Author Archives: gerard oosterman

The Restless Booksearcher (Final)

01 Friday Jul 2011

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After the swap to the maroon coloured book ‘Riders of the Chariot’ he took up her offer of the shower at the back but first went to the butchers for some bones for Bluey. This time it was a dishevelled male that served him. He was dressed in shorts and grimy singlet. Just some bones and lamb chops, he asked. There were no books or shelving. Carcases were dangling from hooks at the back wall and a compressor was busily trying to keep the room cool.  The book searcher asked where the nearest town was, somewhere with a market, he said. Oodnadatta, 180 miles from here, the butcher answered. Take plenty of water, but you might take a ride on the cattle road-train, he advised.  I have got some water and food from the shop up the road, the book searcher said. Taking a shower first? The butcher smiled back, with just a hint of something more, but left untold. 

He got back, gave the bones to Bluey who had patiently waited confidently that his boss would not forget. Our wanderer, now satisfied with yet another book but still unwashed went to the back of the shop for his shower. He got undressed, started to soap himself when the large breasted shop owner got through the door, offering him a towel as well as her-self. She was naked but held her hands modestly before her large pendulous breasts. I’ll soap your back, she said. She pushed him against the wall. There was limited space and the softness of her generous body pressed against his lean hardness was as good as any hot afternoon would ever get 180 miles from Oodnadatta, for him as well as her.

Afterwards, with the sun at four in the afternoon our happy book searcher bade his goodbye and wandered to just outside the settlement. He spotted a large and lonely ghost gum. He spread his swag and told the dog “sit’. He took out his P.White’s “Rider of the Chariot,” and started his first page of his unread book:

RIDERS OF THE CHARIOT.

“Who was that woman?” asked Mrs Colquhoun, a rich lady who had come recently to live at Sarsaparilla. “Ah,” Mrs Sugden said, and laughed, “That was Miss Hare.” “She appears an unusual sort of person.” Mrs Colquhoun ventured to hope.

The Restless Book Searcher had found his book, yet again.

The Restless Booksearcher (number 3)

30 Thursday Jun 2011

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The wandering book searcher had in the meantime surveyed the rag-tag of books on the shelving. He cast his eyes over the titles, holding his head askew this way and that way trying to read as much as was still visible on the torn covers. He munched approvingly on his rotating burger which was now almost eaten to its core.

His usual modus operandi was to exchange his quarry inside the back-pack for any unread ones. He mainly succeeded in that, especially if he traded two books for just one.  Depending on his limited finance he would just sometimes buy a book, a reckless splurge of the moment which so far he had never regretted.  His need for books was till now still unrequited dating back to childhood, deprived of letters and words printed on pages by an uncaring culture and not made better by a bookless neighbourhood. He would never fill the void but made up the deficit as good and as diligently that he was still capable of. He was lucky to have been taught reading in the first place. He knew that if he was to catch up with books and the reading of them he could never waste time working for a living and money. He wanted to understand more of the world that he lived in. Time was of the essence, and because of that he could not afford wasting time in working for anything, let alone just money whose value could never be read.

His reading skill had been installed when very young and in a far away country of which he still had some vague memories. He also remembered fondly that a distant uncle, rumoured to have emerged from a Tsarist Russian background and nobility, had taught him to play the mouth organ. He now had a small ‘Hohner’ organ with a button on the side for half-notes. His early childhood training had stood him in good stead despite the deprivations later when circumstance had transferred him to the relenlessly hot and dusty world he now resided in. When he arrived at a place that, through no intent of him, featured a market he would put down his belongings, told Bluey to ‘sit’ and start to play his mouth organ. He would only play long enough for people to provide him with enough coins for some future food and a frayed but un-read book.  He knew that by following a certain repertoire the coins would be dropped in his hat, especially during his playing of the very popular ‘When the Saints come marching in’. The combination of the music with Bluey’s mournful looking eyes, cast upwards towards the audience; many would not walk past without chucking a couple of pennies.

When the hamburger had finally been eaten and the last of the tea been squeezed and scored from the tea bag our searcher stood up and paid for the food including a couple of Spam-ham  cans, making sure the cans still had the keys attached at the top.  He already knew that there was yet an unread book on the shelves that he badly wanted. He took a book from his back-pack. It was a well thumped ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. He asked the large breasted shop-owner if he could swap this for the maroon coloured hard cover book on the top shelve. He also offered to top his offer up with a tuppence coin. She agreed and offered him the use of the outhouse for a shower; that’s if you want to shower, she asked?  He, for a split second thought there was something in the furtive way she looked sideways as she made the offer, away from his open gaze.

She knew the rule for wanderers with swags and cattle dogs. Itinerants, ringbarkers, fencers and shearers, they were the ones that she still managed to eke a living from. Some she befriended and even loved for a night or so, snatched away from the uncompromising hard fist of an otherwise solitary life, a life not unlike those that she sold her wares to. She hardly remembered her husband who had vanished without a grunt of a good-bye years ago. A hopeless drunk of piss-pot, he was. That’s the most she recalled. Her solemn but generous giving of relief to the itinerant wanderers and flotsam of those on endless dirt roads cut both ways and she preferred that to her previous marital mishap. Besides, it did give her business a chance to limp on.

To be continued.

The Restless Booksearcher (Number 2)

29 Wednesday Jun 2011

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The ceiling was of pressed metal, bravely keeping some semblance to a floral pattern somewhat obscured by the numerous coats of paint applied through the decades. It was now painted a light hospital green and decorated with the hangings of three brown fly strip spirals that had lost its fatal attraction to anything in flight some years back. The whirring of a ceiling fan above the custard tarts glass case might have finally been installed to at least show the flies they were not all that welcome anymore.  Besides, the health inspector had become somewhat grumpy and insisted the fan to be installed, as well as a written direction to clear out the dead flies from the glass display cases.

The man put down his swag and back-pack outside, told the dog ‘stay’, which he instantly obeyed, squatting next to the swag. The dog was thirsty as well as hungry. After entering through the fly screen door, the solitary walker surveyed the interior and took in the sparsely filled shop. He knew that he could rely on a hamburger and cup of tea. The rancid smell of 50/50 hamburger mince and 100% lard had permeated floor, ceiling, furniture, not even giving the hard Laminex a chance in warding it off.

The day had been hot. The back-pack of the walker contained a small hoard of books as well as clothing. Dried fruit, including apricots and sliced apple, some nuts with a couple of bottles of water completed the solitary walker’s total inventory.  The heat had weighed him down more than usual. He needed sustenance as well as to replenish water for himself and his dog. A woman appeared. She was dishevelled looking, hugely breasted and all crumpled. The TV blaring out with canned laughter from somewhere at the back indicated the possibility she might have been horizontally positioned when he entered the shop. He asked for a hamburger, a pot of tea and some water.

 His daily walk in search of new and unread books had taken him longer than usual and even though he passed several small settlements, none had books. His roving eyes had spotted shelving with frayed looking books just behind the tables facing the right hand wall away from the counter. His spirit lifted even before the hamburger arrived, which the shop-owner plonked on the fiery Laminex table in the well practised and desultory manner of the country shop. She came in again and served a pot with cracked spout filled with hot water and a separate dusty tea bag and sugar and milk. She also, without wasting a single word, walked through the fly screen door with a dish of water for the dog outside. The Bluey dog was still camped next to his master’s swag. His grateful slurping was heard inside with his dog- tag tinkling against the metal dish.

The man’s thirst quenched by tea, the intrepid walker started on his well layered hamburger, bits of beet-root trying to escape slipping and sliding towards the edge which the solitary book searcher prevented  from falling by rotating the bread bun while  expertly eating the protruding slices of guilty vegetables including the brown rings of fried onions.

Will be continued.

The restless Booksearcher.

28 Tuesday Jun 2011

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The Restless Book Searcher ( part 1 )

By gerard oosterman


The Restless book searcher.
The sun was at its highest this time of the year. A man carrying a swag and back-pack was seen walking the deserted streets. His cattle dog cleverly walked in the limited shade that the walker was still casting. The merciless heat was parching the dust which was as much in need of water and as thirsty as the man and his dog.

He finally arrived at a small shop which had a ‘Tip-Top bread’ sign hanging from its awning. On the shop window there were plastered a variety of signs, including one on ‘Big Ben’ pies, also a poster of Camel Cigarettes featuring a goggled fighter pilot in his cockpit with ‘nerves of steel’ and a ‘Vincent’s APC Headache’ powder advertisement. Even though the torn and battered fly screen door was slightly ajar, it had a ‘closed’ sign facing any possible customer on the outside of it. The owner of this shop had lost the will to turn the sign around to ‘open’ a long time ago, and anyhow, with the fly-screen refusing to shut properly for some years, the shopkeeper reckoned people would guess the shop was open regardless of any sign. The few locals would know. It was just about the only ’mixed goods’ shop for the next fifty miles. The settlement still had a garage and a butcher shop, a left over from a gold rush mania long time gone.

The interior of the shop had a couple of tables and matching chairs, all from the same vintage with splayed legs. The tables had an aluminium strip screwed all round the sides and over the edge of the Laminex which had bubbled up here and there. The shop’s counter was levered towards the customer and made of a glass display cabinet which had a crack at the front, where at some earlier times, efforts had been made with tape to try and prevent it from falling either out towards the floor or inwards towards the listless display of custard-tarts, dry looking Lamingtons and some lonely mince pies. The tape was still holding on even if somewhat yellowed and curled. Against the back wall was another glass case with a bowl of floating beetroot slices and a plate holding sliced onions with next yet another couple of plates holding some limp artichokes with a hard boiled mess of what looked like chopped up eggs which had been sprinkled with Keens yellow curry powder. The Keens curry powder tin was still standing next to the plate, leaving open the optimistic possibility for future use.

will be continued.

Daffodils and “Go back where you come from”.

23 Thursday Jun 2011

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The SBS program on Go Back where you come from has certainly caught the watchers by surprise, World -wide viewing by tens of millions and it even made some people change from watching Footie, Alan Jones or Derryn Hinch.

Last night’s episode was shown to even have two Australian men helping the Malaysian ‘Polisie’ ferret out some hidden hapless refugees and the Australian Girl ‘Raquel ‘waxing about how we should do the same in Australia.’ Let’s forgive and just think it was Stockholm syndrome. The same Raquel baulked at using the toilets at the African refugee camp and seemed determent not to go to the toilet for the next few days. The best of luck to her. It was riveting viewing when she was interviewed on what she actually did in Australia, “nothing”. Do you work? “No”. What do you do? “Nothing”. The interviewing UN official smiling and nodding, he fully understood.

 Did anyone not feel the humaneness and warmth of those refugees in Kuala Lumpur, especially the kid’s eagerness to go and learn at schools? The place, despite the terrible overcrowding, kept spotless, kids in clean clothes and big smiles.

We have our three flush toilets, surround sound and plasma, our recycle bins full of empty wine or coke bottles just out of sheer luck of birth and that’s all that separates us from the African refugee with his hacked up face and missing limb.

Of course the program is very ‘Big Brother” and similar to the format used on many of those type of programmes, including many of those cooking competitions and seems mostly based on some form of  humiliation, expulsions or put-downs. We all become in a way perverts on failures, misery and bullying.

The good thing about watching so much world misery unfolding has been the opposite of it and the joy and emergence in our garden of the bulbs which I keenly planted some weeks ago. A single jonquil has almost started to flower and at least another dozen or so are getting buds.  Can you believe it? Each morning I go out and check both front and back. The back garden where we have the cloth line, I planted both tulips and Dutch Irises. The twelve Irises have all come up and I am now waiting for the tulips to poke through any day.  The shortest day is now behind and already we have more sun, the volcanic ash has moved on and the carbon tax is now more likely to get the go ahead. Life goes on.

To Market, to Market…

23 Thursday Jun 2011

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To Market, to market.

Another memorable aspect of those times in The Inner West was the markets in church yards on each Saturday. They are still going but many have now turned into new goods markets, mainly selling cheap trinkets, Chinese socks and aluminium sauce pan with anodized pink lids. The best part of the ’old’ markets were the food stalls. We knew a couple that used to live near us but had moved to somewhere far away. He was a steady husband but seemed more interested in jazz than earn money to keep family. She was German and the pillar of that family. Then, as mysteriously they had disappeared they turned up as stall holders of organic fruit and vegetables. They had become vegetarians but on many occasions I had seen him slip away from his greens and leave the wife to man the stall and he would be munching on a meaty Chinese spring roll.

  Years earlier, when they were still living in the Inner West, the wife had taken on the franchise of organic cosmetics. It was supposed to have been made from mink oil and was credited with having miraculous properties and healing powers. She was struggling but forever optimistic hoping to keep their house and family together while he would be glued to the radio, listening to jazz. He claimed to be a trumpet player but no one had actually ever heard him play.

Anyway, a mink oil party was arranged at someone’s place on the waterfront and the host was kind enough to cater and provide coffee, cool drinks. The evening proceeded well and the different mink oil products were displayed at the front on trestle table with a nice table cloth. The wife took the stand and started explaining the benefits of the products and some clients of her who had already purchased the products were in agreement that it had helped them obtain better skins. Blemishes had disappeared and they even felt better.

The magic of the mink animal and its well known healing properties throughout the centuries were touched upon, when out of the blue another German, a man this time, got up to say that his wife had tried it and her skin had broken out in rashes. The product was expensive and he felt it was a waste of money!

The evening turned sour and the seller of the products was seen to cry and wipe tears. She did so much her best to make things work out. The cruel fate and general difficulties tipped the bucket over. Soon after, they disappeared from the scene, only to pop up as organic fruit and vegies sellers at the Saturday markets years later. One of their sons must have inherited some of the perceived trumpet skills of his father from mouth to fingers as he played the violin extremely well. He had become a very confident boy and earned good money busking in front of the church were the markets were being held.

Woman Rape

22 Wednesday Jun 2011

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There have been some strange News items today. One was about an Irish Lady being freed from jail after an alleged rape by her on a woman in a toilet. The mind boggles but here is the item: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/21/3249367.htm?section=justin

I was lucky to get the article about the hospitable Turks up and running on the Drum but, gee, it was gone in a flash together with MacCullum’s piece. Many of the answers seemed to draw comfort from the fact that Turkey and Syria are neighbours and as Australia hasn’t got that problem it is therefore not a good comparison. I thought my piece was more about how Turkey declared to accept all those fleeing violence. Their minister from immigration declared. “They are human being in distress; we will not turn them away”. I might be wrong but I have yet to hear any Australian minister declare any empathy, a warm welcome or understanding of the plight of refugees.

In the face of this refugee flow, Turkey has taken action without involving international institutions in the process. However, international cooperation will be inevitable if the number grows. Large camps, mobile hospitals and residential areas have been created in response to the fundamental needs of the refugees; thanks to preliminary preparations, Turkey is now able to host 800,000 refugees. International human rights organizations welcome Turkey’s generous attitude. Despite the fact its stance will further encourage others to flee and take refugee, Turkey’s preference not to close the border is extremely humane. At this point, the people of Güveççi village deserve particular credit and thanks; they have been mobilized to help out the refugees and given away everything they had to extend support for even those who stayed on the other side of the border, teaching humanity a lesson.

http://www.news.az/articles/turkey/38741

It seems amazing how the issue of so few numbers of refugees in Australia have excited so many. It still remains unanswered why Australia is getting so worked up about so few that end up on our shores. We are really slack and lacking in our humanity.  Perhaps it is due to our education. So many, despite many nationalities having settled here, seem ignorant of the world’s geography or different cultures.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/21/3249679.htm?section=justin

 

Is Turkey showing us the Way?

18 Saturday Jun 2011

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Is Turkey showing us the Way?

June 18, 2011 by gerard oosterman

Turkey promised to keep their borders open for the people fleeing the violence in Syria. Many thousands of Syrians have crossed into Turkey and footage shows men and women, children walking into that country.
Even though Turkey is a country with a large population of over seventy million and already coping with an overflow of many other nationalities, it has not lost its humanity in doing the right thing by extending its hospitality to those so much worse off. They are quickly opening disused buildings and building camps, constructing a temporary hospital.

If Turkey can do it, where is our compassion?

Lack of ‘humaneness’ is what seems to doggedly divide Australia from most of the rest of the world with a deeply engrained hostility towards others. It is especially directed to those hapless victims of endless wars that somehow managed to make it anywhere near our shores.

Our present minister and previous Government ministers have exalted in, ‘we must make conditions here as harsh as possible as a deterrent’. The general gist of the messages from our Governments has been very constant., “No-one, we repeat, no-one should come here under the understanding they will be treated with compassion or care if they jump the ‘queue’ or come ‘illegal’ by boat,” is what they mainly are saying. The political leaders are well aware that those sentiments will be well rewarded with the approval of thousand of voters.

The latest threat of sending at least 800 refugees to Malaysia just about takes the cake in the manoeuvring of our desperate Government keen to further whip up our xenophobia. The fact that this whipping might be translated to a caning in Malaysia was just seen as a mere bagatelle, easily overcome with a few soothing words of a promise that that would most likely not happen. The UNHCR seems less convinced.

While the conversation is continuing and a flurry of visits to New Guinea and Nauru intending to underline our tough stance once again, some might question where this dreadful fear comes from. Is there something in our history that gives us clues?

We couldn’t do much wrong by visiting our most recent history of how we treated children, both in our mother country of the UK and in our own.
Just having seen the film “Oranges and Sunshine” and previously read D.Hill’s, “The forgotten Children”, I wonder if one day we might admit there was something rotten going on in our culture dating back perhaps hundreds of years. I know of no other country that exported and deported over a 130 000 children in recent times. I also know of no other country that then allowed the further destruction of those children in the institutions they arrived at.

Is it is the history of bullying children and sending them into the hierarchical system of the English Boarding Schools, the Public ( Private) Schools with its whipping masters and the degrading of all those coming into contact with the ‘British system’ of parenting and educating?

This seems to go to the very heart of why Australia has never managed to shake of that bullying that defined us from the very start.

Yet, when it comes to cattle or suicidal whales we all get teary eyed, ban the export of cattle or stand in the sea for days stroking dying whales. Where is the stroking for the flotsam of humans cast on our shores?

Last Monday’s ABC’s 4 corners, again ‘bullying and degrading’ at the very core of our armed forces. It is totally ‘us’ and not just the isolated few of ‘them’. Howard, Ruddock, Abbott, Gillard, Morrison, Bowen. What chance did they all have growing up and indoctrinated into a system of bullying? No Government except the British, conduct parliament so appallingly and again, bullying is at the very heart of it.

In the meantime we should take a leaf out of Turkey’s book. We will not turn them away, is what the Turkish Minister for Immigration is reported as saying. They are human beings in distress.

I can’t even imagine one of our politicians saying that.

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Like Peas in a Pod

10 Friday Jun 2011

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Like peas in a Pod

June 10, 2011 by gerard oosterman

Anyone having visited the main supermarkets of late could not but have noticed that we as consumers have now entered a totally new world of devastating health. Gone are the bleak advertisements of chocolate bars or croissants. It’s all health, health and more health. Giant posters of apples, Pink Ladies or Jonathans, all pink and roseate, viridian green Granny Smiths, a tsunami of huge fruits have now been posted and pasted on every square metre of wall or window at the supermarket entrances. Let’s not also forget the vegetables though. Yesterday at Aldi’s there where peas in their pods so well photographed and blown up in size they almost looked dangerous.

There is now the push on in earnest for all to get violently healthy and no excuse for getting girths above the OBM measurements anymore. This is how so often things are handled. Obesity as a result of supermarkets pushing very profitable but dodgy foods still continue as ever but a veneer of concern for robust health is cleverly being promoted.

Those giant posters of fruit and veggies not only soothes those that have genuine concern for the millions of overweight people but it soothes above all the shopper thinking that entering the supermarket now delivers them from junk food. The mood is set in believing all is well and their shopping continues as before. The trolley still features the same cooking sauces, the same chips, biscuits, choky brekkies and other high carbon junk foods. The relentless race to diabetes goes on and the millions of overweight no doubt will queue our surgeries and hospitals as never before.

A cooking and food expert interviewed on ABC FM radio gave an account of a person faced with a fish and a saucepan and could not relate that to cook the fish it needed to be placed in the saucepan and heat applied. Jamie Oliver some time ago travelled through UK schools and found some children could not identify the potato. They simply thought it came in golden coloured strips.
Despite all those TV shows and all the cookery books with millions watching and reading, cooking wholesome meals at home is getting less. Just because our large Mansions now have Caesar stone kitchen benches, butcher blocks and huge knifes hanging from the wall, doesn’t mean that families sit down to eat a well cooked and healthy meal.

On the ABC program of QA, the panel was asked why Solariums were not being banned. The answer; It is a State issue and there are many warnings on the use of Solariums causing cancer anyway.
Apparently a similar answer was given on junk foods with the opinion that ‘surely’ adults can make up their own mind and take care that their children eat healthy foods and don’t become obese. We ‘should all exercise good and healthy choices’ and that should not ever be taken away by banning junk food ads during children TV, one opposition minister , Christopher Pyne, suggested. This was also T. Abbott’s refrain when health minister during the Howard reign.

No one came up that ‘the free choice’ available for decades had not resulted in improved dietary habits. Would it not be prudent to try something else? Free choice also gave us thousands clogging hospitals with people dying from smoking. It was tackled very successfully. Plain packaging again will lower the number picking up smoking and many will give the habit up.
Surely, with food, the same can be tried. No-one wants to deny a chocolate or the biscuit, the frozen meal or the soft drink. But why not have those foods costing more and made less attractive. Much of the junk food exterior packaging are depicted with images of healthy food while in fact the food inside is just rubbish of very dubious nutritional value.

Could we include much more dietary advice with perhaps a star system the same as on white goods. The Mars Bar a single star, the apple or stick of celery 5 stars. I read that at Saturday school sports, the tuck shops still sell sausage rolls and junk sugar stuff that no one seems to question. Kids don’t buy the treats if they are healthy, some complained. Well, let them go hungry and see if they will get into the apple or fruit salad, the chicken and cheese or egg and tomato sandwich?

The check-out counter inevitably pushed the worst of junk foods and many a mother despair going through without the child throwing a tantrum for another sweet crunchy bar or sugary drink. At petrol station we are exhorted to spend another $5, – to get another 4 cent per litre of petro discount. The extra money is for either soft drink combined with sweet bars etc. Again, a pushing of junk food is featured. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When it comes to ‘free choice’ we are in the grip of very clever advertising giants with millions to spend which drives us now in  their clutches, dressed up with good health posters . The ‘free choice’ morphs us all into very obedient but overweight people.

The E coli and why mainly Women?

08 Wednesday Jun 2011

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The recent outbreak of E-coli whereby over twenty have died and thousands taken ill has baffled many. However, what is most interesting for those that study outbreaks of public diseases, is that it seemed to affect mainly women. Now that enough time has passed some of the puzzling pieces have been found to fit together.

The e-coli bacteria are everywhere to be found and our bodies generally have anti-bodies that fight most diseases including the E coli nasties. This strain of E coli was strangely different and way out of the ‘norm’, very toxic and a new kid on the block. The normal arsenal of anti-biotic medications didn’t seem to work very well and authorities were scrambling to get a handle on the outbreak.

http://healthmad.com/conditions-and-diseases/europe-on-high-alert-as-deadly-cucumbers-kill-10-germans/

The culprit was at first thought to be Spanish cucumbers.  On TV were shown endless footage of crates of very nice looking cucumbers being dumped into large containers, followed by equal dumping of beautiful, very red and luscious looking tomatoes. Some of the cucumber exporters were immediately thrown out of the business and fridges everywhere were emptied from cucumbers. Not a fruit and veggie shop dared to display cucumbers and even tomatoes were shunned.

There were expert opinions popping up from everywhere. Many televised interviews with very serious looking but world- wide respected epidemical professors, including even a lengthy debate on the very revered and estimable Tom Lehrer News Hour. The chemical complexities of the toxins were discussed and the best advice that was offered was the old trusted stand by, ‘wash your hands and your vegetables.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQqIIvBW4-k

The sale of lettuce spinners sky rocketed and manufacturers were working feverishly on future gadgets that could be linked to a safer and better way of dealing with vegetables, combined of course, to million dollar instant profits.

The attention then moved from Spain over the Pyreneans to Germany. Many had been taken ill and some had even died. It was starting to look very worrying but the experts were starting to hone in to finding the real culprit. The Spanish cucumbers were mightily relieved and even the tomatoes were given the all clear. In fact Spain was not found to have been responsible. Who would have thought the Germans were responsible for this E coli outbreak? The well disciplined German vegetable growers?  How could that be?

Spain is furious and has now taken to demanding compensation from Germany for having cast aspersions on the Spanish in the first place. The cucumber and tomato growers and export merchants in Spain will push for more than just an Olé!

This time, with the news media hurriedly flown to Germany, footage of a German restaurant was shown were many of the sick had been tucking away, eating nourishing meals, no doubt washed down with a well filled stein of frothy beer. The restaurant owner, while glaring defiantly into the camera, was shown munching on a fistful of lettuce leaves.  A gesture so comic and, like so much of real life,  also desperately sad. He knew his restaurant was verging on total collapse. Can you imagine the whole world watching and being focussed on his enterprise and on his bean sprouts?

Bean sprouts were found to have been the culprit and again footage was shown of the suspect bean sprout farm. This time the camera seemed to peer through some undergrowth and it was all a bit secretive. Perhaps the owner bean sprout farmer had been tipped off and was lying low behind some bushes, hoping to wait it all out, his wife hurriedly had made him sandwiches and a thermos of coffee?

Anyway, since then the mystery of why mainly women had succumbed to this E coli outbreak was also solved.

Women eat salads far more than men.

Men concentrate on meat, women on salads. Amazing, isn’t it? So simple was the answer. It is true. Go to any restaurant and men far more than women will order meaty dishes, while women gravitate to quiches or dishes with salads or vegetables. This concentration of eating meat by men is also often accompanied by silence. No mere words must interfere with meat eating. Many a woman must despair when they go out with partners and the meal is eaten in total silence. The steak is hoed into by the male, not a single word spoken, with the burning candle flickering away the only indication of a hoped for lingering romantic evening.

Cynical males might well respond and say that the preferred eating of vegetables or salads by women is because they fear weight gain and will eat rather a thinly sliced cucumber with some lettuce than risk putting on a single ounce.  Getting E coli seems a very and unnecessary cruel punishment.

Just wash your hands and your vegetables.