Digested week: put away the hot wax and don’t eat your Christmas tree | Lucy Mangan
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Never trust a hippy selling pine-flavoured butter. Plus, a watch that finally explains it all. The AFSCA (Belgium’s federal agency for ensuring food supply chain safety – but of course you knew that) has been forced to issue a warning to the good people of Poirot’s homeland not to eat their Christmas trees. This is after the city of Ghent – an environmentalism hotspot in northern Flanders – posted tips on how to recycle their obsolete festive conifers into food, including using them to make pine-flavoured butter.
![[Lucy Mangan]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/Lucy-Mangan,-R.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Non, strongly advises the AFSCA. And possibly nee and nein too, given the polyglottal nature of the place and the importance of the issue. Christmas tree needles are likely to be covered in pesticides, flame retardant and other things you wouldn’t want to be ingesting freely, especially now your relatives have all gone back home.
![[Health Secretary Wes Streeting (left) and shadow home secretary Chris Philp waiting to appear on the BBC1 current affairs programme, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5ea20a59d6a9d3ebf998109694f07c93310fb0fe/0_75_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I offer you this story in the hope that it will encourage you to join me in following the one rule for life that has never yet let me down: trust no hippy, nowhere. You will die if you do. A friend asked me if I wanted to go out for lunch with her this week sometime.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m already seeing someone this week.”. “What?” she said. It was then I remembered that she is quite a new friend – we have only known each other about a year – and she has yet to be fully inducted into the magic that is me.
