The one thing The Guardian is right about

I have made most of my living out of the food industry since 1978, and it has required an epic amount of ducking and weaving over the years to avoid inspecting the killing end of an abattoir.

Because I enjoy eating meat, and suspect that I might never do so again if my theoretical knowledge of how it arrives on my plate was reinforced by a practical demonstration.

Pie factories, on the other hand, of which I have seen many, are counter-intuitively cheering: not only for their high standards of cleanliness but also for the complete absence of the nasty ingredients that urban legend would have you believe meat pies contain.

My least pleasant food industry experience to date was being taken on a tour of a battery chicken farm by its proud owners, who were about to float their company on the stock market. As a result I have religiously insisted upon free range eggs ever since.

However, it has been real religion that has dominated the headlines lately, as the old debate about the labelling of halal meat has received another airing in the tabloids.

An earlier outing of this story from 2010

This is presented by some as an animal welfare issue, but it really is not. Any unlabelled “halal” meat that makes its way into British supermarkets comes from animals that have been stunned before slaughter, in accordance with their standard requirements.

So there is no practical difference between benighted, wicked, ritual slaughter and the modern, friendly, secular kind. In both the animal ends up dead by having its throat cut. If you don’t find that concept palatable, don’t eat meat.

Those kicking up a fuss about halal are really concerned only with the fact that the unfortunate animals may have received some sort of Islamic blessing before meeting their destiny as little Wayne’s chicken nuggets.

With the best will in the world, I cannot imagine that hearing a few words of prayer, whatever their nature, can add greatly to any creature’s misery. They are at least more sensitive than a Tannoy blaring “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye”.

It pains me more than I can say ever to find myself in agreement with The Guardian about anything, particularly after their hugely distorted monstering of the North East at the weekend, but on this one issue they are surely right. The halal furore has nothing to do with love of animals and everything to do with dislike of certain people.

Yes, exactly like Detroit. Hard to tell them apart.

Specifically, it reflects resentment that we are all being forced to conform to the beliefs and wishes of a small section of the population, about whose feelings we seem disproportionately concerned.

This produces the same sort of irritation we experience when told that we must not celebrate Christmas or have black sheep in our traditional nursery rhymes, for fear of offending one minority or another.

Even though most members of said minority probably have not the slightest wish for us to change anything at all. My wife comes from a Muslim family who always celebrate Christmas far more enthusiastically than I have ever done. While the nearest we came to a religious difference this Sunday was bickering over our shares of the crackling after I cooked roast pork for lunch.

My elder son, who is soon to be five, loves animals and wants to be a farmer. Like so many of his peers, he would unhesitatingly name sausages as his favourite food. Yet he is so soft-hearted that he rushes for the “off” switch whenever it looks as though the fox in the CBeebies cartoon may finally catch Peter Rabbit.

The other day he was invited to visit a friend’s farm and asked if there would be dairy cows, his particular favourite. No, we said, only beef cows.

“Oh good,” came the innocent reply. “Maybe they can show us how the cows make the beef.”

I sincerely hope not. Perhaps he will become a vegetarian when he is finally faced with the truth. More likely, I suspect, he will follow the family tradition of ducking and weaving so that he can keep enjoying the things we both find delicious without facing up to the grim reality of how they are produced.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

It is always a good time to put the clocks back

In the week when we endured the annual faff of putting the clocks forward, it was encouraging to observe some sterling efforts to put them back by decades and even centuries.

First there was the happy news that Australia’s Prime Minister had taken a moment off from superintending his country’s search for a very small aeronautical needle in a whole prairie of haystacks to announce that he was reintroducing the titles of knight and dame, after a lapse of nearly 30 years.

It would be a duller world that had to forego the possibility of another Dame Joan Sutherland or Edna Everage, so I was delighted to see Australia’s outgoing Governor-General become Dame Quentin Bryce.

Dame Quentin Bryce

This announcement proved of no interest at all to the British media apart from The Guardian, which was predictably outraged. In my experience this is always a reliable indicator of a positive development.

However, my pleasure in this Antipodean defiance of progressive nostrums was blasted into total insignificance by sheer awe at the monumental nerve of the theatre designer whose work I experienced on Saturday evening.

Because somehow, in a world tied in knots by the demands of Elfin Safety, a genius has managed to construct a near perfect replica of a 17th century playhouse. Which is to say a building made almost entirely of wood, and lit throughout by candles, in which people in floaty period dresses waft around in thrilling proximity to the naked flames.

This certainly created a frisson for those of us who remembered how a single candle set the dress of tragic soprano Susan Chilcott ablaze at Covent Garden in 2002: an event which, according to legend, allowed one newspaper to run the cruel and inaccurate headline “The show ain’t over till the fat lady singes.”

This miraculous place is called the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and is a sort of footnote or addendum to Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s South Bank. The performance was of Francesco Cavalli’s Venetian opera of 1644, L’Ormindo.

As readers of The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera will already know, the first true opera was performed in Venice on March 6, 1637, so this definitely qualifies as an early work. It was all the more remarkable, then, for its maturity and contemporary relevance.

Combining comedy and tragedy with those old theatrical favourites of disguise and mistaken identity, it struck a particular chord with me because at its centre is a feeble old monarch married to a beautiful young woman, Queen Erisbe.

So very like my own domestic arrangements.

Quite unlike the happily loyal Mrs Hann, Erisbe dallies with two fit young princes before deciding to elope with Ormindo. But she is foiled by Fate, which blows their ship back to Casablanca and her irate husband.

Who duly sentences the pair to death by drinking poison, for which someone kindly substitutes a sleeping draught.

Which is handy, as the two lovers awake shortly after the king has discovered that Ormindo is, in fact, his son. Implausibly, all are reconciled and live happily ever after.

It’s a bit like Romeo and Juliet or Tristan und Isolde, but with a happy ending.

Seating just 340 people on authentically uncomfortable wooden benches, the new-yet-400-years-old theatre provides a wonderfully intimate and memorable experience, with excellent acoustics if occasionally dodgy sightlines, and I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who finds themselves at a loose end in London and can grab a ticket.

Unfortunately at the time of booking almost a year ago I had overlooked the fact that our night out was on the eve of Mothering Sunday, requiring an early morning dash back to be reunited with our children.

Two-year-old Jamie has been delighting us for many months now by clasping both his hands to his head, waiting for all around to copy him, then beamingly leading a round of applause.

When we got back I duly raised my hands to my head and nodded to him. In response, I received only the Hann Death Stare to which I treat people who ask how my diet is going.

I know his growing up is inevitable and indeed desirable, but it did make me pine to put the clock back just another touch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Once again the big winner is apathy

It is always a delight to see any political idea favoured by Eddie Izzard being decisively punted into oblivion, so last week saw the Hann household rejoicing for the second Friday in succession.

No

And who could resist a little surge of local pride on discovering that the North East had led the field in saying no to AV, with a majority of 71.9%?

A mere handful of places said “yes”: Oxford, Cambridge, a few smug inner London boroughs and their Edinburgh and Glasgow counterparts. Tempting me to the conclusion that we need never go to the trouble and expense of a national referendum ever again. Just obtain the newspaper wholesalers’ data on where The Guardian sells most strongly, hold local polls there, then do precisely the opposite of whatever they vote for. We won’t go too far wrong.

Though perhaps we should have one last national referendum on Scottish independence first. And I do mean a national referendum. How can you dissolve a marriage without consulting both of the contracting parties? Allowing Scotland alone to vote on its future would be like letting the children decide on their party guest list and entertainment without consulting the adults who actually have to pay for it.

But I am ignoring the pachyderm in the living quarters, which is this. Although pundits assure us that turnout in the AV referendum exceeded expectations, apathy was once again the big winner on polling day. A thumping 58% of my compatriots still found something more important to do than pootling down to their local school or village hall, and marking an “X” on a bit of paper.

How could this lot fail to inspire?

All right, it’s not very intellectually challenging and it doesn’t promise the same sort of returns as filling in a lottery slip, but in the Middle East people are currently dying for the right to do just this. How can you possibly conclude that it is more important to be scratching yourself on the sofa in front of Loose Women or The Jeremy Kyle Show?

Politics matter. Which celebrity is shagging which lady of easy virtue who previously enjoyed relations with which Premiership footballer does not.

Another thing that matters is our ability to hold our heads up in the world by adhering to certain standards of decency and fair play. From the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War to the recent revelations about our treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya, the reputation of the British Empire is certainly not an unsullied one.

But have the Americans, who worked so hard to bring our Empire to a conclusion, led us onto the broad sunlit uplands of probity and transparency?

Their support of assorted murderous tyrannies around the world, and their use of “extraordinary rendition”, extra-territorial detention camps, the extraction of information by torture and – yes, their ham-fisted inability to get their story straight about the cold-blooded killing of their public enemy number one in Abbotabad last week – all lead me to the conclusion that the world was a rather better and safer place when those chaps from Whitehall were in charge of it.

It’s not that I have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, though his “command and control centre” looked to me rather more like a teenager’s bedroom that had been handed over to an OAP as part of a Channel 4 reality life swap show. But why would anyone conceive and execute the operation against him in a way that seems specifically designed to give conspiracy theorists a field day?

Latest version of events: the White House execution team hold their breath as the UK AV referendum results come in

The only thing that troubles me about my misgivings is that I have already found them shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and will no doubt soon find myself allied with the entire readership of The Guardian, including Eddie Izzard. So as you were, Mr President. Most reluctantly, Operation Geronimo gets my vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.