Archives for 2011

I’ve been coming to the small Devonian port town of Dartmouth for 20 years. When the kids were still in scale with this dinky ville, we’d rock up for a few summer days to coarse fish for crab from the harbour wall, ride the vintage steam train to the beach at Paignton or take the river cruiser up the Dart to the crystal-dangling delights of Totnes. But the bulk of my time in Dartmouth has been spent alone and off season. Courtesy of friends who own a cottage wedged up one of the town’s vertiginous wynds, I am able to retreat there to write.

I say “there” but I mean “here”, as I’m in Dartmouth as I write, peering out through a rain-speckled windowpane. Off-season Dartmouth has all the queasy romance of a ghost Trumpton. At night, staring out over the town’s roofs, there is barely a light to be seen. By day, the streets are empty. The sailing boats in the harbour are battened down for the winter and the mournful ting-ting-ting! of nylon rigging smacking against aluminium masts follows the lonely scribe as, deranged by his creative imagination, he batters his way through the shades of long-gone yachties, their V-necked Pringle pullovers crumbling into dust like some bizarre outtake from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Needless to say, such a summer playground is well-stocked with eateries. Whether you favour a quick snack – Pasty Presto – or a murder mystery dinner – the Royal Castle Hotel – or a perverted gobble – Edward’s Fudge Pantry – the town has something for everybody. Even in November, most of these joints are still open, their lonely staff waiting for equally isolated diners. I’ve almost always eaten at Tsang’s, a tiny, booth-like Chinese restaurant that offers excellent fresh seafood dishes. I’ve been going to Tsang’s for so long that the waitress, Irene, has retired, leaving behind only a memento of her presence in the form of a faintly lubricious commemorative dish entitled “Irene Beef”.

At the urging of my friends, I tried a new gaff last night. RockFish has opened on the harbour side, the brain food of Mitch Tonks, impresario behind the FishWorks chain, which has three branches in London. The Tonks philosophy is summed up by a slogan on the tablecloths: “Fish so fresh, tomorrow’s is still in the sea”. You can’t argue with that, and the fish in RockFish is fresh, tasty and well cooked.

I had the signature battered cod and chips, which came with the near-obligatory Mandelson guacamole (mushy peas), but there was a special of sea bass encrusted with chilli that would’ve tempted me, were it not that herby encrustation is to contemporary fish as basting with entitlement is to David Cameron. The RockFish was, by off-season standards, heaving – I counted 14 comers and diners during my scant, hour-long feed. However, while the establishment cried out, “What’s not to like!” with every fibre of its being, I cavilled.

There was the dot-com typography – when restaurants begin to style themselves like email addresses, I’m virtually gone. Then there was the decor: a tunnel-like space with a steep internal pitch and a cladding of weather-worn, paint-daubed boards. I got the fish shtick: we were meant to be in a beach hut, hence our tableware, which consisted of flimsy cardboard boxes. Setting aside the sustainability of origami platters, there’s a reason, Mitch, why restaurant food is served on crockery, which is that it can be heated. Without the added warmth of a hot plate, the second law of thermodynamics had reduced my cod to an entropic condition long before it was finished. The chips – some cut as thick as Ukip – were stone cold.

Looking up at the sloping ceiling, where the tablecloth glyph of fish and slogan had been replicated in the knowing form of kids-drawings-really-done-by-adults, it occurred to me that RockFish was a good example of what the architectural critic Owen Hatherley has dubbed “pseudo-modernism”: design that, with its knowing incorporation of the gimcrack into the commercial environment, underpins the heretofore complacent neoliberalism of our era.

It was a biggish insight to be provoked by a fancy fish and chip shop – although by no means as big as some of my chips, one of which had the dimensions of a dildo in The Story of O.

I thought Edward ought to hear about it, but when I got round to his fudge pantry, it was sadly shuttered.

I remember 31 October 2001 well enough. I’d just flown in to Minneapolis and was staying at some spooky chain hotel or other. There was a sign on the reception desk that read: “We regret we’re unable to offer candy to our guests as we would normally do, because of the current terrorist threat.” The background rumour was that al-Qaeda was widening the ambit of its evil to include poisoning Hallowe’en treats – all across the US already traumatised kids were being urged to stay home, lest they get a gobful of lethal Islamofascism. In truth, there was an aptness to this febrile myth, as Hallowe’en is now so entrenched in the American collective psyche as an antic pagan counterpoint to the society’s workaday religiosity. Americans take their Hallowe’en way seriously, and in the larger cities it’s an excuse for all sorts of adult devilry as well as the usual juvenile japes.

I remember being in New York one Hallowe’en shortly after my third child was born and, because of the massed celebrants, having to walk 20 blocks or so uptown from the Village to our hotel, carrying the infant in my arms. We were passed by devils and demons and fetishists in gas masks wearing full-length black rubber coats – but far more bizarre was that every third or fourth ghoul peered at him and said, “Gee, is that a real baby?”, so in thrall were they to dressing up. When I was a child, we lived in the US for a year and I experienced trick-or-treating for the first time. I was bowled over by the notion that simply by putting on a plastic mask and going from door to door, you could amass large quantities of sweets.

As I recall, there was no such practice in England at that time – although my wife, who grew up in Scotland, says she remembers trick-or-treating well from her own childhood. This would accord with established wisdom regarding the custom, which derives in part from the poor soliciting food on the eve of All Saints’ Day in return for praying for the departed. The folk belief was that the souls of the newly dead still wandered the earth and that this was the last opportunity for them to avenge any wrongs; conversely, it was the final chance for the living to appease them. The Reformation put paid to this fluid cosmos with its commingling of those above and below the ground, and henceforth souls were to be neatly boxed off in Purgatory to await the final trump.

Scots and Irish Catholics kept at it, and when they immigrated to the US in the second half of the 19th century, they took the custom – which by then had mutated into an exchange of sweetmeats for a rather more mundane deliverance – with them.

Trick-or-treating established there, popular culture (film, television etc) in due course reseeded it back in England. What a crazy-go-round of simulated mayhem! Like some folkloric correlate of the North Atlantic oscillation, high levels of credulousness rush from one side of the ocean to the other and back again, carrying with them millions of rubber bats, wonky pitchforks and tankers full of spray-on cobwebs.

Not, you appreciate, that I’m a killjoy – I like a reinvention of an ancient festival with enhanced commercial opportunities as much as the next sap. Show me an Up Helly Aa and I’ll put on a horned helmet (£19.99 rrp, terms & conditions apply); direct me to Glastonbury Tor and I’ll pitch not one but 30 disposable dome tents (a snip at £32.99). Those poor Italians, groaning under the deadweight of having to pay the interest on their sovereign debt – they’ve been driven to consider abolishing a saint’s day so that they can boost productivity. But we here in northern Europe, the realm of fiscal rectitude, understand that that way madness lies.

No, instead of getting rid of public holidays we should increase the opportunities for consumption of such ephemerals as sweets, fireworks and glow-in-the-dark antlers. By the time you read this column, the equally factitious festival of 5 November – remember, remember! – will have been and gone. Back in the day, children (get this!) made their own effigies of the papist terrorist wannabe and used them to gain the funds for a few bangers and firecrackers. Now what kind of use would that homespun fun be for that longed-for desideratum, growth? So much better to withdraw 20 quid from the cashpoint and spunk it straight off in a shower of screaming sparks. As for the guy, why on earth hasn’t some Sugaresque entrepreneur spotted the gap in the market for prêt-a-brûler? God knows there are enough public figures clamouring to be burnt in effigy nowadays, all the way from Cameron to Clegg to Cable. And that’s only the C’s! We could even burn Sugar as well, thus joining Hallowe’en seamlessly with Guy Fawkes Night in a week-long saturnalia. What glee!

The sweet pork with savoury rice (or potatoes) at £3.40 doesn’t seem so bad to me, especially when it’s perfectly tasty and comes piping hot on a damp, autumn day. I could’ve had spaghetti bolognese for the same price or spicy chicken and special rice for 10p less. I could even have gone for the more Dickensian lamb’s liver, mash, steamed cabbage and onion gravy – a snip at £3. And there were several healthy options, including a cheese or ham salad with a jacket potato and coleslaw, weighing in at £3.16.

The combination of low prices and the slightly quirky price points – there are other dishes costing such non-commercial amounts as £2.09 and even £3.01 – should alert you to where we are this week, namely a works canteen.

Time was, I suppose, when the great majority of the British workforce had access to a subsidised works canteen of some kind – it was part of the great postwar settlement, together with such nostrums as full employment and a welfare system. Nowadays, we have no need of such frivolities – we have Starbucks and Bupa and sub-sub-subcontractors, for such is the way of progress. True, Go Ahead London is a private business but as Colin Opher, general manager of Stockwell bus garage, assures me, as we sit in the tiled canteen, there’s still some of the old London Transport ethos.

When it comes to food, at any rate. The canteen is open from 7am to 10pm every day (with last orders at 9.30pm), serving a full hot menu to drivers, mechanics and other staff. You can mosey in in the morning and Theresa, the canteen manager, and her staff will plunk down grilled kipper fillets and brown toast in front of you for a mere £1.75, the menu card noting that this healthy fare comprises 418 calories.

Colin tells me that the canteen is fullest on Fridays, the day after staff receive their weekly payslips. There may no longer be any physical pay day, but there is still the anticipation of the weekly wage going into the account; this engenders collectivism in the workforce.

My impression of the bus garage – which I walk past every day – is that it’s a happy enough place. In the late 1940s, the West Indian immigrants who arrived on the SS Empire Windrush were quartered up the road from here, deep underground in a giant air-raid shelter. A half-century on, Colin has drivers on his books who are second- and even third-generation African-Caribbean employees. He tells me that the African and African-Caribbean staff get on well together – unusual for this neck of the woods – and there are also sizeable Portuguese and British Asian contingents. The staff dispersed around the canteen seem relaxed, their high-vis jackets lending fauvist intensity to the light-green tiling on the walls. There’s a game of dominoes clacking on at one table; at another, newspapers are being read intently. A couple of huge fruit machines wink in the corner.

It helps that the canteen is well lit by high windows. They’re difficult to replace, Colin tells me, as they’re the original Crittall ones. That’s the downside of having a Grade II-listed garage that, in 1951, when it was built, had the largest pre-stressed concrete roof in Europe.

On sunny days, the drivers cluster by the main gates, smoking and drinking mugs of tea, while the mechanics have created a sort of “peace garden” that runs along the flank of the building, complete with its own makeshift shelter. I don’t want to overstate what a happy, extended family inhabits Stockwell bus garage, but if the truism that the heart of any home is its kitchen holds good, the sight of Theresa and her colleagues dishing up jerk chicken – Friday is jerk chicken day – must be perennially warming.

Time was when most bus garages had their own canteen, but now only seven or so of the bigger garages in London do. Drivers who have waiting periods at Euston usually eat at the University College Hospital canteen, which is also open to the public, while those waiting at the stand by Clapham Junction have recourse to Asda.

As I chase grains of rice about my plate, Colin casts an eye around to see if Lena, his oldest driver, is in. She’s been with the company since 1978 and, at 71, shows no sign of retiring. Even before the recent legislation, there was no mandatory retirement policy at London General. So long as they pass their medicals, Colin says, the last thing the company wants is to lose its older employees – it’s a job that benefits from the application of wisdom. Still, if drivers want to stay on the road, they’d better give the “London General Special” a swerve – a full English breakfast of artery-busting proportions – and pay attention to Theresa’s laminated card by the till: “KICK THE SUGAR”.

This week, I thought I’d run, piecemeal, through some of the smaller follies I’ve encountered in the past seven days, such as the cab rank outside Clapham Junction station – or rather, the attitude of one cabby towards it. The rank is situated in the middle of a busy road with no safe pedestrian access; when I remarked on this, having managed to get wife, child and dog into a cab without them being crushed, the cabby said, “It’s always been like that.” As if this justified any ridiculousness: you could imagine him in all ages and places – say, squinting at rebellious slaves crucified along the Appian Way – and, when you remarked on the barbarism, shaking his head and saying, “It’s always been like that.” This kind of madness has a name – conservatism.

But there are equally deranging purviews that are bang up to date. Dining with elderly friends – all bar one in their 90s – at a fancy bar-cum-restaurant, I suggested to the waitress that she turn off the muzak, because it was making things difficult for those with hearing aids. She was utterly discombobulated. “But . . .” she managed to squeeze out, “we can’t have no music – this is a restaurant.” When I last checked, food-for-sale and tables-to-eat-it-on defined a restaurant, not Phil Collins warbling, “I can hear it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord . . .”

Just as zeitgeisty are obese people on mobility scooters wearing tracksuits. The quintessential sight of modern Britain, it should be put on postcards together with jolly policemen carrying Heckler & Koch rifles, Olympic stadiums with built-in obsolescence and looters trying on clothes.

I was having difficulty getting the organisers of a literary festival to book me a hotel room I could smoke in. The saga went on for some time, until I spluttered over the phone: “Why can’t you just call round the local hotels and find me one?” There was a silence, then my interlocutor said, “Well, you see, we don’t actually book the hotel rooms. It’s done by another company.” A vision of interlocking private enterprises as complex as a medieval mosaic sprang to my mind: once it would’ve been another department that was responsible, but now it’s the Hidden Hand of the Market that’s afflicted with paralysis.

In Boots, the poor pedant in front of me at the till engaged in a lengthy debate with the shop assistant: “Don’t you see,” she was complaining as I tuned in, “on this 25 per cent off voucher it says that it’s valid with transactions over £40, and these two items I’m buying cost £46 altogether.” The shop assistant shook her head wearily. “No,” she rejoined, “the voucher is only valid if one of the items you’re buying costs more than £40.” “But,” said the customer, “that’s not what ‘transaction’ means – a transaction is a single act of purchasing, no matter how many individual items are involved, that’s the dictionary definition.” I wandered to another till – when someone appeals to the dictionary in Boots, hysteria is surely in the offing.

Mind you, at least you could, in principle, consult a dictionary in Boots, because it has bright strip-lighting. Not so in the corporate hotels that litter the arterial byways of our land. I stayed in three last week and in not one of them was the bedside reading lamp worthy of the name. At one, I managed to contrive enough illumination by removing the shade, but mostly I had to adopt rather disturbing – and lewd – postures in order decipher print. Perhaps no one reads in hotel rooms any more, in which case you should find a talking book of the Bible in the bedside table, shouted out by Brian Blessed.

And so, finally, to Gloucester, from where I had to take a minicab to Cheltenham. “Montpellier Gardens,” I said to the driver. “Hmm,” he hmmed, puzzled, “I’m not altogether sure of that location.” I observed that it was probably near the town hall, and he said, “You’re probably right,” I said I had hoped he had a more reliable mental map of the environs than me, given that he was the local, and he said petulantly: “But it’s not local, is it, it’s Cheltenham.” I pointed out that this was hardly Ulan Bator, and besides he had a satnav to assist him. “Ah, but you see,” he said, his tone suggesting that this was the clincher, “they’re always putting up new estates and that in Cheltenham.” Such intense parochialism was at once deranging – and quite comforting. I sat back to enjoy the ride along the A road into the unknown.

Strada is the cool pizza chain: it’s the nouveau riche to Pizza Express’s liberal bourgeois, the Campari to Domino’s Carlsberg and the Fellini to Pizza Hut’s Mike Myers. Thoughts of Fellini are never far from my mind when at Strada and they were especially present the other day, when, during an unseasonably hot lunchtime, I ate at a branch that had open windows facing on to an exhausted runnel of a street backed up with traffic. I found it difficult to sit there, contemplating the furled, white napery and the green place mats, without thinking of the opening sequence of his neorealist masterpiece La strada (1954), in which Gelsomina is hustled home from the beach by her sisters and sold to the travelling strongman Zampanò for 10,000 lire – it’s bestial, sure, but cheap, too.

My god-daughter Beatrice was speaking, quite reasonably, of her wheat allergy to the waiter, asking if they did gluten-free pasta or pizza bases. At the end of the restaurant, the flames of the pizza oven played merrily on a ceiling-high, transparent wine cooler. All should’ve been right with the world and it would’ve been, were it not for this dreadful miasma that I could sense gushing from some internal vent, fogging up my mind.

There are 70-odd Stradas in Britain, with most of them – doh! – in London. The government wishes us to consume our way out of recession but that’s not going to happen so long as the majority of a restaurant chain’s outlets are bounded by the M25. What’s needed is some Duce-style visionary sending pizzerias and burger joints to those latter-day equivalents of Abyssinia: the Midlands and (gulp!) the north. Only when every clone high street has every eatery – Subway biting down on Pret, Pret munching EAT, EAT stuffing itself with McDonald’s – will the good times return.

No, the amiable waiter said, they didn’t have gluten-free flour and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee that it wasn’t contaminated, because, you see, they make their own pasta and pizza dough and flour tends to gust about the kitchen in clouds that are at once insubstantial and grittily tangible – OK, I concede that the last bit was me, but the waiter was turning his inability to provide something into a selling point. Genius.

Beatrice ordered the risotto funghi and I chose the stufato di pesce. We had side salads – rocket and Parmesan, and mixed. With a Coke for me, still water for Bea and 10 per cent service included, the bill came to well under £30. We were ordering from the £6.95 prix fixe lunch menu – but then, isn’t that the shape of things to come? Western civilisation is at the prix fixe stage of decline – long gone are à la carte days of yore. Soon enough, we’ll be in the past-its-sell-by-date discounted dump bin of history. Bea was sitting on a banquette that had been covered with the kind of greyish, slightly shiny fabric that Communist Party apparatchiks wore during the Brezhnev era – like I say, Strada is cool.

The couple at the next table were Italian. I could tell because he, while looking perfectly tough, was wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt and she had white-blonde hair, cut to resemble vinyl. I explained to my god-daughter that funghi tasted lovely, although to my knowledge they had no food value whatsoever, even though the long filaments of their rhizomes can extend through the soil for kilometres, probing for heavy metal contaminants to suck into their fleshy heads. “Wow,” she said, “they really are growths, aren’t they?” “Oh, yes,” I observed. “If they were grouped on the menu with athlete’s foot, they’d get far fewer takers.”

I had to eat my hearty fish stew with my napkin tucked into my collar, lest I flick pasta grains and tomato sauce all over my shirt. It’s like that nowadays – life has to be approached with new stratagems devised to counter embarrassment, both for me and others.

I called for the bill. I once heard two waitresses discussing the most offensive things patrons can do. One contended that it was hailing them with a finger click; the other that it was scribbling on an imaginary airborne bill. Long ago, I devised my own method, which involves thrusting both my arms in the air at odd angles while adopting a transfixed gurn. When I’d paid, I looked up and Beatrice had gone – either that or the miasma had grown thicker. Strada is the Dante to Pizza Express’s Boccaccio and, in my middle years, I have found myself in a dark wood.