s Turkish Delight) not readily available in Murka.
Then there’s been Wadworth 6x beer, which was not a childhood comfort food, but is definitely my adult one.
And speaking of comfort food, I’ve rediscovered the excellence of Southern Comfort as an evening aperitif. Southern Comfort was my bedside tipple of choice back when I was a professional musician (Cliff Notes: rock musician, in my early twenties, during the 1970s — of course I had a favorite bedside tipple). The best thing about Southern Comfort (Suthies, as we used to call it) is that I don’t need ice — in fact, I prefer it at room temperature which, as any fule kno, is cooler in Britishland than in Texas.
Of course, I was shocked to discover that during my long layoff from Suthies that the manufacturer had gone and changed the label from its elegant antebellum design to something more “modern” that is, well, terrible.
In fact, when searching for Southern Comfort on the liquor store shelves, I missed it completely because I was looking for the bottle on the left when in fact the disgusting new one was right in front of me. Worse yet, the pathetic little new cap means that you can no longer use the long gold cap of old as a shot-glass. If I can somehow find an old bottle in decent condition, I’m going to use it as a decanter.
And of course they’ve added a whole slew of new variants — “ginger”, “lemon” and so on, none of which I have any intention of trying.
I hate change.
I know: Southern Comfort is less of a whiskey than it is a liqueur. I don’t care about the designation, I only care about the taste, which is lovely. Also, it enables me to more or less keep up with the drinking rate of Mr. Free Market and The Englishman, which would cause even accomplished booze hounds like Dylan Thomas or Peter O’Toole to fall over.
And it’s an excellent accompaniment to a late-night bacon buttie — yet another comfort food of my childhood:
I’m gonna need three airline seats to carry my fat ass back to Dallas…
…last night, before heading off for yet another piece of Friday Night Unpleasantness at the King’s Arms with The Englishman:
When I say I’m a “meat-and-potatoes” man, this is what I mean. A decent filet spiced with Salt Lick Rub (imported from the great state of Texas), and potatoes roasted in goose fat. It took 35 minutes in the Aga to create it.
In case you’re wondering, I had Free Market Towers to myself last night; Mrs. FM was off sailing, Mr. FM was doing Capitalist Things in (I think) the Far East somewhere, and the staff had the night off to recover from the Friday Floggings.
Food was courtesy of Waitrose. If I had one of these emporia near my house, I’d weigh 500lbs in a month.
So the BBC published the salaries of their top “talent” a little while ago. Surprise, surprise, men earn more than women for doing the same job. (As Mr. FM puts it, “Most of them are paid to read a teleprompter and are no more journalists than my dogs.”)
There’s a lot to be said about all this, but I’m only going to make a few comments.
BBC is funded largely by annual license fees paid by 95% of the British population — roughly $180 per annum per household — and the fees are collected with incredible ferocity. It’s not unfair to say that they’re collected at gunpoint, because failure to pay can result in massive fines and even imprisonment. Needless to say, therefore, people really bitch about wastage and, inevitably, bloated salaries unless they’re being paid to people of serious worth such as veteran nature documentary maker David Attenborough. Here’s a lesser-known example.
BBC Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, unsurprisingly, makes more than any of the others. While we Murkins might know Evans as the dorky ginger who tried (and failed) to fill the scuffed suede shoes of Top Gear‘s Jeremy Clarkson, Evans is a brilliant DJ, has had the morning radio gig for many years and has astonishing listenership numbers. (Radio is still very popular Over Here, mostly because the TV, all of it, is such shit.) If we translated Evans’s popularity into a Stateside comparison, he’d make more than Howard Stern did at WNBC in New York or Rush Limbaugh still does. While there’s the usual Wealth Envy moaning from the Labour Commies, not too many people are getting upset about Evans because frankly, he’s worth the money. Of course, there are some male presenters who, equally frankly, are not only overpaid but lucky to be employed at all because by any measure, they’re as shit at their job as the crap they have to present. But that’s not the biggest issue.
Oh no; it’s all about Teh Ladies (of course).
Now I’m not going to get into who are the better presenters (although I can’t see why, say, morning TV show male presenters shouldn’t be paid the same as their female co-presenters — they aren’t; men are paid much more). I haven’t watched enough BBC-TV shows to get an idea, because a.) I have a life and b.) all the morning shows are so banal that they make Good Morning America look like the aforementioned Howard Stern’s TV show, and I’d rather walk the Free Markets’ dogs than watch any of them. I will say that having watched a few, the wimmins are actually more entertaining than the men — unless they’re doing a girls-only show like Loose Women, which makes the American show The View (which is unspeakably bad) look like quality programming by comparison.
My final thought is that managerially speaking, the BBC are a bunch of morons. What they should have done was publish alongside the salaries both the length of tenure on the job — experience counts — and most importantly, the viewership / listenership numbers — it’s all about the eyeballs and earholes, folks. Chris Evans’s 9 million listeners dwarf BBC Breakfast‘s 1.5 million viewers, so that would explain the salary disparity there. (As an aside, I should point out that rival ITV’s Good Morning Britain, hosted jointly by the sexy Susanna Reid and the revolting Piers Morgan only gets 800,000 viewers.) Here’s Susanna:
And lastly, the whole BBC salary thing is a study of orange-and-apple comparisons — morning TV shows to, say, football shows — but I have to say, though, that I’m getting a huge amount of pleasure watching the oh-so sanctimoniously-PC BBC wriggle as they try to explain the “gender gap” in their executive wage scales. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of social justice warriors. The BBC also complains that they have to pay these salaries because they’re in competition for talent with the commercial media — except that the competition pays far less, on average, than does the BBC for like jobs.
Addendum: stats on Brit media are incredibly confusing: “peak” vs. “average daily” v.s “weekly” etc. I do understand them, having worked in advertising agencies for years, but I couldn’t be bothered with forensic accuracy. My numbers may be a little off, e.g. dated, but the relative scale of them isn’t, and I’m not a journalist so I have no inclination to spend hours of research on them when I could be cleaning my new Mauser. Priorities: I have them.
Ah yes… last night.
Pretty much the same cast of characters (The Englishman and Reader John M. — Mr. Free Market had to stay late at work: celebratory drinks after some successful capitalist venture, no doubt), the same products of Messrs. Wadworth and Company, same wonderful fun, same pub. Same final result, of course.
Back when the skull-hobgoblins have finished their Happy Dance…