Archives for 2011

The other evening (middle-aged speak for “months ago”), sitting having one of my favourite repasts – slow, bland, achingly solitary – at the OK Chinese restaurant on Wandsworth Road, I found myself shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation of the couple at the next table. They were a father and son in their late 40s and late teens respectively. They had a large-boned assurance and an ease with one another I found instantly attractive – how else to explain my moment of madness?

After all, a native Londoner, I revile above all things the folly of talking to strangers. Anyway, there was this attraction, and there was what they were saying: the son jollily expounding to his dad that, “In the 1500s, or maybe the 1700s – I’m not sure which – there was a huge flood in London, the whole city was under water, something like 25,000 people were drowned.”

The older man demurred: “No, I can’t believe that! I’m sure I’d’ve heard about it . . .” But the son persisted in his contention that the city had been completely deluged at some indeterminate point in the past, with a concomitant huge loss of life. It was at this point that I could no longer forbear, and leapt in with a potted version of the account of the 1524 flood-that-never-was, as told by Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

According to Mackay, a mania for prophecy conjoined with several soothsayers predicting a catastrophic high tide on the Thames for 1 February 1524 – the result was a mounting and wholesale panic.

As the appointed day neared, thousands fled their homes and set up encampments on the heights of Hampstead and the North Downs. The prior of St Bartholomew was so alarmed that he had a well-provisioned stockade erected at Harrow-on-the-Hill to which he retired with a few close friends – shades here of Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death”.

As we know, no flood occurred, and the populace trailed home feeling shamefaced in the way we all do after succumbing to asinine groupthink.

I was momentarily bowled over by the notion that this young chap, circa 2011, might be retelling not a piece of bona fide history learned from some sub-Schama at school, but a folktale that was still embedded in the popular unconscious of Londoners and that had, over the centuries, acquired the verdigris of veracity.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of the urban myth, which, despite spawning sodden stacks of toilet books in the past few decades, still continues to culture itself using the minds of the credulous as a substrate.

A recent one (middle-aged speak for “some years ago”) took the form of a round-robin email sent on by a friend who’s a senior editor at a national newspaper – and really should have known better. The gist of this scare story was that night-time drivers in sarf London shouldn’t flash their headlights if flashed by another car, because they would then be chased by the flasher and gunned down in cold blood.

I pointed out to my daffy pal that the spread of this delusion exactly coincided with a local upsurge in gun crime; moreover, didn’t she think it strange that the myth was being transmitted between white middle-class professionals via email, when all the shootings were black-on-black and confined to the lumpenproletariat?

But to return to the brackish matter in hand. My fellow diners heard me out, and then the dad mused: “Well, come to think of it, I suppose London must’ve flooded at some point – or else they wouldn’t’ve built the Thames Barrier.” I was about to explain to him that while London had been subjected to quite devastating floods – notably in 1953 – the loss of life had been in the low hundreds, and that furthermore the Thames Barrier had been built as an antediluvian measure, rather than après le déluge. But then I thought better of it and put my face back in my duck with ginger and spring onions.

Why? Well, you can’t win ’em all – and besides, I was reminded of how I had shared such moments of baseless conviction with my own late father. Our joint delusion had seemed altogether believable at the time, and we had chatted long into the night outlining the specifics of what, in later years, I came to realise was never, ever going to happen.

Socialism, I believe it was called.

“Do you mind if we perch here?” said the chubby little chappie in the blue suit as he and his porky pal – think layered blond hair, quilted gilet, jeans; think Chiswick, or Chester, or Chorleywood – hovered beside our table. “Yes,” I snapped, “yes, I do mind if you ‘perch’ here, it makes you sound like a brace of homicidal birds from The Birds who’re just waiting to pick us clean; however, you may sit here if you like.” They availed themselves of this opportunity and my friend Alex and I returned to discussing the matter in hand: All Bar One. “I’m slightly ashamed of myself,” he confessed, “but I hate it above all other chain eateries.”

“Me too! Me Too!” I cried. “But why do we hate it so much?” I cast a frenzied look around the high-ceilinged room, with its enormous plate-glass windows fronting the busy street, its expanses of exposed wood, its mega-blackboard neatly pseudo-chalked with the menu, its brass-topped tables and bar, its post-office clientele sousing their cares in Chardonnay, its huge earthenware pots from which suspect fronds groped. On the face of it, what wasn’t there to like?

The All Bar One chain started in 1994 with a single outlet in Sutton, Surrey, and has expanded over the years to where there are now 40 of these hybrid gastropub-cum-wine-bar-cum-bistros, from Edinburgh in the north to Portsmouth in the south. Back then, a brace of birds had the idea of opening a joint that was appealing to lone women who found pubs dark and intimidating – hence the trademark big windows, which afford female wine-bibbers a cloak of lightness, while allowing those passing by to check out the interior. Alex, who over the years has shinned up the moisturised pole to become editor of a major British men’s style magazine, knew all about All Bar One’s feminist credentials, but . . .

“I just can’t help it – maybe it’s a snob thing.”

In my case there was no maybe at all: it’s definitely a snob thing. Moreover, All Bar One was arguably the vanguard for all the banal Slug and Lettuce, Pitcher and Piano uglifications that have smeared their corporate slime across Britain’s high streets.

I stalked off between the high tables equipped with highchairs – an import from US sports bars that has no real function unless there’s a screen somewhere in the mid-distance showing NFL playoffs. That there isn’t at All Bar One is at least one thing to be thankful for. A sign directed me to the “LAVATORIES”, a term I haven’t heard spoken for years, although my late mother used to insist that it was the acme of U, as opposed to the horrifically non-U “toilet”.

This further pretentiousness galled me, and in the lavatory itself someone had left a full pint glass of greenish-amber fluid beside the commode in one of the stalls.

I hoped that this was an ironic comment on the relationship between beer and urine.

Back at our table, Alex had been served with his supper. The menu at All Bar One is capacious: taking in breakfast, specials, fresh from the grill etc, there are scores – if not hundreds – of items. Moreover, each of these items is a sentence in and of itself, complete with entire descriptive clauses, active and passive verbs, adjectives and even adverbs.

This laborious menu prosody documents a cuisine that sounds not so much like a fusion – but a car crash: Sesame tempura chicken fillet served with cucumber salad and a soy & wasabi dipping sauce, or indeed, grilled sea bass fillets with a spiced red lentil, potato and butternut squash ragu served with Asian-style pesto – which is what Alex had opted for, while I risked the tiger prawn linguine with a ginger, lime, saffron & smoked paprika cream.

It was an intimidating list of ingredients that suggested a dish of uncompromisingly strong flavour – not so much piquant as pokey. But I needn’t have worried. It turned out that there was a reason for the highchairs, because both our dishes were utterly, butterly tasteless. Alex’s orangey pulp of a ragu even looked like baby food, and he did it childlike justice by picking at it for a while, then setting his fork down. As for my linguine, a proper menu listing would’ve been: thawed prawns throttled by tasteless pasta. Nevertheless, I ate it all with gusto – after all, there’s a fine line between hatred and love. And if you’re a late bird like me you’re best off settling for anything that looks even vaguely wormlike.

The Peter principle states that employees are promoted to the point where they become incompetent – and there they remain, doing a crap job. What this axiom expresses is our general credulousness, bordering on collective delusion, when it comes to hierarchies. Try as we might to grasp that a more senior position in an organisation doesn’t ipso facto mean a more capable incumbent, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the belief that because, say, someone has the job title “foreign secretary”, he must be a world-bestriding statesman of great acumen.

The problem is that, while an individual may be good at job X, that doesn’t mean he’s fitted for position Y and, by the time he reaches management role Z, he may well be floundering hopelessly out of his depth. In most organisations, the Peter principle is vitiated by the well-known method of “managing upwards”, whereby efficient subordinates learn how to bolster and even control their inadequate superiors. British government ministers, who often have little or no experience of the portfolio they are given, have long been managed by their ostensible subordinates: the permanent undersecretary in whichever ministry it is.

It would be comforting to know that, in the current Middle East imbroglio, British foreign policy is not being formulated by the flamboyant white rose William Hague, but by some colourless wonk called Simon Fraser, who, apart from a brief sojourn in the Department for Business and Blah-Blah and a few years as Mandy’s Brussels bag carrier, has been steeped in the FCO’s arcane ways since the late 1970s. Comforting but, sadly, it is almost certainly not the case, because the political hierarchy is one of the few in Britain to which the Peter principle doesn’t uniformly apply.

Willie H is instructive in all this. He was a political wunderkind who addressed the Tory party conference in 1977, aged 16, with a ringing declamation about demography – “Half of you won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time,” and so on – and then went on to occupy the usual “coming man” positions in Oxford student politics. After his obligatory First in PPE and an MBA, Hague worked for McKinsey before entering parliament as the youngest Tory MP in 1987. Haguey-Waguey was in the government by 1990 and was minister of state for social security and disabled people by 1994. So far, so meteoric – but then comes the real zenith of his career: in 1995, Billy Fizz (as he was called by the publicans around Rotherham to whom he delivered soft drinks in the 1970s) was appointed Welsh secretary.

There! I rest my case. Is there any coupling of job title and name more apposite than this: “William Hague, Welsh secretary”?

It doesn’t so much trip off the tongue as deliquesce there, leaving a blissful residue of suitability. Every time I say, “William Hague, Welsh secretary”, I get a warm, contented feeling.

A recent psychiatric study has confirmed that saying “William Hague, Welsh secretary” over and over again like a mantra significantly ameliorates depression (the control, if you’re interested, was reciting “William Hague, Scottish secretary”). It was a happy time for Oor Wullie, too. He met and married the charming Ffion and, unlike most married couples, they still adore ffucking each other to this day.

But all good things must pass and, following the 1997 election defeat, the Tories stupidly ignored their well-tried method of avoiding the Peter principle (which is to have leaders only from a select caste, schooled from birth to assume the role) and tore Hague from his happy valleys with predictably dire results. I’ve no wish to dwell on this disaster and I think we’re all relieved that, after the interregnum of a couple of caretakers, a proper Etonian was installed in 2005; not only an Etonian, but one who had also studied at the Tony Blair Finishing School for Liberal Interventionists. The only sadness is that Cameron appointed poor Hague to be his foreign secretary.

At times like these, unless we’re all to go crazy, we need a foreign secretary who’s as steady as a rock, a colossus who bestrides the petty animosities of warring tribes. If we look back to the last time we were caught up in a situation like this, the name “Jack Straw” has just such a resonance – it’s no wonder things turned out so well.