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know most about law enforcement – those who actually do it – are the least qualified to advise on what its rights, powers and funding should be. We have to ignore their cries and trust our instincts. We have to balance our fears of the indefinable, nebulous worlds of crime and terrorism with the fact that, if we put Tasers in our public servants’ hands, at some point they’ll use them on us.
     
    Since I wrote this in October 2012, the police and Police Federation’s public image has deteriorated further. In May 2014, the home secretary rebuked the Federation’s conference, calling on them to “Show the public that you get it”, and issuing a threat: “The Federation was created by an act of parliament and it can be reformed by an act of parliament. If you do not change of your own accord, we will impose change on you.” Meanwhile, the communications data bill, having lost Nick Clegg’s support in April 2013, looks unlikely to become law.
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    As someone who enjoys food, I’m surprised by how irritable chefs make me. Whenever I read about a chef or chefs campaigning for, complaining about or promoting something, I can feel myself metaphorically folding my arms. And sometimes I literally fold my arms at the same time – which, if you count both real and metaphorical limbs, briefly makes me an insect. A disdainful beetle, gearing up to get cross with a chef.
    “Oh, what is it now, chefs?” I sneer to myself – not out loud because chefs are famously handy: I’m thinking of Gordon Ramsay, or John Cleese in that sketch where he bursts out of the kitchen waving a cleaver. “You moaning chefs get my goat, which left to you would presumably be locally sourced, turned into a jus or a foam and piped all over a perfectly harmless starter! Why don’t you shut up, you bloody chefs?”
    You may be uncertain of what I’m talking about. What are all these occasions when chefs say, want or bemoan something? you may wonder. Maybe my chef-irritability is making me delusional, but to my mind it’s constant. Some chef is always saying something, and it’s never just: “Can you make sure that doesn’t boil over? I’m popping out for a fag.”
    It’s probably the fault of the media – most things are. When you’ve retyped all the news agency stuff about Syria and Ukraine, and reprinted today’s cameraphone snap of a goose swimming past someone’s upstairs window, what are you going to put on page two? Probably best just to ring up some chefs and find out what’s bugging them.
    My view of chefs as a vocal part of the community is reinforced by the fact that most television programmes are now about cookery – about 52%, according to a survey I just conducted into what would bolster my argument. I quite like cookery programmes – something I have in common with every other viewer. That’s why there are so many. The future of television, according to haircuts and focus groups, is stuff that everyonequite likes, rather than stuff that anyone particularly likes. It’s best just to make cookery programmes, because dramas are expensive, nature documentaries are fake and those horrible panel shows are brash and rude and have more chefs on them than women. But no one ever got annoyed by shots of a casserole.
    So I already had more metaphorically folded arms than a metaphorical millipede exchanging insurance details with some chefs who’d just crashed into his car when I heard the latest from the chefs: they’re annoyed by shots of a casserole. Or probably not actually a casserole – that sounds a bit 70s – more likely a reduction or a daube or a posset or a phucking pho. They’re cross that customers often photograph (or pho-tograph) their food and put those images online.
    These particular chefs are French, which, I must admit, doesn’t allay my suspicions that they may not have quite got over themselves. So I’d completely prejudged Alexandre Gauthier (of La Grenouillère in La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil) before I