In this issue

• This week: One Fat Lady
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Cooks and chefs always seem to be in the news these days. We’ve had Jamie Oliver campaigning to bring about an improvement in school dinners. Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant openings continue to make the papers, as do his reality TV shows – peppered, of course, with his famously brutal management style and expletives. And my personal bugbear, Delia, can guarantee massive sales of a food item or kitchen utensil just by using it on one of her shows (remember how suddenly everyone was using sun-dried tomatoes?), although these days she’s almost as famous for her antics at Norwich City FC.

One of my favourites, though, is about as far removed from this type of celebrity chef as you could imagine. Healthy eating’s anathema to her – she uses prodigious amounts of lard and butter in her recipes, and she admits to a pathological hatred of carrots because her father used to feed them to her with slugs on them. She’s not a woman of the people – her father was surgeon to the Royal Family, and her mother was an Australian heiress. Where Gordon Ramsay started his career as a footballer before reinventing himself, she initially trained as a barrister before she turned to her career in food. She’s not the director of a football club, but she’s got enough first names for an entire football team. Step forward, Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright!

What’s so great about her? It’s not the recipes as such. Many of are a bit too eccentric to ever be part of most households’ menus. And I wouldn’t hold her up as a paragon of kitchen virtue either – I used to wince every time I saw her and her partner in “Two Fat Ladies”, Jennifer Paterson, put their hands into a mixing bowl because I knew they’d still be wearing all their rings!

I think her blunt, no-nonsense attitude has a lot to do with it. (For those of you who’ve never seen her, think Peggy Mount in all her dragon lady roles.) Where all the other TV chefs are doing their best to set trends or at least go along with them, she cheerfully bucks them. Calorie-counting and vitamin RDAs are for others to worry about; if it tastes good and looks good, that’s what counts for her – although presentation takes a back seat to taste, as it should. And she’s got no truck with PC; it’s no surprise to find that she’s an active campaigner for the Countryside Alliance.

But most of all, you get a feeling with Clarissa Dickson Wright that this is someone who’s lived their life to the full. In spite of the privileged background (her BBC profile describes the Dickson Wright household as one “where eating caviar and pheasant shooting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper”) she’s not always had it easy. Although she won a place at Oxford, her father (who was a violent alcoholic) refused to support her unless she studied medicine; so she went to University College, London instead and studied law. She became an alcoholic for 12 years after her mother’s death and has been bankrupted twice. So she’s been through the mill. But she’s also thrown herself energetically into whatever she’s done. She was the youngest ever woman called to the Bar, at just 21 years old. Her keen interest in food writing (she worked for several years at the “Books For Cooks” bookshop in London before starting her own shop in Edinburgh) led her to be described as “the world’s leading authority on cookery books”. Her anthology “Food” is superb reading. And she continues to make some of the most marvellously eccentric TV programmes around, even after Jennifer Paterson’s death.

And now, among her many other activities, she’s a motivational speaker. A very good one, I don’t doubt – but I can’t help thinking of the stereotypical girls’ boarding school games mistress: “Get some BALL, you bunch of soft nellies!”…

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

Sadly, the BBC no longer has a web page for the Two Fat Ladies, but you can still read about the programme on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia: Two Fat Ladies

The Waitrose Food Illustrated website has an excellent article about Clarissa Dickson Wright by one of her friends, Matthew Fort:
Waitrose Food Illustrated: Larger Than Life

A quick Google search for “lard is good for you” turned up an interesting article with that title on Travelerstales.com, written by a US volunteer teacher about her time in Costa Rica:
travelerstales.com: Lard is Good For You

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• parody song roll out the barrel
• the barbie ex pat forum
• hot brothel
• lanzarote big cock
• amos zongo
• a catalan company -east -mercenary -byzantine
• lam cadeo
• its a sin to be this tropical animal
• zeed pic post
• as a headless horseman

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Bankruptcy is like losing your virginity. It doesn’t hurt the next time.”

– Clarissa Dickson Wright (1947- )

Joke

How to tell when foodstuffs should be discarded

The Gag Test

Anything that makes you gag is off, except for leftovers from what you cooked for yourself last night.

Eggs

When something starts pecking its way out of the shell, the egg is probably past its prime.

Dairy Products

Milk is off when it looks like yoghurt. Yoghurt is off when it starts to look like cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is off when it starts to look like ordinary cheese. Ordinary cheese is nothing but off milk anyway and can’t get any more off than it already is.

Mayonnaise

If it makes you violently ill after you eat it, mayonnaise is off.

Frozen Foods

Frozen foods that have become an integral part of the defrosting cycle in your freezer compartment will probably be off – or wrecked, anyway – by the time you pry them out with a kitchen knife.

Meat

If opening the refrigerator door causes stray animals from a half-mile radius to congregate outside your kitchen door, the meat is off.

Lettuce

Lettuce is off when you can’t get it off the bottom of the salad drawer without Flash.

Tinned Food

Any tinned food that has become the shape or size of a football should be disposed of. Carefully.

Carrots

A carrot that you can tie in a clove hitch is not fresh.

Wine

It should not taste like salad dressing.

Potatoes

Fresh potatoes do not have roots, branches or dense leafy undergrowth.

Dips

If you can take it out of its container and bounce it on the floor, it has gone bad.

General Rule of Thumb:

Most food cannot be kept longer than the average life span of a hamster. Keep a hamster in your refrigerator to gauge this.

In this issue

• This week: Fictional police/detectives
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

We’ve just finished watching the first two series of Lynda La Plante’s “Trial and Retribution”, with David Hayman in the lead role as hard-nosed detective Mike Walker. Gripping stuff. Each episode is about three hours long and it’s impossible to stop watching once you’ve started, so that led to a few late nights – early mornings, more like.

It got me thinking of other fictional cops and detectives. Anyone remember “Dixon of Dock Green” or “Z Cars”? Then there was “Softly, Softly” and a whole host of others. We liked “Inspector Morse”. “A Touch Of Frost” was good too; of course David Jason is always excellent in anything. But Frost lacked the rapport that comes from having a regular side-kick. Maybe the fact that he had a succession of them was a deliberate feature of the series, but to me it made the programme much more of a one-man show. Morse wouldn’t have been quite the same without the put-upon Lewis beside him – and many of the storylines made nearly as much of Lewis’s predicament (family life, career progression etc) as of Morse’s. They’ve even done a spin-off starring Kevin Whately as (now) Detective Inspector Lewis (and three more are in the pipeline).

My all-time favourite is “Taggart” – not just because it’s Scottish, or even because the stories are both gripping and credible, but because there’s a really good interplay between the team of detectives, which has endured several changes in the cast. Sadly Mark McManus, who played the title role, died in 1994 after eleven years in the role but somehow it managed to remain a big success despite this. Interestingly, the character of the new Chief Inspector that replaced Taggart was almost a complete opposite – Mike Jardine, who had joined the series in 1987, was very squeaky-clean and urbane where Taggart had been gritty. But following James MacPherson’s departure in 2002 they reverted to type and got Alex Norton in to play DCI Matt Burke.

The genre has had enduring popularity in Britain, even before film and television took off – Agatha Christie, for instance, was a hugely successful author in the 1920s. I sometimes wonder if it’s quite the same elsewhere. Somehow the various US police and detective dramas have never really grabbed me in the same way – too much glamour, not enough substance. How can you compare “Starsky and Hutch” with “Inspector Morse”, or “The Bill” with “Hill Street Blues” or (far less) “NYPD Blue”, with its annoying camera swooshes between scenes? And Indian detective thrillers are even more melodramatic.

Of course, probably the greatest fictional detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, has had his share of portrayals on TV and film – apparently more actors have played him than any other character. Basil Rathbone was possibly the most famous for a time, with a series of black-and-white films made in the 1930s and 1940s. But many fans of the books think he was something of a travesty – as were some of the storylines, which were thinly-veiled wartime propaganda rather than faithful reproductions of the books. Jeremy Brett played the role very successfully on Granada TV for several years. But possibly the most successful Holmes wasn’t even an English speaker. Vasily Livanov played him in seven films between 1979 and 1986, receiving an honorary OBE for his efforts. For many Russians, Livanov *was* Holmes. Coincidentally, he looks rather like Basil Rathbone…

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

The Taggart Fan Club have a great collection of trivia, quizzes and information about the series:
taggart-fanclub.co.uk

The Sherlock Holmes Museum has a pretty good online presence. Their virtual tour has musical accompaniment (the theme music to the Granada TV series), but it’s easy to turn it off.
Sherlock Holmes Museum

The University of Oxford have put together a “Morse’s Oxford” collection of 360-degree panorama shots, featuring some of the buildings that appear in the series:
Morse’s Oxford

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• how do vulture breathe?
• smoke smarties
• monologue darn thing in there
• hangwoman stories
• liver and lights recipes
• butch monkeys
• how to please a man in bed with pictures
• blue whale penis circumference
• food from exhibition of sail
• cheap flay romania

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

– Sherlock Holmes in “The Sign Of The Four”, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Joke

Three blondes were all applying for the last available position on the Texas Highway Patrol. The detective conducting the interview opened a file drawer and pulled out a picture. “To be a police officer, you have to be observant. You must be able to notice things such as distinguishing features and oddities such as scars and so forth.”

So saying, he showed the photo to the first blonde for two seconds. “Now,” he said, “did you notice any distinguishing features about this man?”

The blonde immediately said, “Yes, I did. He has only one eye!”

The detective shook his head and said, “Of course he has only one eye in this picture! It’s a profile of his face! You’re dismissed!”

The first blonde hung her head and walked out of the office. The detective then showed the photo to the second blonde for two seconds. “What about you? Notice anything unusual or outstanding about this man?”

“Yes! He only has one ear!”

The detective put his head in his hands and exclaimed, “Didn’t you hear what I just told the other lady? This is a profile of the man’s face! Of course you can only see one ear! You’re excused too!”

The second blonde sheepishly walked out of the office.

The detective turned his attention to the third and last blonde and said, “This is probably a waste of time, but……” He showed her the photo for two seconds. “All right, did you notice anything distinguishing or unusual about this man?”

The blonde said, “I sure did. This man wears contact lenses.”

The detective frowned, took another look at the picture and began looking at some of the papers in the folder. He looked up at the blonde with a puzzled  expression and said, “You’re absolutely right! His bio says he wears contacts! How in the world could you tell that by looking at his picture?”

The blonde rolled her eyes and said, “Well, helloooo!  With only one eye and one ear, he certainly can’t wear glasses!”

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

• This week: Trashed House
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Sorry we missed sending the newsletter for a week or two; here are our excuses. First we went off to Cambodia for a week (watch out for more new content on the website soon). And secondly, after working behind the scenes for months on another new website, we decided to do nothing else but that site until it was ready to go live. The result is http://www.trashedhouse.com – a tale of filth and destruction caused by a tenant, plus lots of information about letting or selling your home in England and Wales. (Sorry to exclude Scotland and Northern Ireland but the laws are different and our experience was in England. We’ll try to cater to the others if we ever have any spare time on our hands.)

I expect that many of you may be in a similar situation. Unless you’ve decided to sell up and escape permanently, there is always the dilemma of what to do with your UK home. if you sell it, you’re effectively jumping off the property ladder and it might be hard to get back on. If you leave it unoccupied you may run the risk of getting squatters in. I guess the default option for most is to rent it out – with all the worries that can bring.

We had heard plenty of horror stories from our friends and colleagues about bad tenants but we went ahead with that option anyway. And went through thirteen months of hell (and a substantial sum of money) sorting out the resultant mess. We thought we should tell our story to help others not to make the same mistakes as we did. If you are wondering about renting out your home, visit Trashed House and you may have serious second thoughts about it.

And now for something completely different. Because we travel quite a lot we get to eat breakfast in a variety of places (well, Dave does anyway as I am barely aware that such a thing as morning exists) and we’ve been taking photos of various breakfast offerings around the world. It might be fun if you too could send us any photos of breakfasts which you have. Why? I dunno, for fun, just to make my toes laugh. You can see what we’ve already got here:
Breakfasts

Please also include a caption (and your name if you want your 15 minutes of fame).

So that’s it for this week. Let’s hope things return to what passes for normal soon.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us about it?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

LandlordZone is an essential site for anyone renting out their house. It’s stuffed full of useful information. Try this page for a brief history of landlording in England and Wales.
LandlordZone

MrBreakfast.com has a few interesting things to say about breakfast. I particularly liked this page about “Breakfast With Jesus”, which gives details of some of the silliness surrounding the “miraculous” appearance of Jesus and other religious symbols in everyday breakfast comestibles. Yea, verily we are blest. Yea… right.
mrbreakfast.com: Breakfast with Jesus

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• who is the most photographed animal
• what kind of plant is a british hedge
• self shock
• food mondegreens
• funny quotes if you re being chased by a police dog try not to go through a tunnel
• airplane jokes australia midget hammer
• veiled cloaked movie
• boney felicidad lyric explanation
• gawdelpus
• obnoxious plants
• how to please a black man
• a picture of dobie the elf from harry potter

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“We are just tenants on this world. We have just been given a new lease, and a warning from the landlord.”

– Arthur C. Clarke, physicist & science fiction author (1917-)

Joke

Letters to a landlord

Excerpts from actual letters (allegedly) sent to landlords:

The toilet is blocked and we cannot bathe the children until it is cleared.

I want some repairs done to my stove as it has backfires and burnt my knob off.

This is to let you know that there is a smell coming from the man next door.

The toilet seat is cracked: where do I stand?

I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is running away from the wall.

I request your permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen.

Our lavatory seat is broken in half and is now in three pieces.

The person next door has a large erection in his back garden, which is unsightly and dangerous.

Will you please send someone to mend our cracked pavement? Yesterday my wife tripped on it and is now pregnant.

Our kitchen floor is very damp, we have two children and would like a third, so will you please send someone to do something about it.

Will you please send a man to look at my water? It is a funny color and not fit to drink.

Would you please send a man to repair my downspout? I am an old-age pensioner and need it straight away.

Could you please send someone to fix our bath tap? My wife got her toe stuck in it and it is very uncomfortable for us.

I want to complain about the farmer across the road. Every morning at 5:30 his cock wakes me up, and it is getting too much.

When the workmen were here, they put their tools in my wife’s new drawers and made a mess. Please send men with clean tools to finish the job and keep my wife happy.

In this issue

• This week: Domestic appliances
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

As you read this on your computer, chances are that you’re surrounded by other technical innovations in your home: fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, etc. They’re just everyday conveniences which most of us take for granted. But even these humble objects have interesting histories if you care to delve a little into the past.

Some of them have been around for longer than you might expect. In many cases, the technology was there but the price of these goods was prohibitive. It was also the case that most houses didn’t have the necessary infrastructure to make use of the emerging technologies. Many rural homes in the UK didn’t have running water until well into the twentieth century.

The microwave has always struck me as a very 1970s innovation. Yet it actually saw the light of day in 1947! The key technological advance which made it possible was the cavity magnetron, which was developed in order to enable aircraft to carry radar equipment on board during the Second World War. The earliest radar equipment, used by the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, used long wavelengths and thus needed large masts to generate the radio waves. The cavity magnetron reduced the wavelengths to a matter of centimetres. (In fact, “magnetron” is the word the Dutch use for a microwave oven.)

Washing machines were perhaps the most significant innovation for the household. Before their arrival, washdays literally did take a day or even more, as clothes had to be scrubbed by hand. At best, the housewife (and it invariably was women’s work in those days) had a washtub and a wash dolly (a contraption a bit like a wooden stool with a long broomstick through it) to agitate the clothes – but it was still hard physical labour. And this went on right up into the early twentieth century, even though the first patent for a washing and wringing machine was granted in 1691. It wasn’t until 1906 that the first electric washing machine went into mass production; and it took another 31 years before Bendix came up with their automatic machine. (And even that had to be bolted to the floor because it vibrated so much.)

One thing I’ve noticed is that when it comes to choosing between top-loading and front-loading washing machines, there seems to be quite a bit of variation around the world. Here in Thailand, the top-loader is king; sure, you can get front-loaders (and we have) but you have to hunt around a bit for them. According to Wikipedia, the same is true of the US and Australia. In Europe, on the other hand, top-loaders are a rarity, except perhaps in launderettes. I don’t know why – maybe people associate top-loaders with the old-fashioned twin-tubs (remember them?).

The idea of having a box in your house to keep food cold in is an old one, of course. In ye olden days, it was called a cellar – if you were wealthy enough to have one. Then in the early nineteenth century in the US people had the idea of cutting up the ice off frozen lakes, storing it in warehouses and selling it bit by bit to households, who would keep their block of ice in a special cupboard designed to keep the cold air inside – an icebox. Deliveries of ice were as much a commonplace in American cities as deliveries of milk. (Hence, I suppose, the Eugene O’Neill play “The Iceman Cometh”. “The Milkman Cometh” doesn’t have quite the same ring somehow, does it?) Inevitably, commercial refrigeration facilities were available quite some time before the domestic version, and for several decades the commercial facilities would provide the ice for iceboxes.

Perhaps inevitably it was a Frenchman, Marcel Audiffren, who had the idea of producing a refrigerator for the domestic market, thus enabling people to keep fresh food in short-term storage at home. But the earliest fridges using his design cost a whopping $1,000 back in 1911 – about twice the cost of the average car. And many of these units needed the compressor motor and heat diffuser to be housed in a different room from the cold compartment. It wasn’t until 1927 that a mass-produced fridge became available. The General Electric “Monitor-Top” is a funny-looking thing by modern standards, with its compressor on top concealed by a decorative porcelain ring; but it sold over a million, and some are still working today.

You maybe wouldn’t have expected the dishwasher to be the oldest among the four inventions I asked about at the beginning of this piece. Yet they’ve been around in more or less their present form since 1886! The inventor, Josephine Cochrane, didn’t invent it for herself as such, but for her servants – who were chipping her chinaware. The idea was that extra-hot water and more powerful, more caustic detergents would remove food more effectively than hand-washing, and avoid the almost inevitable bumps and bashes in washing-up basins.

Needless to say, all of these innovations have been refined since their invention. The CFCs which first brought fridges into the home have now been banned internationally; washing machines use far less water now than they used to; some microwaves can now read the barcodes on food packaging and cook the contents automatically; and researchers at the University of New South Wales have been working on a dishwasher that uses “supercritical” carbon dioxide instead of water and detergent, saving energy and reducing pollution of the water cycle with harsh chemicals. And of course all of them are getting hooked up to the internet these days.

What next, I wonder?

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

General Electric have an interesting timeline of domestic appliances (mostly their own, of course, but still worth a look):
General Electric: History of domestic appliances

A few years ago Channel 4 showed a reality TV series about a family that spent two months living a 1900 lifestyle in a terraced house in south-east London. Sadly, they’ve pulled their own mini-site, but PBS television in the States still have theirs:
PBS: The 1900 House

Washing machines are far more reliable now than they were even twenty years ago, but they’re still more prone to breakdowns than other appliances. Here’s a helpful site produced by a washing machine engineer:
washerhelp.co.uk

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• mosquitoes pollenate
• good of mankind reverse effect fear
• fish fingers are made
• freddie mercury birthday cards online
• refrigerator song
• rincwind poster
• cluttons mallorca
• more about creepy crawlies/insects
• grown man crying
• desmond morris leg crossing

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.”

– Rudyard Kipling, poet, novelist and journalist (1865-1936)

Joke

Mary was married to a male chauvinist. They both worked full-time, but he never did anything around the house and certainly not any housework. That, he declared, was women’s work!

But one evening Mary arrived home from work to find the children bathed, a load in the washing machine and another in the dryer, dinner on the stove and a beautifully set table, complete with flowers. She was astonished, and she immediately wanted to know what was going on.

It turned out that Charlie, her husband, had read a magazine article which suggested that working wives would be more romantically inclined if they weren’t so tired from having to do all the housework, in addition to holding down a full-time job.

The next day, she couldn’t wait to tell her girlfriends at the office. “How did it work out?” they asked.

“Well, it was a great dinner,” Mary said. “Charlie even cleaned up, helped the kids with their homework, folded the laundry and put everything away. I really enjoyed my evening.”

“But what about afterwards?” her friends wanted to know.

“It didn’t work out,” Mary said. “He was too tired.”

In this issue

• This week: Prisons
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

A BBC article about a postman who was sentenced to four months imprisonment, for burning mail he should have delivered, recently sparked off some debate on the British Expat forum. Whilst not making light of his crime – after all, the mail which he’d burned might have been crucial for some people or their businesses – it was generally felt that a prison sentence was daft and community service would have been much more appropriate in this case.

The signs are, though, that our members’ point of view is at odds with practice in the UK. According to the statistics, the UK’s prison population is at an all-time high, with about 85,000 people currently behind bars, compared with about 50,000 in 1993. England and Wales currently have the highest proportion of population in prison in Western Europe, at 143 per 100,000. Scotland is close behind, with 135 per 100,000; by contrast, Northern Ireland is towards the bottom end of the scale, with just 80 per 100,000.

(Europe is a long way behind the US, though, where a staggering 724 per 100,000 are incarcerated – 0.7 per cent of the population. Perhaps more scarily, many US prisons are privately run and their inmates made to work for commercial operations – uncomfortably close to a form of forced labour, depriving the market of properly paid jobs and allowing the companies concerned to keep prices artificially low.)

So why are so many people now doing time? Apparently it’s not because of the rise in crime; crime figures show that the number of convictions has remained pretty stable over the last ten years or so. The reason seems to be – in part, at least – an increase in severity of sentencing. Judges are now more willing to impose prison sentences for relatively petty crimes, and to impose a higher tariff than before where prison would have been indicated anyway. It’s been suggested that this increased toughness can be traced back to the murder of toddler Jamie Bulger in by two older children, and to then Home Secretary Michael Howard’s view that “Prison works” – a view which Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair echoed as he sought to shake off Labour’s image as soft on crime.

So what’s prison like in the UK these days anyway? Is it like the 1970s TV show “Porridge”, or are the prisoners all comfy in hotel-like rooms fully equipped with personal computers and every home comfort?

The answer seems to be somewhere in between. Looking at HM Prison Service’s own website, the picture is of an environment where prisoners are encouraged to become productive and well-adjusted members of society, and much the same picture is given by the BBC’s In-Depth feature. Prisoners are given the chance to develop trade skills, and to keep fit in relatively well-appointed gym facilities; and in their “free” time can play pool, socialise and study, or watch television (if they have one) in their cells. Food, though by no means of gourmet standard, is adequate and nutritious, provided at an average cost of £1.87 per prisoner per day, or £3.81 a day in Young Offenders’ Institutes. (By comparison, the MOD spends a daily average of £2.20 per head to provide meals in messes, and the NHS spends £2.50 for hospital meals.)

But that’s the ideal, and with overcrowding on the increase, in facilities which in some cases were built nearly 150 years ago, it’s perhaps not surprising that the cracks around the edges are beginning to run a little deeper. HMP Pentonville was recently the subject of a damning inspectors’ report which found that unemployed prisoners (nearly half of them) were cooped up in their cells for all but two-and-a-half hours a day on average, and that the catering facilities were overrun with cockroaches and other vermin. In Scotland, about 300 prisoners are due to receive compensation because sub-standard sewerage facilities forced them to slop out while in shared cells. And, most worryingly of all, there are roughly 20,000 incidents of self-harm every year – including 78 successful suicide attempts in 2005.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that there are so many. It’s estimated that about 90 per cent of prisoners suffer from some kind of mental illness. The Prison Reform Trust and the mental health charity MIND reckon that schizophrenia is more than ten times higher among male prisoners than it is among the general population. But the Government’s social exclusion unit has found that prisoners are twice as likely to be refused mental health treatment as people on the outside. And the Chief Inspector of Prisons has estimated that about two in five prisoners in prison health care centres should really be in secure NHS units.

Women appear to be at particular risk. Although women make up only just over five per cent of the prison population, they account for more than half of the self-harm incidents. But the most common offences for which women are imprisoned are theft and handling stolen goods, not violent crimes (which account for only one-sixth of women prisoners). Yet the results of imprisonment can be catastrophic for both the woman imprisoned and her children, as homes are lost and families broken up. The founder of the advocacy group Women In Prison, Chris Tchaikovsky, summed it up: “Prison is often a very expensive way of making bad situations worse.”

All this is not to suggest that prisons are bad in themselves, or that prisoners should be mollycoddled. The point is that people who commit crimes should face the consequences of their action in a proportionate way, not further damaged and excluded from any future opportunity of rehabilitation into society. One particularly powerful initiative in recent years has been the effort to bring prisoners into contact with the victims of crime. These “restorative justice” projects have the effect of helping both victim and criminal – the victim in resolving their pain, the criminal in realising what the crime has meant to other people’s lives. And, although there are some criminals who can’t be reformed in this way, the signs are that many can. A much more hopeful prospect than the knee-jerk reaction of condemning criminals to rot in jail.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Does modern art make your blood boil, leave you cold, or float your boat? Are art materials expensive in your part of the world? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

You can find out more about UK prisons from the official websites:
Northern Ireland Prison Service
Scottish Prison Service
Prison Service in England and Wales

See number 2 on this list of worst April Fool’s hoaxes ever. Words fail me…
Museum of Hoaxes: Worst April Fools

Remember Norman Stanley Fletcher? Here’s an interesting guide to “Porridge”:
BBC Comedy Guide: Porridge

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• i need a certificate from tufty the green cross code how would i get one
• deep fried scone recipe
• supersex forum
• ways to grow tall lots bbc
• mark last crete
• animalsex couple 767
• burger van orkney
• british politics condom flag
• i started smoking sobranies
• joke are guinness book of records and camilla parker bowles

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighbouring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?”

– Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-born US philosophical essayist, novelist and poet (1883-1931)

Joke

Barrister: “M’lud, I wish to appeal against the verdict against my client on the basis of newly discovered evidence.”

Judge: “And what is the nature of the new evidence?”

Lawyer: “M’lud, I have just discovered that my client still has £500 left.”