Prosciutto Cotto?

No wonder Peppa Pig looks upset. She's been mocked on Twitter for choosing the wrong wine to go with her swill. That's a bit like the fate that befell a young woman (she has a degree and works for Deliveroo, so she's probably got enough on her plate with a £50,000 debt) who was last night's social media laughing stock. She was unwise enough to tweet her anger at discovering that the pizza she'd bought for £4 from Sainsbury's had meat in it. She didn't know that Prosciutto Cotto meant Ham, you see. What an ignoramus!

Naturally, it goes without saying that I didn't know, till last night, what Prosciutto Cotto is, either. Today I passed by a shop advertising Chicken Mole. That's something new to me as well. Either it's a very strange hybrid of two very different animals, or a mole who runs away at the first sign of danger.

Because I live in Sheffield I see a lot of stuff on Twitter about tree-felling. There is a very well organised campaign against the City Council's policy of cutting down old trees and replacing them with saplings; however, no matter how well organised it has been the campaign has been unable to save any trees from the chainsaw, because the Council is operating within the law. The campaigners' attack is based on many different arguments, including the trees' capacity to reduce pollution and the secrecy behind the contract with Amey, but most of it is totally beside the point. The reason people don't want the trees to be cut down is that tree-lined roads look much nicer than those that don't have trees on them. In the end, that's all that needs to be said.

The same applies to the Government's ongoing massacre of badgers, on the controversial grounds that badgers cause bovine TB. I am frankly ambivalent about Sheffield's trees (after all, the city still has thousands of them left) but my sympathies are 100% with the opponents of the badger kill. Once again, though, the campaign likes to introduce red herrings into the argument, such as debating the so-called science behind the cull. I oppose killing badgers because it's cruel, and that's the end to it as far as I'm concerned. Even if DEFRA proved that cows develop TB because of proximity to badgers I'd not change my mind. Unlike trees, badgers can feel pain and fear and have a genuine interest in protecting themselves. You can't be cruel to a tree because a tree doesn't have the capacity to care about itself. Attaching a sign saying SAVE ME doesn't alter that fact; it's not the tree talking, it's whoever nailed the sign to it.

It's still a Winter Wonderland out there but at least it's a lot less cold than it was midweek, when it was enough to freeze your face off. It's not half been pretty though.