Archives for 2011

The latest Real Meals column:

Only one kind of meal comes with an erratum slip: the catered formal dinner. My slip reads, “Please note: there is no pancetta wrap on the guinea fowl.” Fair enough – presumably some religious scruple is involved, although I’ve forgotten whose beanfeast this is: Jews or the Jewellers’ Association? Black-clad servitors are moving efficiently about the lily pond of circular tables, depositing plates at each setting. I was at a funeral of a friend recently where the eulogist recalled that the deceased had once wept at a formal dinner, upon realising his placement. I’m not feeling teary despite being flanked by middle-aged men in business suits, because, after all, I’m a middle-aged man in a business suit, too – and I’m as charismatic as Gurdjieff, with the coiled sexual intensity of a rutting rattlesnake.

Besides, the man on my right turns out to be witty and insightful. When I observe – apropos of the entrée being plonked in front of us – that the plated meal is a comparatively recent phenomenon, dating only from the late 1980s, he takes the conversational baton and runs with it: “I know. Twenty-odd years ago, all you ever got at one of these gigs was roast meat of some indeterminate kind, swimming in brown gravy.” We’re tucking in to our artful salads of French beans, grilled artichoke, black olives, confit tomatoes and soft-boiled quails’ eggs. “Nowadays, it’s always quails’ eggs,” says my man. “Which is fine, but I do wonder where they’re keeping all these quails. I mean, you never see an item on the news about how battery quails are being kept in unspeakable conditions.”

I resist the temptation to say “true dat” like a character in The Wire, confining myself to the observation that quailing conditions must be even more unspeakable than those of battery chickens, in absolute if not relative terms. Some sort of thumping electronic music has started up – I now notice that there’s a podium behind me on a stage flanked by visual display monitors and conclude that this must be some sort of awards dinner. This is confirmed when a man with one of those newscaster faces that has been basted by the regard of the multitude springs on stage and starts handing out small, gilded statuettes of the god Hermes. Jewellers – or Jews? – begin making their way to receive them; however I’m not paying much attention, transfixed as I am by the pat of butter that is positioned on a small square of bluey-grey slate in front of my plate.

I’m lost in reverie. As a child, I visited a slate mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog with my parents. After we’d been rumbled through the dripping caverns, a horny-handed miner demonstrated the divine suitability of the stone for roofing – or butter plates – by taking a chisel and hammer and tapping out thin leaf after leaf from a large block.

I come to and find that my guinea fowl has arrived: a breast stuffed with spinach mousseline and bare of its pancetta wrap lies in a semi-circular pool of jus, beside a weird, rectilinear chunk of compressed potato and two dollops of pre-splodged veg. I’m not in a position to judge how good this food is, because I haven’t eaten for 24 hours and would probably fall on Turkey Twizzlers, grunting and squealing with delight – all of which is by way of saying: it’s bootiful.

I’ve read all sorts of grisly things about how catered dinners are prepared, and I’ve no doubt that such things do occur. But this event is obviously in another league, and I’m not in the mood to be picky. Before my solipsism became pathological, I used to dread events where I had no control over who I talked to, but these days I welcome being forced to be other-centred. I’ve enjoyed talking to my fellow suits and, when the poached pear arrives, I’m so buoyed up that I cannot forbear from thanking the waitress.

“I bet you don’t get thanked that often in your line of work, do you?”
“No,” she replies. “We largely get ignored.”
“That’s why they make you wear black,” I continue, warming to my reheated theme, “so that you become invisible.”
“Possibly,” she replies, looking uneasy.
“Beneath contempt, Untermenschen -”
“You’re starting to bother me now.”

But she needn’t worry, because, at that moment, the man on my right plucks up my name card and cries: “You’re not Howard Jacobson!” Seconds later, I am being bundled from the hall by security. Ah, well. It was a real dinner – even if I wasn’t meant to be attending.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin / Now it’s gone, gone, gone, /Whoa-whoa-woh!” belts out the busker in the long tunnel that connects the Central and Northern Lines of the London Underground at Bank Station. He’s accompanied by a tinny boom-box that builds a Lego-sized version of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”. I’m not saying he’s a bad singer – because he’s not a singer at all, more a shouter who strikes attitudes with the mic. It’s strange because, in these quality-control-obsessed times, you now have to audition to torture people in this way. I try hard to imagine what such an untalent show would be like, but can’t – unless, that is, the Simon Cowell equivalents of Transport for London were actively seeking crap musicians.

That might well be the case, I continue to hypothesise as I allow my jaundiced eye to scan the oncoming people stream: goofy and glassy, split-endy and bendy, tall and short and hopelessly fat, all of them click-clack-slapping the tiles with that mounting frenzy that heralds the evening rush hour. After all, a critical consideration for public transport planners has to be a concept used in the science of fluid dynamics, namely, laminar flow. In a restricted column – such as a pipe, or a tube – streams of liquid will move parallel to one another without disruption, but if there are checks or disruptions, eddies may form. A good busker, by encouraging rush-hour commuters to slow down, might create dangerous cross-currents.

During the off-peak period, a proficient up-tempo musician might be desirable, provoking dense knots of dunderheaded teenage language students and valetudinarian tourists to get a fucking move on. The complexities of scheduling good and bad buskers with different tempi utterly preoccupy me until I find myself in a people puree struggling to mush itself into a Morden-bound train. “Please allow the passengers off the train,” crackles the PA system, and then: “Move right down inside the carriages.” I’ve grown up pulsing through the teeming arteries of the urban circulatory system, happy to be just another corpuscle. Arguably, on public transport systems, big-city rush hours exemplify not the madness of the crowd, but its sanity. You get your head down and go with it; too much thought is a dangerous thing, because if you pause to consider your situation – hemmed in by the herd – you might well lose it altogether. Which I’m in danger of doing, because one train has come and gone, then a second, and still there’s no let-up.

Worse still, as we snuggle up to one another in the pack, the clones around me begin to become dangerously individuated. The tall man in the camel-hair coat whose buttocks are grinding into my thigh, I mark him well by the brocade of lost hairs on his collar, and by the shaving nick on his blueing jaw. And that young woman whose elbow is tucked beneath my ribcage, well, her pinched brow and smudging beige lipstick suggest premature despair; I can see her an hour or so hence, shovelling down microwaved Lean Cuisine in front of a soap opera, tearful in a bathrobe she stole from a Comfort Inn.

At last I manage to get on a train – or, rather, the three of us do, still welded together like conjoined triplets. It’s such a tight fit, the driver has to open and shut the doors several times, and my neck is uncomfortably kinked to accommodate the leading edge. As is always the way, within feet of this 3D jigsaw of limbs there’s ample space, because no matter how many times it is urged to do so, the crowd is too unthinking to move right down inside the carriage. Over there people are reading newspapers, while over here our forced intimacy compels us to brainlessness – if I look into Camel Hair or Lean Cuisine’s eyes, I can detect no more self-awareness than you would in the eyes of heifer being prodded towards an abattoir.

But then they probably feel the same way about me – and as we jiggle and jounce our way through London Bridge, Borough and all points south, it impinges on me how wrong I was: oh yes, you can be blithe about the crowd’s sanity so long as it’s achieving laminar flow, but in this frozen turbulence there is nothing but mental derangement. My gargoyle face distends and twists, my mouth gapes and unbidden the words splurge:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin, now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa-whoa-woh!”

The latest Real Meals column considers The India Club on the Strand

As I have the gall to pontificate fortnightly on the places where people actually eat, it seems only meet that I should occasionally fess up to my habitual gnawing spots. Not, as regular readers of this column appreciate, that I’m one of those foodinistas who never chew fast’n’low. I even enjoy an occasional trip to McDonald’s late in the evening, when the sebaceous whiff of the departed teens has merged with the odours of the chip fat, the meat and the polystyrene.

I like to sit there in the artificial twilight, picking my teeth with the fries, wolfing a simple cheeseburger and washing it all down with glugs of a coffee-style drink; comforted, certainly, by the rock-bottom prices but also savouring that particularly poignant solitude that comes from eating solo in a public place. Yes, that’s my buzz – I admit it; far from looking upon mealtimes as social affairs, I gain the greatest of pleasure from masticating alone. Indeed, when I first saw Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté, I found the scene in which the guests at a bourgeois house sit around a table on commodes discussing defecation politely while shitting, then retire to small locked cubicles in order to eat, anything but surreal.

I suppose my ideally real meal would be consumed in one of those small family-run bistros you can still find in central Paris, with a few tables covered with check cloths, a prix fixe and some specials chalked on a board – the sort of gaff you imagine Inspector Maigret dining in when he’s fed up with sending for beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphine. I always liked the atmosphere of Simenon’s novels because of their concentration on the sensuality of the quotidian: a solitary appreciation of the texture of food, the play of tobacco smoke and the taste of wine.

Still, needs must, and since I live in dirty old London my equivalent is another anachronism – the India Club Restaurant on the Strand at Aldwych. I used to eat here as a penurious recent graduate in the 1980s. Back then I was amazed by the timeless quality of the place: the chequerboard of grotty lino leading up a flight of stairs, then another flight and into a dining room redolent of the 1950s: plain bentwood chairs, plainer melamine-topped tables, grot-brown floor, yellowy distempered walls, and on those walls affectingly naive portraits of Indian notables. Gandhi, in dhoti and granny specs, his hands held thus far apart as if to indicate the size of the great celibate’s . . . what? and captioned “On His Historic March to Dandi”. By the door there’s an even murkier daub of a gentleman with a patriarchal beard, who, the restaurant’s current patron, Yagdar Marker, told me, is none other than Dadabhai Naoroji, Britain’s first Asian MP and one of the founders of India’s Congress Party.

As I say, when I first went to the Indian Club it seemed beautifully old-fashioned – and not like an Indian restaurant in 1950s Britain, for there were hardly any of those, but like one in 1950s India. At that time, the place was frequented by Fleet Street hacks who referred to the food as “Gandhi’s revenge”. This is unfair, but no one is going to claim the Indian Club is a gourmet outfit. It offers up today exactly what it always has: serviceable Madras cuisine, heavy on the ghee.

Just as I like to eat alone, I hold to Wittgenstein’s dictum that it doesn’t matter what you eat, so long as it’s always the same thing. At the Indian Club I have the rasam, a tamarind, tomato and chilli pepper soup; the mixed bhajis – some are mild peppers, others are fiendish chillis; the tandoori chicken, some dal and some chapatis. All of this is washed down with masala tea.

I was eating this meal in the early 1980s and when, after a 20-year hiatus, I started going to the India Club again, I resumed eating it. In the meantime nothing here had changed! The world outside had horribly mutated but in this sepia burrow it was still India in the 1950s. Mr Marker dolefully informed me that when he took over in 1997 he was obliged to refurbish the hotel upstairs by Health & Safety, but he remained as dedicated to preserving the vintage ambience of the restaurant as I was to imbibing it.

So, if you’re in town and desire a break from the frenetic present, stop by. Some might say the Indian Club is a delusory place, but for me the real maya lies outside. I’m sure Dadabhai Naoroji would agree.

The latest Madness of Crowds column considers the halo effect of Dyson products:

A large part of mass human behaviour is dictated by our gullibility; by which I mean not just a simple compound of ignorance, obedience to authority and conformity to one’s peers but a more fundamental – and, in many ways, quite charming – will to be fooled. The etymology of the verb “to gull” is ascribed by the Oxford English Dictionary to the Old Norse gulr, meaning “pale” or “yellow”. Until recently, I found this derivation rather dubious because a far more plausible provenance is the simpleton sea fowl. Gulls are oppressively social: they take flight in great flapping clouds of conformity and their cries – at once plaintive, raucous and infuriating – sound to me like those of children disabused of a cherished belief.

Consumerism, the popularity of Jeremy Clarkson, fascism, advertising, all manner of speculative manias from tulips to property – to explain phenomena as irrational and diverse as these, it is not enough to suppose human beings to be easily swayed. Rather, we must be congenitally in the swing of things and only awaiting the slightest push to soar still higher. An example from my own life will tease this out.

A few months ago, the vacuum cleaner gave out and I went to buy a new one. Being design-conscious bourgeoisie, we’ve always favoured Dysons but the man at the local appliance shop said, “Oh, no, you don’t want one of them – we call ’em ‘2CVs’ in the trade ’cause you always see them fallen apart by the side of the road. They’re dear, too.”

I took this intelligence home and suggested we break brand loyalty but my wife snapped at me, “No, think again: we’ve had that Dyson for seven years. It’s amortised at less than £50 a year and it’s a good machine.” So, in the space of a few minutes, I went from rejecting something to ordering another one on the internet, simply because of my innate gullibility. Then again, I was at the British Library a week or so ago and found myself marvelling at the efficiency of the Dyson Airblade hand-dryers that have been installed in the toilets.

The Airblade, for those not familiar with it, utilises thin, high-speed jets of cool air to dry the hands in seconds. Its manufacturer claims that this makes it more environmentally friendly but, whether this is true, it’s damnably effective at desiccating.

Its modular form and positioning next to the urinals mean that, sooner or later, someone is bound to put it to the ultimate test. When the subject of Dyson products came up at lunch with a group of design professionals a day or so later, I said quite casually, “I pissed into a Dyson Airblade the other day and it completely evaporated all of my urine in mid-air.”

One woman was a little shocked; a man contended that my flow can’t have been that great; another man said there must have been some sort of spume – but the important thing is that none of them doubted my claim for an instant. This, I realised immediately, was yet another example of the well-attested “halo effect”, whereby when an individual is possessed of an egregious characteristic, it renders people insensible to subtler ones.

True, it grieved me a little that my overriding characteristic was to be the sort of man who people instinctively believed would piss into in a hand-dryer but there was a complementary explanation: the halo effect of Dyson products. These design professionals, while disputing the excellence of Dyson’s cyclonic separation system for vacuum cleaners, nonetheless remained convinced that, if there were to be a hand-dryer that could dissipate a stream of urine in mid-air, that hand-dryer would be a Dyson. Put the two halo effects together and a sort of aurora of credibility enveloped the entire pissing-in-the-Airblade scenario.

There was all of this and there was also that other key component of gullibility: people’s need to conform. Meditating on the incident later, I realised that it had been the woman’s outrage that had confirmed the veracity of my story; had she merely dismissed the tale, the others would no doubt also have begun to demur. As it was, this small crowd continued to reinforce one another’s group-think throughout a long lunch. By the time I got home, I, too, had begun to believe that I had pissed in a Dyson Airblade hand-dryer; I was also more susceptible to the OED’s etymology for “gullible”. Pale? Yellow? It made perfect – albeit faintly disgusting – sense.