Roadkill Chef makes an offer Miliband can't refuse
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Your support makes all the difference.* The Roadkill Chef - or Fergus Drennan, as he was christened - has finally received the culinary award his carrion cuisine deserves.
No, not a Michelin star, although it cannot be long before inspectors visit the Kentish woodlands to forage for berries, mushrooms and assorted carcasses. The wild food collector, who only eats meat from animals he finds along roadways, has won the "Ethical Cuisine" gong from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "Roadkill is not factory farmed or pumped full of antibiotics," Drennan says.
Peta comments that it is "no more disgusting than consuming the decaying flesh of factory farmed animals who spent their short lives mired in their own waste and whose flesh could be riddled with deadly bacteria." The charity adds: "If you must consume meat, the only ethical way to do it is to scrape it off the road." After you!
Anyway, The Roadkill Chef has made an intriguing offer to our Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband (who until Monday refused, to farmers' irritation, to say if he ate meat): a day foraging in the woods followed by seagull stroganoff, or similar bumper fodder.
"I'd obviously be pleased if he's interested," Drennan tells me. "On cycling trips you normally find one or two pheasants and the same number of squirrels. The strange thing with squirrels is that they are rarely completely squashed by cars.
"You just chop it up and put it in the ravioli with everything else."
David Miliband was too busy yesterday to accept or decline the kind invitation.
More soon.
* There was once a time when Roger Daltrey's pre-stage tipple was a bottle of something cold, clear and over 40 per cent proof. These days, The Who's frontman prefers a softer beverage.
Speaking on Christian O'Connell's Virgin Radio breakfast show yesterday about the contents of the band's "rider" for a forthcoming Teenage Cancer Trust gig, Daltrey said: "It's things like Kombucha and anything to keep you going."
Kombucha appears to be a tea, a "sparkling Himalayan tonic" which many tree-hugging enthusiasts believe can extend life.
As Pandora mentioned in October, Daltrey's bandmate Pete Townshend now gets his mind-expanding kicks from washing underpants and socks in the tour bus kitchen sink. Daltrey, of course, second-jobs as a gentleman trout farmer in Hampshire.
Rock on!
* Ken Livingstone has worked himself into a fine rage about criticism of his jetset lifestyle. Last weekend he flew to Davos for an environment-saving summit; in November it was a cloak-and-dagger trip to Cuba; last year it was China and the US.
Yesterday Ken flew to Miami, which this weekend hosts American football's Super Bowl - a necessary evil, he says, in bringing an American football match to Wembley or Twickenham this autumn.
A mole overheard him the other day: "Of course I can't do it by videolink. That's ridiculous. Don't they realise how much investment I've brought to London, the thousands of jobs created?"
I suspect that the sight of Livingstone being pursued by "The Fridge" - the 6ft 2, 320lb former American footballer - would mollify detractors.
* Ruth Kelly's prickly relationship with the gay lobby is becoming a tad personal. The Catholic Secretary of State for Communities - the minister responsible for equality - has been a target for gay rights campaigners ever since she refused to say whether or not she thought that homosexuality was a sin. Then last week she was slap-bang in the middle of the Cabinet's gay adoption row.
Gay affairs website Pink News has upped the ante by claiming in an article about Kelly that she is 44 - a grave insult, since Kelly insists she's a supple 38. "Read into it what you will!" laughs a Pink News source.
Says a Labour official in Bolton, where Kelly is MP: "Ruth appears to have aged a bit but, come on, she's had a horrible few weeks. She really is 38."
* William Hague as a boiled egg, Michael Howard as Dracula and John Major resplendent in the notorious Y-fronts tucked into his pants that came to symbolise his political impotence. Just a few of the delights on offer at the Political Cartoon Society exhibition of Tory Party leader caricatures, which opened on Wednesday night.
"I can reveal..." said the former chancellor Lord Lamont, at the launch, "that I am one of the few people to have seen John Major's underpants. It happened in his hotel bedroom when he was talking to Bill Clinton."
Lamont did not divulge what he was doing in Major's bedroom at the time, whether Clinton was on the telephone or there in person, or what either of them were wearing.
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