- Hats off to father Gordon's family favour
- By Andrew Bolt
- Herald Sun
- 26/11/2008 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: PrincePlanet ( 6 articles in 2008 )
GORDON Ramsay has done us a small favour, and deserves a helping in return.
No, the favour he performed wasn't bonking "professional mistress" Sarah Symonds, or inspiring journalists to invent such a useful euphemism for her kiss-and-sell kind.
The celebrity chef deserves our thanks instead for finally making inedible the fraud that is the "Father of the Year" award.
Here is one more of those honours more often given to glorify not the winner, but the giver.
Rarely, if ever, is "Father of the Year" handed to a dad who sacrificed fame and fortune to spend time with his kids from the time they were in nappies - and is therefore utterly unknown. A worthy no-name simply won't get the publicity that look-at-us givers crave.
So the title tends to go instead to celebrities who, more than likely, actually got famous by putting in more time at the office than at home.
What's more, they are often awarded the honour without any of the judges actually knowing what really goes on once the front door closes and the say-cheese smiles are switched off.
Take Ramsay. He was two years ago named "Celebrity Father of the Year", and last year won "Celebrity Family of the Year", too.
Yet even then his wife, Tana, openly complained that "if I could change one thing about Gordon . . . it would probably be for us to have more time together".
So little time did he have for his family that they reportedly spent only Sunday nights with each other.
Now Tana has another grumble after a newspaper stakeout of a plush hotel room, and its slim, blonde occupant: it's said that one reason Ramsay was so often away is that he'd had a seven-year affair with a mistress.
Not just any mistress. Symonds, former lover of novelist Jeffrey Archer, is the author of Having an Affair - a Handbook for the Other Woman, in which she offers more insights into this champion dad and family man.
"A friend of mine was having an affair with a world-famous TV chef, well-known on both sides of the Atlantic for both his bad language and his good food," she blabbed.
"He complained to my friend that things weren't going well between him and his wife and that he was being made to sleep in the basement."
Did anyone bother to vet Ramsay before telling the world he was the Cordon Bleu of dads? A three-hats family man?
Likewise, did anyone vet Bob Hawke before naming him Victorian Father of the Year, and posing the future prime minister with his children and then wife - two of whom have little or nothing more to do with him?
DID anyone from the US Father's Day-Mother's Day Council look behind the big white teeth of US Democratic presidential contender John Edwards last year before making him, too, Father of the Year, and posing him with his cancer-stricken wife - eight months and 20 days before his mistress gave birth?
Here's a rule worth following. Don't give prizes for things you don't actually judge. If you can't vouch for a dad's private behaviour, don't tell the world he's officially the best.
And fact is, we strangers can't truly judge a dad unless it's by the children he raises.
It's like judging Ramsay as a chef. Surely you can't judge him great until you've actually sampled the results?
Let's stop, then, this "Father of the Year" pretence - or at least reserve the award for dads whose children have grown up into unmistakable testimonies of his love and care.
If Ramsay helps us to achieve that, he's done us a good turn. And, as I said, one good turn deserves a small other.
I don't know whether Ramsay is now getting the rounds of a Hell's Kitchen at home, or whether his wife will indeed, as some papers report, stand by her naughty boy.
Their business whether he's forgiven or fried alive. Not mine to judge, just as it wasn't anyone's right to judge Ramsay as Best Dad - or not when they were doing the judging from outside his house, and not inside.
No, the favour he performed wasn't bonking "professional mistress" Sarah Symonds, or inspiring journalists to invent such a useful euphemism for her kiss-and-sell kind.
The celebrity chef deserves our thanks instead for finally making inedible the fraud that is the "Father of the Year" award.
Here is one more of those honours more often given to glorify not the winner, but the giver.
Rarely, if ever, is "Father of the Year" handed to a dad who sacrificed fame and fortune to spend time with his kids from the time they were in nappies - and is therefore utterly unknown. A worthy no-name simply won't get the publicity that look-at-us givers crave.
So the title tends to go instead to celebrities who, more than likely, actually got famous by putting in more time at the office than at home.
What's more, they are often awarded the honour without any of the judges actually knowing what really goes on once the front door closes and the say-cheese smiles are switched off.
Take Ramsay. He was two years ago named "Celebrity Father of the Year", and last year won "Celebrity Family of the Year", too.
Yet even then his wife, Tana, openly complained that "if I could change one thing about Gordon . . . it would probably be for us to have more time together".
So little time did he have for his family that they reportedly spent only Sunday nights with each other.
Now Tana has another grumble after a newspaper stakeout of a plush hotel room, and its slim, blonde occupant: it's said that one reason Ramsay was so often away is that he'd had a seven-year affair with a mistress.
Not just any mistress. Symonds, former lover of novelist Jeffrey Archer, is the author of Having an Affair - a Handbook for the Other Woman, in which she offers more insights into this champion dad and family man.
"A friend of mine was having an affair with a world-famous TV chef, well-known on both sides of the Atlantic for both his bad language and his good food," she blabbed.
"He complained to my friend that things weren't going well between him and his wife and that he was being made to sleep in the basement."
Did anyone bother to vet Ramsay before telling the world he was the Cordon Bleu of dads? A three-hats family man?
Likewise, did anyone vet Bob Hawke before naming him Victorian Father of the Year, and posing the future prime minister with his children and then wife - two of whom have little or nothing more to do with him?
DID anyone from the US Father's Day-Mother's Day Council look behind the big white teeth of US Democratic presidential contender John Edwards last year before making him, too, Father of the Year, and posing him with his cancer-stricken wife - eight months and 20 days before his mistress gave birth?
Here's a rule worth following. Don't give prizes for things you don't actually judge. If you can't vouch for a dad's private behaviour, don't tell the world he's officially the best.
And fact is, we strangers can't truly judge a dad unless it's by the children he raises.
It's like judging Ramsay as a chef. Surely you can't judge him great until you've actually sampled the results?
Let's stop, then, this "Father of the Year" pretence - or at least reserve the award for dads whose children have grown up into unmistakable testimonies of his love and care.
If Ramsay helps us to achieve that, he's done us a good turn. And, as I said, one good turn deserves a small other.
I don't know whether Ramsay is now getting the rounds of a Hell's Kitchen at home, or whether his wife will indeed, as some papers report, stand by her naughty boy.
Their business whether he's forgiven or fried alive. Not mine to judge, just as it wasn't anyone's right to judge Ramsay as Best Dad - or not when they were doing the judging from outside his house, and not inside.
Source: https://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24707610-25717,00.html
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