Pastygate: George Osborne get your hands off our pasties!

A 20 per cent tax on hot food for poor people from the millionaire cabinet that just awarded their friends a five per cent cut in their taxes.

Here’s a poem from the other year which features a pasty.

Ode To A Detox On Returning From St Ives

I’d hoped to grow old like Lauren Bacall,
Elegant, willowy, tall,
Tight arse, tons of class,
An enigma on a pedestal

Once slender and considered quite tasty
In a thin thong and pasties,
The pasties are now Cornish pasties
And I can’t thing the thame thong without crying.
My legendary six-pack is now a six-pack of cider,
My inner Size Zero grows a whole lot wider
finds the hacksaw hidden in the hogroast
and hacks her way free,
pausing only for a swift one with pork scratchings on the side.
Deep fried.
If only I ate apples instead of being shaped like one.
I am a woman of many appetites but fruit salad ain’t fun.
My overactive mandibles leave love handles the size of trees,
I love my food but my food hates me.
Treacherous, it deposits clues
In my jelly belly
it’s a jelly belly, it’s a jelly belly, it’s a jelly belly, it’s a jelly belly
I tried sleeping with the fishes,
Even they didn’t fancy me.
They flashed their fins and went upscale
And threw me out of the sea

A whale washed up,
A chubby cherub after the Fall,
I roll across the land, a shapeless fog,
Devouring all in an epic trawl.
I wish the fog was a pea-souper
Cause I could scoff that an’ all
Scarf the lot like a hog.
Nom, nom, nom.
No! This lardy bard must recall
Lauren Bacall was no butterball.

Fat threatens to settle in folds,
In rolls of old cholesterol.
The make-up thickens
Like clotting cream,
Like two inches of plasticene,
Like fossil strata from the palioscene.
My bags are now luggage
My breasts are baggage
In body angst overdrive
My reflection is savage.
I will rivet closed my gaping maws
My beak snaps shut,
My greedy paws gathering greenery,
My jaws chewing up the scenery,
Filling the hole inside me
Coz I recognise the metaphors.
Grimly I scan the vision before me
And understand why no-one adores me.
I do not enthrall like Lauren Bacall
Tons of flaws, open pores,
I’m growing old like Diana Dors

Anna Chen September 2010