Some things are made to go together - lamb and mint sauce, sour cream and sweet chilli, roast beef and gravy. It’s the natural order of things. Let’s choose one of these, not entirely at random. Gravy. There are as many recipes for gravy as there are gravy makers. If you make gravy from a packet or a tin, then feel free to learn something.

Having roasted the beef, one removes the bulk of the oil from the roasting pan, but take care to leave all the meat juices and other “goodness” in the pan. One then sprinkles flour liberally on the pan and cooks it atop the stove, stirring and scraping occasionally until the flour is cooked. You can then add your ingredients of choice (these vary from wine or beer or water and may include tomato sauce, Holbrook’s sauce, whatever… really the varieties are endless). In my experience however, the simpler the better. One then boils the resultant mix until the correct consistency is achieved and voila ! Gravy. The best gravy is made by grandmothers, because they were around when things had to be done by hand and it wasn’t possible to cheat.

Anyway all this thinking made me hungry… and curious. Mummy, where does gravy come from? Naturally I turned to man’s greatest invention – the internet – which surprisingly didn’t tell me. The specific part of the internet I asked, was Wikipedia. They have a high opinion of themselves, but in fact it boils down to this. In the old days (some of you may remember) we had what was called a ‘set of encyclopaedias” (though this may not be grammatically correct, that’s what we called them (it?). Anyway, if you wanted to know something you simply looked it up. It was arranged alphabetically, which worked back then because people knew which order the alphabet was in and how to spell things. Things like “gravy”. Having found the pertinent entry one could then read all about the wonders of gravy (except that we were usually looking up “sex” and “genitals” and so on… tee hee hee).

The words contained in the encyclopaedia were FACT. If you tried to erase or cross out words, and add new ones – the next person to look would hardly be fooled. Much like an ocelot however, Wikipedia is a different animal. Anyone, yes even you (or in this case me) can go in there and fiddle about with it. You can change facts. You are an encyclopaedia God! Oh they say that they have a team of bearded academics and so on who check all these edits to make sure they are factual but that simply can’t be true. The number of entries is HUGE and they can’t be checking them all the time. So… just for fun.. I decided to change “knowledge”. And the specific part of the total of human knowledge I changed was Gravy.

I think I know the secret. If you change an entry on the Sea Shepherd they’ll be right on you, because people are always watching it and plenty of bearded VW beetle driving hippie types are waiting to pounce on you. If, on the other hand, you choose something a bit less glamorous (like gravy) and even throw in a fake reference to make it look real, then I think you stand a greater chance. So download the internet and look up Gravy on Wikipedia. See whether the historical origins of gravy sound about right to you…

I’m not suggesting for a minute that you make any changes to gravy. Gravy is mine, leave it alone. But I wonder how far you’d get altering the entry for Bob Brown or Anna Bligh so that it more properly reflects "the truth". You know.. just hypothetically.









Oh and this has been posted on another forum so I'd ask those who are on both forums to please keep their traps shut on the other forum, regarding my secret identity !
Ta muchly.