Ragtag Giggagon

            People are expressing disbelief over the sudden death of Barbara Windsor, killed by an Islamist faction in the BBC canteen as she tried unsuccessfully to rescue Alan Titchmarsh, Len Goodman, Cheryl Tweedy-Cole, Adam Hart-Davis, Fearne Cotton and Sir Terry Wogan, among others, from a hostage crisis that escalated into a murder-suicide bombing late yesterday afternoon.             When close friend Kelly Brook was asked to comment, she claimed that the radicalisation of young Muslims was certainly a problem. Brook is shocked at the scale of the carnage. She admitted that only a fortnight ago she had been sharing a plate of lasagne with Windsor in the very dining hall where at least fifteen household names, and a further thirty well-known faces, yesterday lost their lives. The deaths occurred after an extremist group, who had been expected to appear on BBC’s Newsnight l...

“One hundred and sixty years ago, we were a broken land, Phytophthora, phytophthora, phytophthora infestans…” I just made those lines up, but phytophthora infestans is the name for the potato blight that wreaked havoc across the island of Ireland in the late 1840s. Given that the potato was the staple of the Irish peasant’s diet, the result was starvation and disease resulting in death for at least a million people. I’ve read somewhere that the kind of spud farmed in Ireland at the time was one of the most nutritious: Today’s taters won’t come close. It meant that the rural Irish diet was said to be better than that of the typical European city dweller’s, even though that diet was far more varied. There are gardeners today planting seeds of this type of potato in allotments, but you won’t find it in the supermarket or the fruit & veg store. Anyhoo, the Jeanie Johnston Famine Ship is a replica of a cargo vessel that delivered the Irish trans-Atlantic from their broken land to North...