Enjoy Christmas, stop thinking and save the universe

Nov 28 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

ACCORDING to the latest piece of research to clog up my inbox with exciting revelations such as “one in 10 Liverpudlians regularly eat fish and chips” or “72% of Merseysiders suffer from bad hair days”, I am in the wrong profession.

This comes as distressing news because it suggests that I have wasted the past seven years in journalism and possibly the four years before that when I was doing an English and French degree.

A lonely seven months living in a brown bedsit in a rural France to improve my language skills was also pointless in career terms, although it certainly taught me some important facts about life, including that brown carpet on the walls is not a good choice when it comes to decorating a gloomy bedsit.

The assault on my aesthetic sensibilities could have been avoided, I now discover, had Tesco.com carried out its aforementioned study earlier.

It reveals, and I am sure readers of this column are awaiting this disclosure with bated breath, that being a Capricorn is the secret ingredient for life as a top chef.

As someone born into this star sign, instead of scrutinising the subjunctive and pondering the perfect tense, I should have been practising papillotes and balancing bain-maries.

It turns out that the books I was studying were the wrong ones – my reading list should have been Delia Smith and Fanny Cradock, not Jacques Derrida and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The study, which cannot be commended for the depth of its research, looked at the birth dates of 100 famous cooks to discover that nearly one fifth were born between December 22 and January 20. They include the voluptuous Nigella Lawson, the fishy Rick Stein, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Keith Floyd and the grande dame of modern cookery, Elizabeth David.

Leos on the other hand, which of all included in the survey only features Ready Steady Cook’s Brian Turner and two others, are the least likely to become chefs.

Tesco.com’s Mandy Minichello, who is blessed with a name that sounds like a very small string instrument, states about Capricorns: “If that’s your star sign, it could be that you have a glittering culinary future.”

Well, be that as it may, I am not going to ditch a carefully cultivated career in journalism for catering college on the basis of astrology alone, particularly as the study gives no suggestion for why we goats, who are usually advised to follow a career in banking because we’re supposedly good at managing money, belong in a kitchen.

Perhaps the company has refraining from coming up with a hypothesis because it has seen another piece of research that has been released this week.

Scientists have come to the startling conclusion that the mere act of observing the cosmos too closely might bring it to an end, which certainly implies that being too curious about why Capricorns make good celebrity chefs is a perilous pastime.

Having conducted further research on the subject via Google, I can safely say that I do not have the scientific brain necessary to understand the theory, never mind to risk a toppling of the known universe, especially as it has something to do with “false vacuums with repulsive gravity” and I’ve hardly used our Hoover in weeks.

If wondering about the world we live in could end its existence, then the human race has got something seriously wrong for many centuries.

It would mean that the most materialistic of us are the ones making the most positive contribution to life on Earth – simply by not contributing to its destruction. Meanwhile, those who dedicate their lives to higher pursuits, such as philosophy, are helping to bring down the planet.

So, perhaps from now on we should just admire the stars without thinking about how they came to be and accept that man once walked on the moon without considering how he got there.

Now there’s justification for treating Christmas as a festival of gluttony and consumerism rather than as a religious celebration.

And it certainly places on a moral pedestal the sort of people who carry out surveys about bad hair days.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk