Who is really to blame for this kind of behaviour?
There has been something artificially over-heated about the international reaction to the video of four American soldiers urinating on the bodies of their dead Taliban enemies in Afghanistan. It was, of course, a fairly disgusting thing to do. But all the breast-beating about how the men’s “egregious inhumanity” had brought “disgrace to their armed forces” and “dishonour to their nation” had something of bluster about it. How could anybody do such a thing, asked people who had never been to war, heard their wounded friends scream or seen them die, blown to pieces, before their very eyes.
There may yet be demonstrations and deadly riots around the world in protest. But I suspect not. This is no Abu Ghraib, for the scenes of degraded torture in that Iraqi prison were inflicted upon the living rather than the dead. But what the two have in common is that both have exposed a systematic pattern of abuse in a culture which had been nurtured or authorised at higher levels.
The Taliban, for all their perfunctory condemnation, have announced that the video will not affect the process of political negotiating that has begun in Afghanistan. As part of a deal to bring a modicum of stability in that country ahead of the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2014 Washington has offered to allow them to open a political office in Qatar. They are far more concerned about that than the desecration of three dead bodies. They and their al-Qa’ida allies are, after all, happy enough to desecrate living bodies, stoning to death young women who have had the ill-fortune to be raped or cutting the throats of hostages and filming it for the internet.
Bad things happen in war. When men have been under extreme fire, or seen their best friend die, anger and hatred flow freely. Enemies are dehumanised. Contempt for the other is a battlefield weapon. Young soldiers – and nearly 40 percent of the US Marine Corps below the age of 22 – are prone to callow as well as gallows humour. Some of them do stupid things. With a total of 90,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the real wonder is that there haven’t been more videos like this. Our soldiers did worse things in the Second World War. They just weren’t able to video it and stick it on YouTube.
FollowHating chavs is also a form of prejudice
When I was at university in Leeds in the early Seventies a black man called David Oluwale was for several years the butt of repeated racist attacks by two of the city’s policemen. The homeless roughsleeper – who had a history of mental illness which began after the first police beatings – was routinely sought out and hit, kicked, urinated upon and mocked as a “lame darkie” by a police sergeant and an inspector. On the charge sheet, when they arrested him, they wrote “Nationality: Wog”. After Oluwale, who was known to locals as Smiling David, was found dead in the River Aire the two officers were charged with manslaughter, and though that charge was dismissed, they were found guilty of assault and jailed.
Certainly things have come a long way since the days of such overt racism, though a defender of the English judicial system might point out that even in 1971 it put the guilty men behind bars. But forgive me if I don’t join the cosy consensus about how the conviction of the loutish murderers of Stephen Lawrence is some kind of watershed in British race relations.
The received wisdom is that the way white Britain empathised with a black family’s suffering changed the way the nation thought about racism. It changed politics, society and the police. I’m not so sure. There were almost 40,000 race hate crimes recorded in the UK in 2010. Since Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed while waiting innocently for a bus at least 96 people have been murdered, the Institute of Race Relations says, in cases where racial hatred was either proven or suspected. “Racism and racist attacks are still happening in this country,” Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, said after her son’s killers were found guilty of murder. “The police should not use my son’s name to say that we can move on.”
There is a faultline here, but it is not race. Polite society has never cared much about members of the so-called underworld killing one another. Attitudes which stretch back to the gangland wars over which the infamous Kray Brothers presided, seemingly untouchable, in the Sixties, obtain still when “black on black” executions occur today among drug dealers in Moss Side, Toxteth or Brixton. If those kind of people kill one another so much the better, is the unspoken compact. And the disparagement extends far beyond murder down to the daily lives of the Shameless class with their won’t work, feckless, tasteless, fast-food culture. Let them live like that, polite society sneers, so long as they stay on their sink estates.
Prison reform isn’t just for prisoners
Early on in the Bishop of Liverpool’s radio series on the state of the nation’s prisons he is approached by a prisoner on remand asking for a blessing ahead of his sentencing. The Rt Rev James Jones offers a revealing response. He says: “Lord Jesus, bless X as he comes before the court. We pray there may be justice and mercy and ask that you help him to turn over new leaf and for his life to go better for him and his family. Amen. God bless you”.
There’s a lot going on in that prayer. It encompasses many of the key components of what we expect from a criminal justice system: justice, mercy, amendment and rehabilitation. “It was just off the cuff,” the bishop told me in an unpublished part of an interview I did with him on the series for the Radio Times. “But it recognises the element of desert and of the punishment to come and yet it also points him in the direction of making his life better, and that of those around him.”
The three-part series, which began this week on Radio 4, and is on BBC Listen Again, is called The Bishop and the Prisoner. In it the presenter uses his position as Anglican bishop for prisons to gain unusual broadcasting access to record the voices of those who are least often heard in the national debate about prisons – the prisoners themselves.
They do not always say what you would expect. Going in and out of prison is just a way of life for many people, they say. You only resolve to go straight when you get old or tired. “My heart’s not in it any more,” one old lag says, explaining why he has determined not to return to jail. Interestingly their bleak and pessimistic view of humanity is shared by right-wingers who would like to see more people put in prison (despite the fact that our jails contain more inmates than ever before) and want to see prisons made considerably more unpleasant places as an added deterrent.
There is something shocking about hearing a bishop use the f-word. But Rt Rev James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, puts it to good use when he intones a high-minded notice about re-education and rehabilitation in Britain’s jails – and then reads out the obscene comment some inmate has scrawled on the bottom. It underscores the degree of alienation between polite society and those we lock up, whose numbers are now at their highest level ever.
In a three-part series for Radio 4, The Bishop and the Prisoner, he has been given an unusual degree of access in three jails – Liverpool, High Down in Surrey and Forest Bank in Greater Manchester – and talks to prison staff, politicians but also to prisoners whose voices are rarely heard on radio. But those who might expect the Anglican Bishop for Prisons to put forgiveness before punishment may be surprised at his willingness to ask hard questions.
The programme begins with a montage of political mantras: “prison works”, “tough on crime” and “we need to understand less and condemn more”. But he is clear that most of those inside have “done something wrong for which they need to be punished, both in their own interests and those of society”. So prison works? “To a degree. It punishes and it protects the rest of society from those who are locked up.”
He then meets political pundits David Green and Peter Hitchens who suggest that we need to lock up even more people and make prisons much more unpleasant places so that inmates will get tired of being sent there. Intriguingly there is tangential support for this view from several recidivist prisoners who have finally resolved to go straight. “You get sick and tired of it, in and out, in and out, in and out,” says one. “My heart’s not in it any more,” adds another. The place is “full of criminals,” a third says, with mock indignation.
The Syrians have lost their fear. Is it time for a no-fly zone?
When President Assad finally falls in Syria will he be shot like Gaddafi in Libya, or put on trial like Mubarak in Egypt, or flee to Saudi like Ben Ali in Tunisia?
On Friday, for the first time, the protests in Syria reached the capital Damascus. The demonstrators on the streets of that nation swelled from tens of thousands to a hundred thousand and more. Protestors have seized the opportunity to show newly-arrived observers from the Arab League the intensity of the anger against the regime of President Assad, which has now killed around 5,000 of its citizens in its unyielding crackdown on dissent.
Mr Assad’s pledge – to implement a peace initiative involving an end to violence, troops pulled off the streets and political prisoners freed – looks utterly worthless. Indeed the violence has got worse since the Arab peace monitors began their mission on Tuesday.
So is it time for the Nato planes which are so newly returned from Libya to begin enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria? Not yet. The protestors in the capital’s suburbs do not offer the only pressure. Syria has been unprecedentedly suspended from the Arab League. The King of Jordan has bluntly told Assad to step down. Turkey, hitherto an important ally and trading partner, has threatened to cut off the nation’s electricity. The EU has moved to extend sanctions against Assad’s inner circle. In Washington there is talk of increasing support for the Syrian opposition. Even China may not resist sanctions at the UN Security Council in January when the Arab League monitors file their report. Assad’s departure is now a question of “when not if” .
Yet it could be some little time still before that happens. Russia is adamant in its backing of Assad. Last year 10 per cent of Moscow’s global arm sales were to Damascus. Russia’s total investment in the Syrian economy tops $19bn. But that will hold off the inevitable only for so long.
A barrier of fear has been broken in a critical mass of ordinary Syrians, as their increased boldness on the streets now shows. Defections from the Syrian army are now said to exceed 10,000. The Palestinian faction Hamas has withdrawn many of its lower-level officials from its headquarters in Damascus.
The giant card behind the sofa says Baby’s First Christmas. But the parents of six-month-old Ellie Taylor – who lies, eyes sparkling, with a smile of sheer joy spreading across her little face – know all too well that, in their case, this is all too likely to be their baby’s last Christmas.
Ellie seemed healthy enough when she was born. There were some complications with the birth, not least that a forceps delivery damaged her shoulder inducing a paralysis called erbs palsy. But, at first, everything seemed well, thought her mum, Yasmin, who had just finished three years at university, training to be a mental health nurse. She had even begun to think ahead to when she might return to do the odd shift in the profession for which she had just qualified.
But after a few weeks her partner Dale, a mechanic at the BMW garage in Salisbury where the couple live, observed that the baby seemed to be moving a little less. “She wasn’t kicking so much when I changed her nappy,” he recalls. “It thought she was just getting more relaxed, but my parents said something was not quite right”.
The couple, both just 22-years-old, took Ellie to see the health visitor. “She looked really worried and called the doctor in right away,” Yasmin says of a moment that is burned into her memory. “We thought it was something to do with the broken collar bone; that some nerves were trapped or something.” But the GP sent them to the local hospital. “The paediatrician there did a ‘floppy baby’ test. He placed her tummy on the palm of his hand. She didn’t attempt to hold her head or legs up.”
He wanted more tests done, says Dale, “but he wouldn’t tell us what he was testing for. He didn’t seem bothered about her shoulder. So we went back the next day with my Dad”. This time the paediatrician sent them immediately to see a consultant neurologist in Southampton. He told them the baby had spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
SMA is a disease in which nerve cells in the spinal cord die off. Muscles become gradually weaker. Ellie had SMA1, the most severe type. “She’ll never sit up,” says Yasmin. “It comes from a mutation of a gene called the SMN gene,” adds her husband. “One in 40 people are carriers. Yaz and I both are, as it turns out. The consultant said he gives Ellie up to a year to live.”
War is messy, but peace is demanding
It is a full eight years since George Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner and pronounced that the United States and its allies had prevailed in Iraq. In fact more soldiers and civilians died there after he spoke than had perished in the massive “shock and awe” operation before. But the laughter rang no less hollow last week when the stars and stripes was finally lowered in Baghdad and Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, averred that the US left behind it a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq”.
Wars start neatly enough, but ending them is a messier business, as Afghanistan now shows. British and American forces are due to pull out of that country by 2014. When they do, a new report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies suggests, they will leave behind them a country where a “benign security environment” is unlikely to be achieved before 2020 at the earliest – and where parts of the country will never be brought fully under control.
We are in Afghanistan, we are told, to fight al-Qa’ida and keep the streets of Britain safe. That may have been true in 2001, or 2003, but is it now? When Osama bin Laden was finally hunted down he was not being protected by the Afghan Taliban but by our ambiguous ally Pakistan. Few suppose that Afghanistan is now a major base for al-Qa’ida’s terrorist operations.
A tacit consensus has arisen that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. The guerillas of Pashtun always triumph in the end, we are told – though Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan might beg to differ. There is an unspoken acknowledgement that our young soldiers are dying in a refractory cause. Yet the real problem is that success in Afghanistan was only possible with a three-pronged military, political and economic strategy. The tragedy is that the first has been pursued without due emphasis on the other two legs – without which the stool will not stand.
Climate change – what’s your excuse?
I was putting the rubbish out the other day. Beside the green bin and the grey one I had a tall half-broken plastic Batman tower that been discarded in a seasonal room-tidy. As I picked it up to put it in the bin a man sped by on a bike – it had to be a bike, of course – and shouted at me: “Citizen of Planet Earth, 2011.”
I was duly stung. I like to think I do my bit for the planet, sorting into the four recycling bins and taking the batteries and fluorescent tubes to the appropriate recycling centre. But to see ourselves as others see us….
The same thing, writ large, has been true of the wider world at the climate change summit in Durban. Outside eyes have been turned upon the painfully ponderous attempts by world leaders to find an international agreement on how to combat climate change. Locals, meantime, have been more exercised by their mega-bucks bid to attract Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May to chose their city to be home to the Top Gear festival for the next three years. There’s the rub. We want to save the planet but we want the thrill of fast cars and their high-octane greenhouse gas emissions.
A jaded campaigner at the summit, Peg Putt of the Ecosystems Climate Alliance, put it thus: “Countries want to turn up and say stuff that sounds all right when you skip across the surface of it, that plays well to an uninformed audience at home. But they’re in no way going to take on vested interests or change direction to actually do anything real”.
This is the real climate change conundrum. If the science is so convincing that humans are melting the ice, expanding the desert, acidifying the oceans and making sea-levels rise inexorably why is everyone dragging their feet about doing something? And repeatedly so – remember the farce of the previous eco-summit at Copenhagen in 2009 when Hopenhagen slid inexorably into Hopelesshagen, disappointment and failure.
War on Iran has begun. And it is madness
One of the more embarrassing features of the internet is that from time to time I find myself confused with a namesake. Paul E Vallely is not me. He is a retired US major general who is now the senior military analyst for Rupert Murdoch’s outrageously right-wing Fox News. Among other things he wants to bomb Iran, which is something I decidedly do not want to do.
There is something deeply disquieting about the deterioration in relationships between the West and Iran in recent days. William Hague was well within diplomatic protocol to expel all Iran’s diplomats from Britain after a mob sacked the British embassy in Tehran. But what is proper is not always wise.
Paranoia has long characterised Anglo-Iranian relations. An old Persian proverb warns: “If you trip over a stone in the road, it was put there by an Englishman”. British memories may stretch back to 1989 when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie for his blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. But Persian memories are longer still.
It was MI6, along with the CIA, who orchestrated the overthrow in 1953 of the popular democratically-elected secular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq who had brought about major social reforms but who had had the temerity to nationalise the petroleum company which became BP. Through the 1960s and 70s Britain backed the Shah of Iran, a man whose regime rested on secret police and torture but who was seen as a plausible counterweight to Soviet influence in the Middle East.
And so it continued. Britain consistently backed the wrong leader. We favoured Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war. We derided the reactionary mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so much that when he was elected President another Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei talked about the British as “the most evil” of diplomats. In 2009 the BBC World Service Persian channel so annoyed Tehran that anyone interviewed on it was harassed or arrested. During the post-election protests that year a member of the British embassy’s Iranian staff was jailed. For the past year Iran has had no ambassador in London, without any explanation given for the vacancy.
Why I am proud to be a British journalist
I got a message from a 94 year old nun last week. She was so sorry, she said, that I was a journalist, but she was praying for me. It has not been a good week to be a scribbler. The Leveson inquiry has offered up a long catalogue of newspaper infamy. So it may seem odd to have responded that, this week of all weeks, I still feel proud to be a journalist.
There has been much to bear. The low point was, of course, the heart-rending cry “She’s alive!” from the mother of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, who had been given false hope when messages from the teenager’s mobile phone were deleted by some hacking journalist. The mother’s eyes sparked feverishly as she recounted the moment to the inquiry.
But there was also the brittle exhaustion of Kate McCann as the inquiry heard example after example of newspapers’ casual disregard for the truth after her three-year-old daughter Madeleine went missing in Portugal. Among the calumnies was one that the parents had sold their daughter into slavery to pay off family debts.
On it went. A 15-year-old boy took his own life after cavalier press lies that his murdered sister had been a bully. The business adviser of the supermodel Elle Macpherson went into a psychiatric facility after being accused of leaking to the press when the model’s phone was actually being hacked. The actress Sienna Miller accused her own mother of betrayal when the true culprits were reporters working for Rupert Murdoch.
Europe is facing a fate worse than debt
This could be the worst crisis Greece has ever known, an over-excited reporter on the BBC opined the other day. There speaks a man without a history degree, riposted the broadcaster and historian Dan Snow. But you don’t have to go back to the time when Alexander of Macedon massacred the Sacred Band of Thebans to find something worse. You could try 21 April 1967 when, on the eve of a general election, a group of right-wing army officers seized power in a coup d’etat after placing tanks in strategic positions around Athens and arresting top politicians and pretty much anyone they suspected might object.
There is, of course, something dramatic about a military coup and tanks on the street. But is it any more radical than what we might call the “market coup” which has suspended, if not overthrown, democracy in Greece in recent days? And not just Greece. In Italy too elected leaders have been replaced by rulers at the behest of the overheated financial markets. In the case of Italy no-one has objected too much because the man who has been replaced was a sleazy, manipulative, self-serving buffoon. But the change is one which ought to worry us.
There was general horror when the outgoing Greek prime minister George Papandreou announced he would hold a referendum to allow the people to endorse or reject the austerity package deal to save their country from bankruptcy. Citizens could not express their opinion, it was said, because there was no time: falling stock markets and rising bond interest rates would bust Greek banks before the vote could take place. Yet Papandreou, in his cack-handed way, was raising a question which everyone was anxious to avoid in the scrambling the eurozone crisis: which is more important economics or politics, capitalism or democracy?
The answer is clear. Political power in Europe has passed to a tiny elite of technocrats. Two days after the economist Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece another technocrat, Mario Monti, was asked to lead a new unity government in Italy.
The Manchester Egg – the world has been waiting
Would it taste as I remembered? It had been the most exciting gastronomic experience I had had in months. But it had been enveloped in an alcohol-induced memory haze. Now here I was in the thin light of a cold wintry afternoon, about to do it again, only cold sober.
A fortnight before I had emerged from a branch of Livebait were I had been presented with the most insipid platter of fruit de mer I’ve ever had in my life. To make matters worse the service had been so execrably slow that four of us had consumed a bottle of champagne and three bottles of Picpoul de Pinet before the main course arrived. We emerged from the restaurant hungry and ebriose.
Across the road Albert Square was filled with the tents and stalls of the Manchester Food and Drink Festival. We entered in search of sustenance and discovered that one stall seemed particularly popular. The Manchester Egg, its banner proclaimed. There we picked up what looked like Scotch Eggs. But this was an entirely different beast from its cold Caledonian cousin which is usually served fridge-chilled.
The Manchester Egg was still hot, fresh from the deep-fat fryer. When you bit into it warm meaty juices trickled into the mouth with a dark richness. A heady aromatic smell met the nostrils before an unexpected piquancy hit the back of the mouth, cutting the richness of the pale yellow yolk. The rare-breed sausage meat surrounding the egg had been mixed with Bury black pudding imparting a fulsome richness. And the egg at the centre was not hard-boiled but pickled – creating a long lingering balance between the tastes of warm oozing meat juices, creamy yolk and the tartness of a mild vinegar.
But perhaps it was just me that had been pickled.
So two weeks on, here I was, in the Castle, a traditional Victorian brown boozer in the city’s bohemian northern quarter to see if the experience could be replicated. It was here that the Manchester Egg had been invented by an amateur chef named Ben Holden during his lunchbreak from his work as a web designer.
Holden, an innovative character, had long developed the habit of crunching up the remnants of his salt ’n vinegar crisps into a rough powder and dipping a pickled egg into them. “I enjoyed the contrast between the savoury crunch and the smoothness of the egg white,” he recalls.
But on the day in question he also ordered a Scotch Egg from the pub’s pie warmer. The combination set him thinking. He went home that night determined to fuse the tastes. After several experiments he fell into conversation with another Castle regular, Robert Owen Brown, the chef at the Mark Addy gastropub, who has a fondness for all things offal. He suggested mixing black pudding in with the sausage.
Over the next three months Holden experimented, making 30 or 40 eggs every Thursday evening and putting them in the Castle pie warmer on Friday lunchtimes. They became a local sensation. People came from miles to try them with a glass of Old Tom, the dark ale from the Stockport brewer Robinsons which was voted best beer at the 2009 World Beer Awards. Often they would sell out in half an hour.
Each week he tried different spices, varying proportions of sausage and black pudding and a range of crumbs on the casing. He settled on a 6:4 ratio of sausage to pigs’ blood, Japanese panko breacrumbs and a blend of spices with paprika, salt, pepper and two secret ingredients. The recipe was finalised by the Manchester Food and Drink Festival which went wild for the eponymous egg.
“We sold 2,500 in 4 days,” he says. “I was drafting friends in but we still couldn’t make them fast enough. Everybody wanted them from young kids to old ladies. It has become a gateway to black pudding and pickled egg for people who say they didn’t like either of them. We even turned three vegetarians.”
But would it taste as good to me as it did that night when it was aided by the world’s two best relishes, alcohol and hunger?
Up in the Castle’s kitchen Holden’s business svengali and amateur sous-chef, Rob Wales, is preparing the eggs. He’s in a bit of a flap because the butchers, the esteemed W H Frost of Chorlton, have mixed the sausage and pudding by hand instead of mincing them together as they usually do.
But Holden is unflummoxed, remixing the meats by hand, adding the spices and forming the case around the pickled egg before dropping them into simmering oil. “The oil is the healthy bit, we use sunflower,” he says, archly. Your average supermarket Scotch egg contains a massively calorific 21 grams of fat – nearly one fifth of an adult man’s daily recommended intake.
When they are cooked and cut the meat casing looks attractively mottled but Holden is not happy. “It won’t taste the same, or look right in the photographs,” he says. He has sent off to Frosts for the correct mix. When it arrives he gives it to Rob Wales to make the proper version while he goes down to meet Rufus Carter, the managing director of Patchwork Paté, which makes Old Tom Chutney with the celebrated Robinson’s ale. Holden is hoping he will develop a special chutney for the Egg, with a base of caramelised red onions spiked with the city’s native red-fruit beverage, Vimto.
As they speak Rob Wales enters with Eggs made from the correct mix. He has made them the size of cricket balls. They look like bull’s testicles. Holden, the perfectionist, goes upstairs for third attempt.
But we have waited long enough. Rufus and I urge Rob on to cut open his creations. There is a surprising but delicious crunch as he cuts through the panko. We each take a slice.
“Oh!” cries Rufus Carter before falling silent as he chews, his eyes closed. “This is the best new taste I have had in years,” he concludes. “The cut, the crunch, the lift, the piquancy. The balance. And it lingers in the mouth. This tastes better than it has the right to with such a mix of ingredients.”
He is right. It is warm and peppery, rich and sharp, moist and has a huge depth of flavour. My memory had not lied.
It would go well with Old Tom but also with a Gewürztraminer, a St Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, a Vouvray, a St Emillion or a Pomerol. “Or a champagne,” cries Rufus. “This is extraordinary, it is like the funky love child of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty,” he adds, though he might have chosen a Mancunian musical maverick, of whom there are plenty.
Manchester has taken the Egg to its heart – and has done so across the board. It is on sale at Manchester City’s ground, sold out before a crowd of United supporters and has been embraced by FC United, the breakaway club formed by diehard fans when the Glazers took over at Old Trafford.
Four local restaurants are making it under the licence of Mr Holden’s Famous Manchester Egg. There are plans for an Egg Van to transport the product round the region and a mobile fryer to serve it at sporting venues, festivals and pop concerts. Holden’s Twitter account has rapidly acquired 2,000+ followers.
Britain has a pantheon of genuinely original regional dishes: the Yorkshire pudding, Cornish pasty, Cumberland sausage, Lancashire hotpot and Bakewell tart. In that firmament the Manchester Egg, I predict, will take a deserved place.
Mr Holden’s Manchester Egg Recipe (makes 5)
Ingredients:
300g premium sausage meat
200g Bury black pudding
5 free-range pickled eggs (ideally pickle your own, but shop bought work just fine)
Japanese Panko breadcrumbs (from the Chinese supermarket or easily ordered online)
Salt + Pepper
Beaten egg
Vegetable oil for frying
Method:
Get the Bury black pudding and premium sausage meat and remove skin. Mix them together 60-40 (as per measurements above) with your hands (you have to boil the black pudding for a minute to soften it up, alternatively ask your friendly local butcher to grind them together for you). Then wrap it around a pickled egg.
I find Pandora’s is the best pickled egg brand you can get from the supermarket. The right amount of mix is around 100g per egg.
You then roll it into a perfect ball around the egg. The best technique for this is to flatten the mix into to a patty about 12cm in diameter and place the egg in the middle, then fold it up around the egg. You then dip into the egg mix and roll in the crumb, pressing down to make sure as much crumb is coating the egg as possible, for extra crunch try double dipping in egg and crumb for a really substantial bite.
Deep fry at 170C for 7- 8 minutes and give it a moment or two to cool before tucking in.
Easy peasy, I also put a secret blend of my own Mr. Holden’s spice mix into the crumb, I won’t tell you that, but have an experiment with spicing it up a bit, you can’t go too wrong by just making sure the crumb has a good amount of top quality sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper added.
