On Vexperts and the Birthday Cake Issue.

The vexperts are at it again. You know, those lonely and presumably inadequate people working for organisations you’ve never heard of who spend their time sticking their meddling fingers into matters of no consequence so they can tell us what we must and must not do.

This time it’s all about cakes in the office. The sharing of cake is a time-honoured tradition in British offices on the occasion of it being somebody’s birthday, but the vexperts say it must stop. It encourages the consumption of an unhealthy comestible, say the all-knowing ones. It was even remarked that the sharing of cake in an office is no different than subjecting people to passive smoking (presumably missing the fact that smoke particles linger in the air in precisely the same way that cake crumbs don’t.)

This is nannyism at its silliest. Cake has been consumed for heaven knows how many centuries. It’s one of the sweet staples of developed cultures, and nearly everybody eats it either habitually or at least on special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas. We know it’s high in saturated fat but so are lots of things, and there’s no shortage of general advice that we should be circumspect in the matter of saturated fat. Having a piece of cake a few times a year when one of your colleagues has a birthday is hardly likely to result in catastrophic illness. And those who feel strongly averse to it can always politely decline.

This reminds me of that time a few summers ago when some half baked vexpert told us we should all paint our houses white when there were a few days of heat wave forecast (presumably missing the fact that while white walls reduce solar gain to some extent, they have no effect whatsoever on high ambient temperatures. And that’s apart from the obvious practical objections.) So let’s ask a few questions.

Who are these people?

Where do they come from?

How much do they get paid for delivering such spurious drivel?

Why do we tolerate them?

But what really concerns me is that there are probably people out there who take this nonsense to heart and deny themselves the simple, short-lived, and relatively harmless pleasure every 27^th September. And I take serious umbrage at the fact that the BBC has so little regard for my intelligence specifically, and common sense in general, that they treat such silliness as sound advice on their news website.