Yes, I think they probably know it's Christmas by now

If, like me, you grew up in the 1980s, you probably have a view of Ethiopia that is pretty hard to shake off, defined largely by the media and celebrities of the day.

As impressionable children we witnessed Band Aid, Live Aid, Sport Aid (Remember that one -  'Everybody wants to Run the World'?) and the inaugural Comic Relief. Loads of money raised for a good cause. A cause that was relentlessly branded upon our collective conscience, pretty much all the time. For some years.

Ethiopia was deserts, flies and starving children. Ethiopian food? Well it wasn't anything was it? There was a famine. OK, maybe the diet consisted of the contents of those food packages paid for with the moneys raised by Bob, Midge and Lenny.

And that was the virtually intractable image we all had in our minds. That was Ethiopia.

A pot that is hot (6)

Forget Bodyguard or Strictly or Grumbleton Glump, or whatever it is you people are watching these days.

The best programmes on British TV at the moment are 1986 episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC4, and old Coronation Street on ITV3. No arguments, please, this really is as good as it gets.

Yes, it's a Hotpot!

If you haven't caught up with Old Corrie, we're in about mid-1990 now, a few months after Alan Bradley got killed by the tram, and probably a year or so before Alec Gilroy's fit granddaughter shows up and is sullied by Andy McDonald.

But we get two episodes every day from a era when they were broadcast at a rate of two per week, so that 'year' will pass by pretty quickly. And there's still a long, long way to go before it descends into an unwatchable retirement home for actors who can't get any other work.

Be transported back to a simpler time. A better time. A time when people were still with us.

Bodeans, Bodeans, Bodeans, Bodeans, I'm begging of you please do cook me meat!

I wrote the other day about Masterchef contestants not getting much of an opportunity to slow-cook, and it got me thinking:

What would John and Greg make of Bodeans? A place that smokes and slow-braises meat over many, many hours, if not days. If not years.

'You've got one hour and 15 minutes?' I suspect not, somehow.

MasterChef - give us time, give us beer!

I'm always impressed with the quality of the contestants on MasterChef, and in this latest series the standard seems particularly high. Indeed it's high enough to scare me into not applying for the show myself!

(Particularly the ballsy Lancastrian lass who is my tip to beat the moustachioed twatster in the final!)

What I'm less impressed by is how formulaic the programme has become, with contestants slave to the straitjacket of rigid format as they wield their spatulas of conformity. (And, if anybody asks, I'll probably use that rather florid excuse for not entering rather than admitting my shitting fear!)

Too busy drinking beer to go on MasterChef

My biggest gripes can be summed up thusly. Firstly, the samesome timescales:

Pretty much every challenge involves having an hour (or, quite often, an hour and 15 minutes) to cook something, which rules out any slow-cooked dishes and indeed discriminates against chefs whose speciality happens to be slow-cooking.

(Yes, I'd probably include myself in that category.)

My other complaint, which may well be a by-product of the first, is that there is nowhere near enough cooking with beer on the show.

And we could all use some additional beer, right?!?

Good news according to Ben

For much of the last few weeks, I've been lain low by the disease of kings. If you want an idea of how excruciating the pain in and around my left ankle has been, I actually went ten whole days without a drink at one point. Seriously. Ten!

It's an insufferable tease too, this gouty fucker. Just when I think it's getting better and I can return to enjoying my usual hearty quantities of ale and meat, the bloody pain strikes again and I'm back spending days on end sat indoors on a diet of low-purine food and Naproxen.

However - and I'm probably setting myself up for another uric fail here - it does finally seem to have subsided somewhat, allowing a pain-free me to focus on some of the really rather good stuff that's been happening lately.

And indeed, to share these good times with my readers.

Sicklehammer would be a great name for a band, wouldn't it?

We were flying back from Moscow at exactly the same time as Edward Snowden was flying in the opposite direction.

A week later, he's still stuck at the airport - I can vouch for the long queues, complicated, expensive visas and overly fussy customs and immigration processes, but a whole week is ridiculous!

But then Julian Assange has been happily living in some 3rd Division country's embasssy for a year now. Maybe these are the prices one pays for a life of consciencious whistleblowing (or perhaps self-important attention-seeking).

I thought this 'we're all being spied on 24/7' went out of the window years ago with the demise of the old USSR, but apparently not. Maybe in some ways we're all still living there waving our hammers and sickles around, and I didn't actually need to visit Moscow after all?

Walking past the mummified corpse of Lenin I made some throwaway comment about how amusing it would be if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat bolt upright... and a security guard angrily sidled up behind me before I'd even finished the sentence.

Of course, I didn't notice at the time because it was quite dark in there and I was already writing a screenplay in my mind where Vladimir the Revolutionary Zombie gets into all sorts of hilarious scrapes.

In my contended obliviousness I didn't realise what was happening until Mrs B-V told me later on, long after Mr. KGB had decreed that I wasn't a legitimate threat to his great, deceased leader. And maybe we don't notice when our governments back home are spying on us either?

You can't overdose on beef, right?

Another day, another great burger...

I'll resist the temptation to make a cheap bus-related pun, but having had my faith in burgers thoroughly restored by Lucky Chip, I've been on something of a beef spree lately.

Like all those dodgy beef products with traces of Horse DNA, I'd probably test positive for beef if I was minced up and flogged on the cannibal market.

But it's a testimony to the great choice of quality burger places we now have in London - something I'd personally longed for for a very, very long time. Probably since my first visit to the USA.

There's Haché, there's MEATliquor, there's Lucky Chip. And there's always somewhere new to get a credible beef fix. For all the horsey furore around bad beef, there's actually never been a better time to eat the good stuff.

Horses for Main courses?

The big news this morning, apart from my helicopter lesson going badly wrong, obviously, was the revelation that some frozen beefburgers made and sold in the UK and Ireland actually contained traces of horsemeat. In some cases 25% 'traces'.

Now, I don't buy frozen value burgers from Tescos, and I've not been to Iceland since about the time it stopped being called Bejams, so I'm not worried that I might have inadvertantly eaten the stuff.

My immediate reaction was: Never mind the horse, the quality of the beef in those things was probably highly dubious!

I know, little predictable ol' me.

But, horse or no horse, cheap beefburgers generally contain the worst cuts of 'meat' from the worst cattle, padded out with additives and fillers and mechanically-recovered anus tissue. I bang on about this sort of stuff because I'm a fan of really good quality beef and really good quality burgers.

The initial media reaction was equally predictable - shock, horror, outrage! How dare they put this in our beefburgers?!? and so on.

And then, continuing the predictability, came the 'but why is it outrageous?!?' backlash with the good old unbiased BBC asking why Britain doesn't eat horses when we eat cows, pigs and other farmyard creatures.

I wasn't asked for my view for some reason, but one or two 'experts' had some, frankly, strange opinions and these rather bizzare arguments for why we don't eat it triggered a bit of friendly office debate.

The mystery of the missing cheese

Of all the myriad, diverse parts of London, Hackney is one of the few areas that I really don't know very well.

It's partly because it's somewhat hard to get to, despite being relatively close to the centre, but also because I've never given it much of a chance, dismissing it in my mind as a pointless inner-city shithole swarming with assorted chavs, cunts and Labour voters.

Possibly a tad harsh, I know, but life's too short to be completely unprejudiced!

I am, however, open to evidence that changes my mind. In the last couple of years, the London Borough of Hackney has gained something like five new microbreweries which is rather astonishing.

And I've known for a while that the area also has it's fair share of Turkish restaurants, some of which are pretty good - I went to one somewhere near Dalston a few years ago where the pitta bread was toasted directly below the grill where they barbecued the kebabs, allowing it to absorb the meaty juices. Yum yum, and no namby-pamby warning signs for vegetarians.

(I've no idea where exactly this place is, and I'll probably never know, given that I was taken there on a date by a Turkish girl who I never saw again!)  

Anyway, this weekend we took our niece out for her birthday and she chose a Turkish restaurant in Hackney. Tad, on Mare Street to be precise.

I'm a big fan of this type of grilled, meaty food, and it afforded me the opportunity to check out the Howling Hops brewery's beer at the Cock Tavern beforehand, so it seemed an admirable choice...

BV London Pub of the Year - part two

Visiting lots of pubs and drinking pint after pint of beer can be gruelling work.

Why, oh why did I ever come up with the idea of the Ben Viveur London Pub of the Year? I must have been mad. Or just very, very thirsty.

Oh well, mustn't grumble. Here's the first batch of contenders (apart from the Craft Beer Company, which started this whole silly business, obviously)...

Broody Spaniards

So it was all too easy in the end.

Anyone expecting a closely-fought Euro 2012 final was disappointed as Spain romped to another Championship in record-breaking fashion. (Oh, and anybody Italian. They were probably disappointed too, obviously).

Pavement cafes: not just for the French!

If you're gripped by Espanomania, you could do a lot worse than head to Borough market where Cafe Brood turns a little corner of the thoroughfare into a veritiable Paella fiesta that's sure to sate your hunger for all things Spanish.

I can bang on for days about why I love the market and it's pubs and restaurants, but it really does seem like the one place in London where you really can enjoy any food or drink you'd ever want. Albeit sometimes at a price.

For the full, elongated Spanish Tapas experience, there's the classy (and fairly pricey) Brindisa restaurant on the corner of Southwark street, but this is quite simply street food at it's best. A less-sung hero, like Iker Casillas, that is quietly but widely acknowledged as being damn good at what they do.

Live and let Liver!

There are plenty of outraged chefs and gourmands in California right now.

If you happen to be in Hollywood or San Francisco and feel like a spot of foie gras tonight, you’re in for bitter disappointment: As of couple of days ago, it’s been banned throughout the state.

(Although this is America, the land of prohibition and prohibition-evasion, so you’ll probably be able to find some somewhere. If you look around hard enough. But you’d be breaking the law.)

I'm so strong I can stop you eating Foie Gras! Nyaah!

California is a big place – if it were a country in its own right, it would be one of the most populous and prosperous in the world – and that’s what makes this newsworthy, I guess.

The ban was actually made law way back in 2004 (well done, Arnie. You really showed your Libertarian credentials there…) and reportedly came about following sustained lobbying by controversial Animal Welfare group PETA – who, as radical vegans are highly unlikely to have ever tasted foie gras.

Ah, I think we’ve found the elephant in the dining room.

Surely there’s something not quite right when people who have never eaten the stuff get to be instrumental in banning it?

Who hates all the pies?

It's strange. By my reckoning I've only been to Manchester about four times in my life, and then generally only fleetingly. 

I'd never before had to spend a night in the city centre - until Tuesday this week, which just so happened to be the evening the riots kicked off there. What are the chances of that?!?

Mrs B-V and I had been watching Coventry City losing pathetically to Bury and were hoping to head back to Manchester city centre on the Metrolink to drown our sorrows, but the police in their infinite wisdom had decided to close the system down. 

Great.

Well done, chaps - while you're advising everyone to stay indoors, you close down transport systems so people who are already out and about can't get back to where they are staying?!? Really sensible, that.