Knives, spam and Steven Tyler

Time is money and nowhere is that truer than in a kitchen. Actually, time isn’t money, “timing” is money, but it all comes down to the same thing. Now, the health and safety people are always telling us that we need to take precautions and avoid injury at all costs because putting people in hospitals is a very expensive business and it’s usually everybody else that ends up paying the tab. In professional kitchens, this is a consideration which appears to be over some chefs’ heads and, instead, they go battering down the length of a courgette and end up slicing their fingers as they do so and adding a little bit of meat content to the odd vegetarian dish, I suspect. This is somewhat counterproductive because the time taken to bandage a finger is probably more than the time it takes for the average amateur chef to cut a courgette into the requisite bits and pieces for putting in his, her or its stew. Would it not be better for chefs just to adopt the same precautionary procedures as the rest of us adopt and inject slightly less of themselves into their original recipes when chopping vegetables, and Spam, and the like?

Spam (now there’s a segue), a correspondent advises me, is undesirable and I should stop sending out four or five different messages a day on my blog. That said, when we buy an encyclopaedia we do not demand that the Encyclopaedia Britannica should send us one entry per day but rather we quite like to have the bound volume before us so that we can refer to whatever part of it it takes our fancy to refer to, in the moment juste. However I can’t accede to her request because I can only mail-shot everyone or paid subscribers only and none of you is paying me right now. But the day may well come, so take what’s going free while it’s free: “don’t buy one, get 5 free”. So, she’ll need to turn me into “spam” and just drop by occasionally to see what’s up(-loaded). You can do the same if it bothers you. And that’s why this link in the Endless Chain is an “omnibus” edition. Ding, ding, fares please.

Now what does all this have to do with Mr Steven Tyler? Very little. He’s just another passenger on this omnibus. Mr Steven Tyler has got the biggest mouth that I know and he uses it to great effect while singing and doing a load of other things, I’m sure. He is a performer and I have seen him live, and what a performer. He throws his all, his everything, his energy and his heart and soul into every performance that he does and it’s noticeable that Aerosmith, the group Mr Tyler heads up, raucous though they are, always have an entrancing melody to back up Mr Tyler’s exuberance. That is an allegory in and of itself because whether you like Bach or Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky or Delius or Aerosmith, their success is only dependent on whether or not they can trigger something within your soul. But, when they do do that, you will feel the shivers down your spine and you will adore the music. And sometimes it’s not the music that you’re adoring; it’s the soul that the composer put into his work that is moving you, not the notes with which it is expressed. Mr Tyler, Mr Kramer, Mr Whitford, Mr Hamilton and Mr Perry put their souls into their works. Their works are as valid as Delius’s or Tchaikovsky’s. When music is not entirely to your taste, then stop listening to the music and listen to the performance.

Out of interest, this text was dictated on MS Word, and it’s quite good I find. My first try. It makes for long sentences, but you do get the rhythm of my spiel? Just enjoy the performance.