Author: James Lark

with Revd Ian Thompson
(recently elected Patron of FUD)

Och – deeeairrry productssss, eh? Wha’s the point o’ a warrrrm cup o’ milk, I say, wi’oot a dram o’ whisky or two to wassshhh it doon? Eh? Eh? We all love a wee bit o’ caek, but wheeerrr’s the joy in caek wi’oot beeerrrrr? If a wee laddie were tae ask me if I was inclined tae consoom cheese productsss, for instance, I’d be a-tellin’ he, “Och, wee gorgeous laddie, wheeer’s ya flagon, och aye?” and a-fillin of his tankard, metaphorical or otherwise I’ll a have-ye, tee hee hae ha hoo!

And that Atkins lassie – At-SINS more leik, in me oon humble opinion! She just spoots nonsense oot of herrr wee mouth, not that ye’ll get a lot o’ sense oot of Angela Tilby, meind yoo, and she’s less than wee if you noo what I mean, aye.

Bent leik drums, eh? Eh? till a’ their weel – swall’d kytes belyve; then auld deeeairrry productssss, maist like to rise, be thankit hums. Is there that owre his milk ragout? Or cheese wad straw a sov, or creeem caeks wad make her spew wi perfect scummer, looks down wi sneering, scornfu’ view on sic a dinner? Sic on ice-creeem? Wha? And hoo cairees anyhoo?

So – here’s tae us, wha’s like us, damn few, and they’re a’ deid – mair’s the pity!

Okay, this is genuinely brilliant: I am processing a project proposal to develop sniffer bees. Because they’re cheaper than dogs.

Give ’em the money, says I.

with Rabbi Lionel Blue

In a hedonistic age, it is perhaps unsurprising that dairy products are now seen with such frequency. Cream cakes are displayed on television adverts and in shop windows. Ice-creams are paraded on the top of vans. Milk is left on the very step on which we ascend into our own homes.

We have become acclimatised to dairy products. They are all around us, inviting us, tempting us. Perhaps we even have too many dairy products.

But have they brought us happiness?

Everybody is searching for happiness. Happiness is what we seek. A quest, a goal. A never-ending hunt for contentment, fulfilment.

And on one level, perhaps the dash of milk we allow ourselves in each mug of tea gives us a moment of pleasure and makes the tea taste nicer. Nobody denies that crackers taste less dry with a chunk of brie.

But we have not found in dairy products the fulfilling, permanent happiness that we perhaps want to expect. I recall the first time I allowed myself the indulgence of consuming a bowlful of profiteroles, when I was in my mid-40s. “Is that it?” I recall thinking, as I wiped away the last vestiges of cream from my sated lips.

It was only much later in life that I realised we only find the true potential in dairy products when we allow ourselves to digest as much as we ingest.

I have found, for example, that dairy products have played a vital part in keeping my strength up in what has been a rigorous a glittering stage career, particularly with regard to my skills as a tap-dancer. I could not have performed in the number of pantomimes I have managed to do, without some form of digestion where dairy products are concerned.

But ingestion is important too. I recall once on Give Us A Clue being asked to mime the film title Confessions of a Milkman. I responded to this challenge in the way that seemed most appropriate, by dropping my trousers and draining a glass of warm milk. How Sue Pollard interpreted this as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids I have never been sure; perhaps in a Biblical sense she saw milk as very much linked to honey.

We all seek our promised land. I believe, in being a tap-dancing panto-producing personality, I have at least attained a degree of alliteration.

But it is also worth bearing in mind that, whilst a Mini-Milk used to cost a mere ten pence, it is now as expensive as a Cornetto used to be. And it may be my imagination, but it seems that they are even more Mini than ever before.

with Anne Atkins

Shocking, isn’t it? That anybody could compare dairy products to incest, abortion, rape?

Yet that is exactly what the Bible challenges us to accept. Each day, as people pierce the tops of their milk bottles, just as Jesus’ side was pierced on the cross, homeless people who ought to know better huddle in pieces of newspaper relating news of war and containing pornographic images.

Fun? Yes, of course. And God knows, fun exists! We’ve all had fun. And fun, looked on as just fun, can be fun.

Healthy? No. It is a deadly poison which eats away at the heart of society. Like the snake which ate away at the heart of paradise.

There will be those who argue that dairy products contain calcium – “they must be natural”, they will say, “they are good for bones and teeth”. Indeed. Hungry words from a hungry, idolatrous world.

Yes, it may seem unfair and unjust to suggest that people who indulge in dairy products are somehow “unnatural”. Yes, it may seem “un-politically correct” to take the point of view that consumers of cheese and milk are cut off from God.

But this is the harsh reality of truth. The Bible is clear about one thing: God hates those who indulge in dairy products. “And ye shall go out at the breaches,” the book of Amos proclaims, “every cow at that which is before her.” Even more clearly, Exodus actually states that “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk”. The implications are plain.

Fortunately for those apparently addicted to the unwholesome and, eventually, life-endangering terrors of the dairy product lifestyle, my Atkins diet helps people give up all dairy products, and strives ultimately to enable people to give up food altogether in pursuit of a more spiritual lifestyle.

It may seem an impossible, even distasteful ideology to impose on a society. But it is not impossible, for as the Bible makes clear, all things are possible. Difficult? Yes. Challenging? Yes.

But just as murder and starvation and even moreso the wicked perverted evils of homosexuality pose a challenge to which we need to respond, so do dairy products. It is time to take away the dairy products from the world.

Not unlike the lamb who came to take away the sins of the world…

With the Revd Angela Tilby

In these times, we are perhaps closer than we like to admit to the desert fathers and mothers who have, intrinsically and hermeneutically, taken from the very cud of the bovine stain a source of what flows, as it were, in the overused but nevertheless still relevant in a contemporary society for which calcium is a required part of everybody who has bones’ diet terminology referring to it thus as, if it may be somehow undressed in a single and necessarily inadequate word, milk. People simply dislike the assumption that they have inherited a controlling institution of dairies and milk-floats which emphasises dairy products and their power over human beings. It is not obviously good news that the only value I have is the value I acquire by pouring a little half-fat milk on my cereal every morning, though it is true that even in a compunction where insights have led to a general suspicion of full-cream products, there are those who have few reservations about the putting on of full-cream milk, even when a cereal such as coco-pops are concerned (they are so chocolatey that they make the milk turn brown).

This liberation of the self, a platonic ascetic in which Augustine discovered the original innocence which embodied his lifelong search for Christian spirituality, can also be a snare, and could easily turn into a narcissistic fixation on the self. Thus we are left with a fundamental dilemma, which is far more aggressive and complex than the misleadingly simple contemporary question “one pint or two?”

People who thirst must make space for milk; the Augustinian guilt hitherto a fundamental part of the dairy product model is no longer the most fruitful way for most individuals to ensure their bones are strong. There is a bovine image within all of us, but it is often only discovered through a detailed and dispassionate examination of how much we have actually colluded with what we put in our tea, what we put on our Weetabix, where cheese, yoghurt, fromage-frais and ice-creams are really all derived from. Accepting the discipline of the dairy product enables us to move towards a way of life where we are not simply driven to and fro by our instincts, drives and even blood sugar levels. It is the beginning of dietary stability. It is, paradoxically, the putting on of milk which actually leads to the emergence of that spontaneous self which is so vividly portrayed in the iconography of the milkman, who is surely a symbol of the very self itself.

I was in London yesterday and Jonathan Pryce walked past me.

He pretended not to recognise me so I pretended not to recognise him, and we went our separate ways.

I am increasingly upset by the work that I am doing in the monotonous black hole that is the East of England Development Agency. I have already ranted at length about the morality of the Government funding anti-aging skin cream. I have attempted to give some idea of the frustration of being surrounded by conversations about wheelie bins and babies (I own neither a wheelie bin nor a baby). And I have moaned about companies with wince-inducing names such as Incentivated, Immunoporation and AcroKool.

What do companies think they’re playing at? Is anybody expecting to be taken seriously with a name like Park Tonks Ltd, Spine-issimus, or Cytofluidix? The knowingly clever punning names are the worst, things like Surgi-Call, Bee Inspired (help), or any number of plays on the location of Cambridgeshire, my current least favourite being Cambustion.

Some companies have gone for a trendy, no-nonsense, 21st century feel: A Recipe for Success Ltd (oh, the irony), or the increasingly overused internet referencing found in the likes of Brochuresplease.com Ltd (notformethanksyouwankers.co.uk).

Then there’s just the plain bizarre: what, for example, does a company called The Wavy-Haired Reader Ltd do? Produce books of short stories for people with difficult hair? And my current favourite company title of all time, Coolanalgesia Ltd – which I can only imagine is manufacturing a funky new sexual disease.

But it just gets worse. It all gets worse. I am now wading through the description of a project that has been granted funding called – wait for it – Pinky. Pinky is the kind of project title you might expect a rather nauseating six-year-old girl to come up with. How worrying, then, that the project description reads like it has been put together by a six-year-old girl. A six-year-old girl with a somewhat loose grasp of English grammar for somebody of her age.

It gets worse even than that. Pinky, you see, is a project to “create the development of a dye for fingers and toenails”. (What does she mean – “create the development”? Does she really intend to produce a dye for use on whole fingers???)

But this is an important area for Government funding. You see, “the problem with existing nail polish is that they (sic) are very vulnerable to chipping, frequently causing those wearers (she doesn’t actually specify which wearers) considerable consternation by doing so shortly before an important social or business function.” So you can see how jolly important this is. Just imagine the distress experienced every day by people who are forced to turn up to important social or business functions with chipped toenails. How bloody awful for them.

The six-year-old girl in charge of operations informs us that “the original idea was conceived nearly ten years ago by myself”. Which means that she can’t be six after all. Looking at her project description, I can only conclude that she is a simpleton.

Perhaps that is why she has been awarded funding. It is, after all, an important aspect of equal opportunities to ensure that even simpletons have a chance in this brave new world. Or maybe it was also a simpleton who decided that this project warranted nearly £10,000 of Government money.

That is correct. Nearly £10,000. To ensure that the terrible tragedy of chipped nail varnish is never allowed to happen again. Certainly I can think of few things as deserving of Government funding – like getting my arse waxed, for instance.

Maybe I’ll put a project proposal together. I could call it Smoothanaljamesia.com Ltd.