The reason I raise this alarming possibility is that he has been ranting about demonic eggbeaters from this neck of the woods, and I believe I may have identified the beast in my kitchen cupboard.
It’s a hand-held electric model, second-hand from a daughter-in-law who had upgraded to a flash stand-alone mixer.
She may have looked askance at the questionable cord on my old beater when I brought it out to whip cream on family occasions. (Originally bought at a garage sale for my paper-making craze, that beater was possibly from the 1950s.)
The newer model gets little use, but over time it has become a bit uppity.
When I try to get it to do something it doesn’t like, it shrieks like a banshee, although I am not sure if it is one of the green ones which exercise Mr Jones.
And so it was when I was attempting to cream the butter and sugar last week for my only concession to the festive season, the Christmas cake.
It was my fault the butter was not sufficiently soft, or cut small enough, which meant it rushed into the interior of the beaters and stubbornly stayed there, distancing itself from any contact with the sugar, while the machine screamed and the beaters chugged about pointlessly.
Every now and then I tentatively smelled the motor to see if it was in danger of bursting into flames. No.
I was attempting to follow Annabel Langbein’s excellent cake recipe which includes prunes soaked in brandy.
Eventually I decided (sorry, Annabel) creaming the butter and sugar was not going to happen so I threw in the five eggs.
After some more shrieking the mixture turned into a liquid of dubious consistency.
When all ingredients were added, the mixture looked far too big for the size of tin specified. I was unwilling to admit the bleedin’ obvious, that it was due to my failure to ever measure anything properly.
Since I have made this recipe before in a tin which was too big, resulting in a large but shallow cake, there was no excuse for a re-enactment, but repeat the sin I did (sorry again, Annabel).
Now I have what I hope will be a delicious cake, but its slices will have the Ebenezer Scrooge designer label.
The only good thing about it is that when people ask me about my Christmas plans, as they inevitably do at this time of year, I can say I have made a cake.
And that is it. At the time of writing, I have no idea what I will be doing on The Day and could not care less.
My attitude to Christmas is similar to the government’s towards its Paris Agreement commitment.
Ignore it or do something half-baked (ba dum tss!) which can easily be decried by anyone who has expertise in the field.
In my Christmas cake case, that would be Annabel, although I am sure she would be too polite to do so, and in the government’s case it is everyone who knows anything about climate change issues, including the climate change commissioner.
In my defence, I am not pretending to be enthusiastic about Christmas the way the government is still professing to be committed to emissions’ reductions.
It has done nothing to show such commitment, with a series of decisions heading us in the wrong direction and conveniently ignoring its international legal obligations on climate.
Bizarrely, it has gutted the Emissions Trading Scheme, even though that was the main way it said it expected to meet emissions targets.
It has also forgotten cross-party support for our emissions targets which have somehow now become all former Greens co-leader James Shaw’s fault.
The government’s latest nonsense on climate change is its response to the Climate Change Commission’s report from a year ago.
It rejected its recommendations, as far as I can tell because they might slightly affect our gross domestic product. When you are all about going for economic growth that will not do.
But as commentators have pointed out, the expected GDP effect of doing what the commission recommended is marginal compared with what actuaries expect will be at least a 25% drop in global GDP if there is 2°C of warming by 2050.
Nor does there seem to be any consideration of the huge numbers of people expected to die from the effects of global warming if the game of let’s pretend climate change is not happening continues here and elsewhere.
Faced with the ongoing hogwash from the government on climate change, turning into a demonic eggbeater, green banshee or even a woke riddled munchkin keen to fry eggs on solar panels, may be the only sane response.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
