Cuisine is French for kitchen, but means cooking, just as toilette is French for 'toilet', but means public convenience, and je ne sais quoi is French for 'I don't know, what is it?', but actually means kangaroo.
British cooking has changed a great deal over the last few decades. These days it is no longer considered acceptable to serve your dinner party guests a potato and some charred roadkill. As people become more interested in quality food, good nourishment and Nigella Lawson, everyone wants to develop their skills as a chief (which is French for chef). As a result, the recipe book industry is now worth literally hundreds of pounds, and not a Christmas goes by without someone buying such a book as a gift for a distant relative who they don't really know, or as an office colleague's 'Secret Santa'.
There is also a huge retail sector devoted to providing the budding chef with a variety of useful kitchen implements, at which the chef will marvel how he or she previously managed without. There are few modern kitchens that are not equipped with implements like the cheese timer, the beanometer, or the garlic laser, nor indeed specialised dining equipment like the carrot spoon, the gravy flute and the new 'Theatre of Grapes' (TM).
Cuisine
Mao Zedong
Poet, politician and plumber extraordinaire
Son of a gay bank manager and a panda, Mao Zedong was created in 1918 to commemorate the death of WWI poet Wilfred Owen.
A bizarre child, he was shunned by his schoolmates due to his unfeasibly small size, having reached only 4 inches in height by the age of 12. Nonetheless, he was clearly a bright child, but the regimented teaching style in 1930s Hunan Province schools did not suit his artistic temperament and frankly wacky behaviour.
In his mid-teenage years he dropped out of school, becoming a drug-addled petty criminal, and eventually was arrested and jailed for running his own robot hedgehog fights in the back rooms of bars and brothels. He escaped from prison after copying keys by impressing them in the icing on fairy cakes that he baked to impress the governor, and then using these icing moulds to make new keys out of teaspoons from the prison canteen.
While in prison Mao had got into the habit of never changing out of his pyjamas, and perhaps due to the restrictions on his freedom during the day, he frequently sleepwalked at night. It was during one prolonged bout of somnambulance after his release that he became Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Subsequently, the entire period of his leadership was spent in a sleepwalk. No-one noticed, and he managed international diplomacy, the writing of his personal manifesto and the release of the hit single It's my Chinese People's Party and I'll rid the country of anti-proletarian imperialists in a bloody purge if I want to while apparently unconscious.
When he woke up in 1981 he was quite surprised to find he had been leader of the most heavily populated country in the world, which he had transformed beyond recognition. On being told of the mass killing and famines of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he didn't believe his informants, claiming that no-one could possibly be so dogmatically stupid, and asserted that they should have put their efforts into neutralising hippy popstar Donovan instead.
In the 1980s he was for a brief time the third member of entertainers the Chuckle Brothers, but retired after securing his fortune by inventing the spoon as an egalitarian alternative to the bourgoise knife and fork. He died suddenly in 1986, while peacefully sleepwalking across the newly opened M25 motorway.