26th January 2012

To start with I have to make it clear that I CAN spell pheasant.

I also know some good recipes for pheasant and I enjoy eating pheasant prepared in various ways, my most recent recipe was a pheasant, parsnip and snap pea curry which was delicious.

It was a freezer, fridge special insofar as the ingredients presented themselves and I organised them into a supper dish using the slow cooker and finishing the curry with coconut milk.

But for some reason I decided to alert my facebook friends to both the recipe and the fact that earlier in the day I had an altercation with a pheasant on a narrow lane which resulted in damage to both the pheasant and the front bumper of my car, which now bears the scars where the trim around the fog lights has sprung away from the bumper.

In that facebook post I chose to spell pheasant as feasant.

This resulted in a number of responses one of which was quite remarkable.

'The only use of 'feasant' I know is Damage Feasant Torts, This is a corruption of Faisant Dommage and signifies 'doing damage'.

One local estate which we pass regularly has a hand written notice declaring SLOW, Pheasants on Road.

But there was no such notice along the lane where my Kamikaze pheasant chose to fly out of the hedgerow as though it was playing a pheasant version of the game chicken!

Sometimes it’s hard not to blink.

Mr Duncan Smith must have wished that the Bishop’s had blinked or that the Lord’s had blinked again when the next part of his Bill was also defeated.

Welfare reform is having a bad press, with the left wing papers welcomed the robust challenges from both the formal and the informal opposition and the right wing press apparently claiming that on the whole the population at large is in favour of welfare reform.

Both sides claim to be Christian and both sides are claiming the moral high ground, whilst invoking the spirit of Beveridge.

There must come a time when politicians are best advised to put their party ideologies to one side and explore what is meant by ‘the common good’.

It is an important idea that underpins the notion that we are all in this together.

Sadly of course we are patently not all in this together.

The divisions in society are deepening as the storm clouds grow more threatening and the risk of a double dip recession grows more likely.

Labour is the most convenient whipping boy and Ed Milliband carries the argument to the Prime Minister in PM’s Question Time but his scope for a  response is limited by the memory of his predecessors words about booms and busts.

In fact it is probably the case that both parties are complicit in the feasant dommage of the economy.

Banks spent more than they had and awarded themselves huge bonuses for their failure, it was a bravura performance on their part but one that we can see should have been constrained more by legislative interventions.

But if the jobs are not there, if the cuts limit the scope that businesses have for growth, if the Banks are not lending, if public services are shedding jobs and the private sector is not creating them then the welfare budget will take the strain.

I have commented previously that there are other industrial and financial models, mutualism and co-operation is high on my agenda and should be high on the coalitions agenda.

We need a radical and daring new politics to replace the trench warfare between Labour and Conservative that has dominated the post war years.

We cannot as another story on facebook has it, continue to raffle dead donkey’s.

In the present climate of gloom and doom there is only one dessert to follow roasted feasant and that is Eton Mess, because that is what we are currently in …………..