If X bureaucrats take money from a bottomless pit for N months...

The Devil's Kitchen is the appropriate place to give the latest tripe boiled up by the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills the roasting it deserves. The BBC were serving up the State Propaganda this morning, too.

So they think that some cookbooks require GCSE English do they? The Reptile immediately and quite rightly nails the fact that the Department of Irritation, Uselessness and Skiving have plenty of other things to do, like FIX THE EDUCATION SYSTEM YOU MUPPETS!§ Instead, they conveniently find a reason to fill their bookshelves with all the latest and trendiest titles research cookbooks. I want to see all those books donated to a library. I want evidence.

To be honest I do find Deliah's recipes irritating and presumptive. I do not think that is about GCSE levels at all, but just about good writing and clarity. Asides do not matter to me, as long as they are not the kind that says "and using the [undocumented preparation stage] which you made [long time] earlier". Long sentences do not phase me, for, it must me said, I am guilty as any other for creating long and multi-clause sentences which, I suspect, has something, if not everything, to do with my taking Latin. Big words and complex adjectives are not the issue either, for I like such things and relish the opportunity to expand my vocabulary (I suspect that someone could pass GCSE English these days and not even have the word "vocabulary" in their vocabulary...).

Somehow I suspect this is a subliminal attempt to make people think GCSE is "difficult" and so shore up the reputation of the exam.

Deliah's guff is harder to read not because it requires GCSEs, but because, if you ask me, Deliah is a crap writer who faffs about, who introduces her undocumented preps halfway through and presumes you know how to do it. Lets be honest about this: Ramsay is a chef, Deliah is a cook, or should we really say a writer about cooking. Deliah washed up, waitressed and "helped" in a kitchen before, I suspect, some mate at The Mirror threw her a lifeline. I can help in a kitchen. I am pretty good at prep, in fact (YES CHEF!). I do think I could write a better cookbook that our Deal. A cookbook for blokes. But why bother, cos Ramsay has done it already.

I wonder if there is any pattern here - some say womens' cookbooks are more confusing than mens'. Do you think this may be down to the fact that if a man writes a cookbook, he is almost always a professional chef, whereas it is not the same case for the women? Professional chefs require speed, simplicity, efficiency, order and consistency. As does any bloke in a kitchen. Deliah is either Labour or Lib Dem, I am certain. She is a Ladder-Kicker, but we cannot have the Government report on Ladder-Kicking, can we? Oh no.

§ you should be working towards ensuring our Universities are not incorrectly incentivised to produce narrow, specific, time-limited and, frankly, training-course substitute "Degrees" like "Golf Management" to pigeon-hole people and make them easy to manipulate.