Is It Weird to Eat a Scotch Egg on a Train?

Yet another marathon journey traversing a disappointingly small portion of the southern coast in an unreasonably long period of time was the focus of my day, but this time I’d a fairly substantial food parcel packed to distract my attentions from the hours of travel.

As I sat on my second of three trains after eloping from my second of two buses as Littlehampton, I cracked open my Northiam Dairy Live Creamy Fruit Yoghurt and began to question the appropriateness of my selection of scotch eggs, cherry tomatoes, yoghurt and creamy coleslaw that my ever-doting yet somewhat-erratic mother had thrust upon me before my quest to Dorset.

I have always felt, through primary and secondary school – as I would, day in day out, dig into my unchanging sandwich, crisps and biscuit – that a packed lunch should be wholly consumed with nothing but the natural-born implements we are blessed with. The requirement of a fork, knife or spoon elevates that particular snack to being paired with either dining at home or in a professional establishment where implements are easily accessed and cleaned away. Kiwi fruits, breakfast cereals of any kind, and liquid-based foodstuff, or yoghurt and coleslaw – as I, for some reason, had ought to remain in these safe havens.

I feel it is important to travel light, so to carry unnecessary, un-disposable tools with you seems counterintuitive. It might make for happy eating, but it most certainly does not make for sensible travel. A light, uncluttered satchel is definitely the way forward to a happy journey.

My incognito consumption also drew my attention to another issue with this form of eating; it simply feels weird. I found myself popping my head above the seats to check if anyone was around, stuffing as much as I could into my mouth before anyone had the chance to get near; so desperately keen that my peculiar meal was to go unnoticed by my fellow passengers that the entire experience was ruin for me.

The peach. That’s just occurred to me. Bloody peaches.

The only safe place to enjoy the sweet flesh of a good, juicy, ripe peach is leaning over a sink, ready to rinse your hands and head after your delicious treat. And it has to be kept at that – a treat. One cannot make this a regular habit, for risking familiarity with this system and becoming tempted to test it on other foods with a high rating on the mess-spectrum.

It is of the utmost importance that we resist this urge to roll this technique out past the delicate, fleshy fruits. Lest we risk jeopardising the future of developed society as restaurants employ the use of bidets instead of tables – the tap ever-ready to spray your soiled features with a cleansing and refreshing dowsing of tap water they’d happily pass off as bottled and charged £2 for.

Despite the impending doom western society faces thanks to my hypothetical situation, I was still travelling with my hodgepodge picnic.

Scotch eggs are such a strange thing to even conceive. The fungal texture of the egg paired with its sulphurous odour is enough to put off some of the most world-weary eaters, yet the Scotch decided to add to the peculiarity by wrapping it in a thick layer of mysterious sausage meat, breadcrumbs and deep frying.

People of the East and tribal jungle-dwellers eat insects and have strange delicacies, but few go so far as this odd concoction in textures, flavours and the mixture of ingredients – spanning from a failed poultry ovum to arbitrary cuts of pig.

And yet, I found myself sinking my teeth into the monstrously eclectic mix on a Southern Railway train from Littlehampton to Southampton, coming to the conclusion that – despite its distinctly compact and clean consumption – it was very much not suitable for this place. This particular food must be eaten at home, this such wonder should not even be sampled at a restaurant.

A Scotch egg ought to be an inherently private indulgence and I, for one, shall never again taste the eggy, meaty, greasy delight in public, as long as I can have control over my consumption of food.

The Language of Sexism: A Big Fuss Over Nothing

NB: I have been reliably informed from a number of sources that I come across in a sexist light from this post. I would like to reference my lecturer again to rectify this issue; feminists are not exclusively women, everyone should be feminists as the concept of feminism is equality between men and women.

This post does not attack women, or even feminism, it simply attacks one small area of one of feminism's arguments. I am not a sexist and I would not like people reading this to make that assumption.

Thank you.

Gender & Sexuality is the newest wonder to glide so effortlessly into my life and cause me yet more frustration and petulance in the face of getting this bloody degree.

In a recent lecture, feminism reared its foul head and began to approach my disinterested notepad. I’d seen it as it clambered over the horizon and begun its fetid journey towards me, yet its arrival was still greeted with a steely gaze and a smattering of unrepeatable phrases.

One such point made in said lecture was one of the word ‘mankind’ being inherently sexist as it assumes that ‘man’ is the focus and therefore more important. I see the point and, unsurprising, would like to challenge it. Our lecturer suggested that ‘humankind’ would be a more ambiguous, and therefore less sexist, term to use in this context.

I can only, in my ignorant and heavily prejudiced male brain, imagine that the offending articles in the word ‘mankind’ are the three little, generic symbols m, a and n (in that order). If my assumption is correct, why are they ignored in the supposedly-acceptable ‘humankind’? Surely they hold the same potency, here, as they do in the aforementioned frowned-upon word choice.

It seems to me that so-called feminists are ignoring the fact that adding letters to words does, in fact, allow the newly-born lexicon to disregard the previously associated meaning of the former word. Although they do embrace this rule with accepting ‘humankind’, is it suggests they approve of the word ‘human’ which has had its meaning changed by ‘hu’.

The power afforded to the humble ‘hu’ by these feminists is pretty powerful, although one ought not be surprised as the letters ‘man’ manage to conjure up such potent and uncomfortable meanings for subscribers to this line of thinking.

The claim that the word ‘humankind’ is less sexist than ‘mankind’ utterly ignores this linguistic (and simply logical) fact, that there only a finite number (26 in modern English, for those of you unbeknownst of this fact) of letters, so repetition is fairly likely when a language reaches the lofty heights of containing a dictionary with the wealth of upwards of 700,000 words to its arsenal.

I am not so ignorant assume the occurrence of ‘man’ in ‘mankind’ is random and is not inherently linked to the meaning of a male Homo Sapien, I realise the relationship they have. But, in terms of the evolution of language, the creation of ‘mankind’ is not a sexist attack on women, it is merely a description of the entirely of highly evolved apes on this little planet.

It is fairly obvious in the currently linguistic climate that words and phrases are no longer (not that they ever were) stitched irrevocable to the meaning they currently have; ‘gay’ once meant joyous, ‘wicked’ once had the connotation of evil, and sick used to mean both vomit and disgusting. Nowadays, these words can mean drastically different things – their original meanings still drifting around somewhere in the ether – as the new age of language architects and engineers – namely the youth generation (as it seems to have been for many generations) – craft new meanings and significances for previously familiar words.

I often hear people of my generation using words that I simply have no grasp of, I believe the (unjustly) popular TV show The Only Way Is Essex has managed to cast a handful of new words into circulation. This is simply what happens as language is very malleable and adaptable to the wants and needs of its users. ‘Ream’ now means sexy and good (at least I think so), when it used to be a bundle of paper. Things can change dramatically; it’s the nature of the unnatural construct of language.

This is why I feel the claim that ‘mankind’ is sexist is madness, by stitching ‘kind’ onto the arse-end of those arbitrary, yet ‘offensive’, letters changes what it means and uncovers an entirely new meaning for those of us open and accepting of the phenomenon of change.

I have asserted than youth culture tends to drive linguistic change, yet the majority of the most uttered words in normal conversation (those naughty swear words) were invented by adults. The secret language of cursing was conceived to discuss wholly adult topics whilst children’s delicate ears were present.

It is this ability of mankind – yes mankind – to create words and hidden meanings for personal use that shows both the weakness and brilliance of words; they both mean nothing and everything at once. They can be split down into their most raw building blocks and shuffled into new shapes to transform an abstract verb into a concrete noun, language is not – and never has been – fixed.

The meaning of the letters l, i, v & e, can mean ‘live’ as easily as they can ‘evil’. And yet, before they are interpreted by the understanding human mind, those letters are simply the sum of their parts and hold no meaning. It is in the decoding of letters that the power nestles, and not in the words themselves.

This seems to be drifting evermore towards the concept of language in the brain and away from a discussion of feminism. Well if that’s the road it has chosen, then so be it.

Language and meaning is literally (in the ‘proper’ meaning, not the overused and undervalued common use) nothing without man (meaning people, not just men. I’m sure I don’t need to point that out, though). A) It would not have emerged without people, culture and civilisation, and B) without man (you know what I mean) to decode the arbitrary combinations of symbols they would remain exactly that – arbitrary and meaningless.

Therefore, the only reason for feminists to decide than ‘mankind’ is a sexist term is simply for the sake of creating a sexist term to allow them to decode it as sexist and thus make a fuss about it. Language tries to bridge gaps between people and the chasm that exists between individuals’ minds, but it falls down in that we all attach our own meanings to words. For example: I, for years, believed the word ‘vivid’ meant vague and weak – the polar opposite of its ‘true’ meaning, yet in my head that word fitted my meaning exactly and I was sure of that.

No matter how hard we try to tap into the relationship between words and cognitive meaning, language will probably never reach the goal of full and proper correlation between what is said and what is meant.

‘Mankind’ is fine, 'humankind' is also good. I will continue to use them interchangably, as is my wont.

Bad Decisions

In recent years I have felt my decision making skills to be in a shameful spiral of decline; I firstly chose to study English at uni, and then chose Bournemouth as the place to study it. These two have thrown me into the clutches where I currently reside and contently complain about these decisions.

Today, though, saw me making a series of poor decisions that won’t affect my life in such a drastic way, but have really rammed home that I am useless at picking out the right path (in this case, literally).

This recent heat wave tempted me to leave the safety of my slug, damp and rodent infested home (although this morning this sight greeted me, so the rodent problem could be sorted, for now.)

This beckoning from the Sun sent me towards Turbary Common, along with my bike and a large bag. I was having a lovely time; cycling along paths, taking tiny jumps and feeling like a man for doing them, and taking little detours through thickets to add some interest to my ride.

Bad decision number 1.

Trying to nip under low braches on a very high-set bike with a large bag on your back only leads to constant snagging and the need to stop, untangle oneself and getting scratched several times by the vicious heath land plants before remounting and continuing towards the next precariously placed tree limb.

Going along one of these pseudo-paths lead me to an opening into a housing estate and, inevitably, home. I wasn’t ready to go home and I saw no reason to turn back. So I continued onwards on, what was most probably, an animal track; forcing my oversized road bike along with me, my bare legs taking the brunt of the damage from the surround flora.

Bad decision number 2.

Whilst ploughing on through the undergrowth, the ground beneath my feet begun to take on a distinctly spongy form, so it became necessary to hop between small clumps of grass as they quickly became the only solid ground I could rely on. I continued forward in my naivety, assuming that this path must meet up with a larger one at some point soon.

Bad decision number 3.

I was quickly left in the following situation after my reliance on the grassy islands failed me.

After standing here for a good 15 minutes, taking in the Sun, I thought it about time to make a move. Going back would surely not be the right move, as that's where I had the accident, plus it wouldn't give me more thing to explore? Correct. Onwards I went.

I hatched a dasterdly plan to resolve this monumental problem, though.

My phone then got very low on memory so the videos had to stop. I was left with about 4 photographs worth of memory to document the rest of my ordeal.

Upon gaining relatively sturdy purchase the other side and retrieving my bike from the tangle of brambles it somhow found itself, I was almost home and dry - well apart from my right foot - and it was just a small amount more clambering through bushes with my ungainly bicycle until I was free. My path did take me past this rather attractive pool of stagnant water, though.

I finally found my way out and came home certain in the knowledge that decisions, in future, should not be made by me as things like this are all too likely to happen again.