Curry.........Curry........Curry.........Curry....

Some people will do anything for a tan and I’m no exception. Actually the weather in Delhi where I’m working for the British Council this week (they pay the school for me and I think it makes everyone happy!) is variable. And for most of the week I’ve been holed up in conferences and meetings. But Indian food is my favourite so it’s even been curry for breakfast. I wrote about food this week in the TES column below which I know some blog readers like me to quote. So here’s a snippet:

‘For food lovers and people watchers, the return of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in a double two-hour feast was a taster’s delight. As in the best formula-driven programmes, there is an anticipated plot. First our hero, the rugged Ramsay, face like a lunar landscape, rides into town to clean up local kitchens. His target? The re-cycled, re-heated and re-volting food served up in restaurants that don’t deserve the name.

So Mick Martin’s Bistro in Okehampton is caught out serving up vacuum-sealed, shelf-stored lamb shanks bought in from the Cash and Carry. Mick clearly has never watched Ramsay in action or he’d have avoided serving him the duck a l’orange made with orange squash. Meanwhile, in Sheffield, Justin’s Spanish place is more tasteless than tapas, more gloop than gastronome.

All this is just for starters. Next it’s onto the main course which the viewer knows will be heavily spiced and served with lashings of vitriolic sauce. This is the ‘Gordon as Shrink’ phase but without the psychiatrist’s chair. Instead, our hero goes into destruct mode, exposing the tensions and deep emotions in the kitchen relationships. You can’t learn this from a recipe book. His kitchen skewer probes deep into what makes these people tick. Message: you can only turn around a failing business if you make individuals face up to their shortcomings.

It’s brilliant television and at this point you may have to turn down the volume because the noise from the box reminds me of those playground fights you wonder how you will ever break up. To Justin’s list of ‘things I’ve done right,’ Ramsay screams: ‘It’s lost you the fucking business! It’s gone!’

Yes there are more F words in this programme than I’d care to count. In fact, the F word is sprinkled like pepper on every sentence: Fresh, fresh, FRESH! That’s the mission: fresh produce or die. And we see Justin’s partner stroking the so fresh it’s still alive, so local it lives just round the corner, deer that will soon become his hit venison pie.

Would it work in school? I’d love to introduce him to that awkward Year 9 group that have given up on us. Go on, Gordon, tell ‘em how it is. What’s that? You think we’ve got the recipe wrong? We need to chuck out boil-in-the bag lesson plans? But surely in schools it’s always the kids’ fault isn’t it? ‘

And certainly the food in Delhi is as fresh as it comes so no f word need.