Off piste on the Butter Mountain

You must forgive me for going off-piste again with this post. Blame it on me being piste off that there's no Mastermind tonight

In the building where I work there is a ban on putting used Dolce Gusto/Nespresso coffee pods in the bins. And the thing is that I do like a Dolce Gusto when I sit down at my desk in the morning to find out how many calls to the DAP have come in overnight. Normally the empties are taken and disposed of by one of my colleagues. However, she was on leave all last week and part of the previous so on Thursday I took a carrier bag into work in which to carry away the empties and dispose of them elsewhere.

Come the end of the day, as I was taking my empties-filled bag to my car, my boss asked me what I was going to do with them. To which I replied that my plan was to add them to the EU’s empty coffee pod mountain. At this point it’s probably a good idea to tell you that my manager is still in her mid 20s. She looked at me askance. “You know,” I continued, “like the EU butter mountain?” No, of course she didn’t know. Total incomprehension. For one thing, we haven’t even been part of the EU for a good few years (sadly in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.) For another thing, according to my perfunctory research there hasn’t even been an EU butter mountain since about 2017.

I mean, it’s not that I’m nostalgic about the European butter mountain, you understand. I’m only nostalgic about the mental picture it conjured up the first time that I heard the phrase. When I was a kid it conjured up images of various woolly hatted continental types skiing down an unusually yellow and slippery mountain somewhere outside Strasbourg. I suppose I felt it belonged in the same category as Max Boyce’s outside-half factory and Ken Dodd’s jam butty mines. Somehow I can’t see the Destination X team visiting any of those destinations. Well, not in the first series anyway.