When home-cooked turkey roasted Reformed chicken.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve developed a whole new respect for the WI.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll never unsee its indestructible president, Virginia Austen, using her WI pinny like a matador\u2019s cape while Ralph (our white van delivery driver) and his Reform rabble charged about like bargain-basement bulls.<\/p>\n
Our ex-Conservative MP (now Reform hopeful), Rupert Fitzwell, has pivoted into fast-fried chicken with his venture-capital pals. Robeena \u2014 our resident clairvoyant and, inconveniently for Rupert, his aunt \u2014 announced he\u2019s up to his eyebrows in debt, largely because he found the MP\u2019s salary tragically incompatible with his lifestyle.<\/p>\n
The chicken scheme came via Rupert\u2019s wife, who went to the Amazon for \u201cspiritual refreshment,\u201d lost half her body weight through aggressive vomiting resulting from the traditional potions she received, and was eventually rescued by fried chicken from a shack in Bel\u00e9m (now climate-conference Disneyland). She brought home a terrifyingly moreish recipe and Fried Chicken Shack UK (FCSUK) was born.<\/p>\n
To market it, they offered free buckets for our residential complex’s Christmas lunch. Douglas, our manager, snapped them up and used the savings to hire \u201cMista Kipling\u201d, a man who looks like Father Christmas and sounds like a slightly haunted jukebox. Robeena intervened: absolutely not. The WI stepped in with a traditional Christmas food \u2014 on one condition: we back its campaign to stop an FCSUK opening next to the primary school.<\/p>\n
So we all turned up in the cold with the WI, facing an angry mob led by FCSUK\u2019s mascot, Chick Chick, a giant yellow chicken demanding \u201cfreedom\u201d to eat what they want to eat. Ralph was there too, ready to share his views on immigrants with anyone unfortunate enough to have ears. Behind them: people livestreaming for YouTube and GB News.<\/p>\n
Then someone yelled, \u201cGet Jamie Oliver!\u201d The crowd spotted the only well-dressed middle-aged man \u2014 Rupert \u2014 and drenched him in chicken grease, convinced he was the TV chef who \u201ckilled turkey Twizzlers\u201d. Rupert protested. The grease did not listen.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, Mista Kipling arrived, struck up \u201cFood Glorious Food,\u201d and everyone \u2014 yes, including Chick Chick \u2014 started singing. We all shuffled home. Peace restored. Sort of. We still can\u2019t agree what \u201cglorious\u201d food is, but we all agreed that we didn\u2019t want unwelcome additives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When home-cooked turkey roasted Reformed chicken. I\u2019ve developed a whole new respect for the WI. I\u2019ll never unsee its indestructible president, Virginia Austen, using her WI pinny like a matador\u2019s … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60,3,56],"tags":[2878,2892,2806,2893,2653,221],"class_list":["post-136641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-society","category-columns","category-food-farming","tag-dec-2025","tag-jamie-oliver","tag-reform-uk","tag-school-food","tag-ultraprocessed-foods","tag-verity-bastion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}