Nicky Twigs and Toads💙🕷️🕸️

In 1998 the most trusted cook in Britain went on television to show the nation how to boil an egg, and sold 54 million extra eggs. Delia Smith had left school at 16 without a qualification. She had been a hairdresser and a washer-up. By the 1990s she had sold more cookery books than anyone in British history, and when she recommended a thing, the shops ran out of it. That autumn she began a new series called How to Cook. The first programme started at the very beginning. How to tell if an egg is fresh. How to boil one. How to fry one, in a little fat, basting the top. How to make an omelette, in butter, in a proper pan. The chefs were scornful. A grown woman, on the BBC, in prime time, explaining a boiled egg. One of them called it insulting. The public's verdict came through the tills. Egg sales across the country rose by 10%. A small firm in Lancashire that made a plain aluminium omelette pan had been selling 200 a year. Delia called it a little gem, and they sold 90,000 in 4 months. Now do the dates. Cookery had been taken off the school timetable in 1990. Eggs had been under suspicion since the cholesterol scare of the 1970s, and a government minister had frightened the country off them altogether in 1988. So by 1998 there was a generation that had never been taught to cook, and had been warned off the cheapest and most complete food in the kitchen. Millions of them were sitting at home, not knowing how long to boil it, and too embarrassed to ask. Delia never made a speech about any of that. She put the pan on and showed them.

A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in. It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot. - How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender - How to make stock from the bones - How to use up the cold joint on Monday - How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course. In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation. Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box. That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower. It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.

The free bottle of milk on every British school desk was put there by a 4ft 10 redhead from a Manchester slum, who was dead within 6 months of doing it. Ellen Wilkinson grew up in Ardwick in the 1890s, in a house with no bath, and caught every illness going. She got out on scholarships. By 1935 she was MP for Jarrow, a shipbuilding town where the yard had shut and 7 men in 10 had no work. She had seen what that did to the children. They were small, bow-legged and grey. In 1936 she walked with 200 of their fathers from Jarrow to London, nearly 300 miles, to hand in a petition. The Prime Minister would not see them. In 1945 she was made Minister of Education. She had one thing she wanted above the rest. The Treasury told her the country was bankrupt and it could not be afforded. In August 1946 a third of a pint of full cream milk became free for every schoolchild in Britain, every day, whatever their parents earned. That winter was the worst of the century. Her ministry had no coal. She worked in her overcoat with bronchitis, and on 6 February 1947 she was found dead in her flat, aged 55. She never saw a single class of those children grow up. They turned out the tallest and straightest generation the country had ever produced. If you drank it, warm, through a paper straw, you were her life's work.

Dog walkers who did not pick up after their pets have cost a New Forest farmer 18 of the 38 calves his herd was carrying. Tom Gould is a commoner, keeping cattle on the Forest under rights first written down 800 years ago. He scanned 38 cows in calf in March, turned them out onto Wilverley and Longslade for the summer, and when they came back in only half of them calved. Blood tests found every animal in the herd had been exposed to Neospora caninum. Some of the calves that did come were deformed. Neospora lives in a dog. It comes out in the faeces, sits in the grass, and gets eaten by a cow up to 6 months later. No vaccine exists and no treatment. An infected cow is infected for life, and she passes it down the female line to her heifer calves, so the loss runs past one year's calves and into the bloodline. Gould could not buy his way out either: New Forest stock has to be double tested for TB before it comes in, so a replacement heifer takes a season to get through the gate. The New Forest Dog Owners Group, 1,200 members, said it was the foxes. The Moredun Institute, which has been studying the parasite for 30 years, says the dog is the definitive host and it has found no link with foxes. The dog that carries it usually shows nothing. The owner who left it in the grass will never know he did, and he will walk the same path next Saturday with the same dog and the same bag in his pocket. That is the quiet half of the damage. Farm animals worth £1.95 million were injured or killed by dogs in Britain in 2025, up 10% on the year. NFU Mutual asked 1,407 dog owners about it in February. 57% let the dog off the lead in the countryside. 1 in 10 said it has no recall at all. 44% said it comes back some of the time. 72% do nothing to stop it chasing. Nearly two-thirds do not believe it could harm an animal. The law moved in March. Unlimited fines in place of the £1,000 cap that had stood since 1953, and the police can now swab a dog, seize it, and come through your door to do it. Not one person in any of this set out to hurt an animal, and 18 calves are dead anyway. Pick the mess up and put the lead on. It is the only request in British farming that costs nothing.