Archives for 2011

“Mac-Dooonald’s, Mac-Dooonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken anna Pizza Hut! Mac-Dooonald’s, Mac-Dooonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken anna Pizza Hut!” Were Iona and Peter Opie revising their landmark study The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), this affecting little ditty would undoubtedly make an appearance. True, I’m not certain that it’s still current but it was when my older moiety of children was at primary school.

What is it with Pizza Hut? Like the poor, it seems always to have been with us – I recall a Pizza Hut in Hampstead when I was of school age, which had chalet-style woodwork and alpine murals that looked as if they had been painted using that time-honoured method of dipping a young bull in Artex, then allowing it to run amok. However, in recent years, Pizza Hut seems to have sunk into the great, cheesy substratum of British fast food, with little brand salience.

This hardly seems fair for a pizza outlet with a noble history stretching back as far as … well, as far as the Opies’ The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, beginning as it did in an actual hut, in Wichita, Kansas, in the late 1950s. There are now more than 11,000 Pizza Huts worldwide, enough to constitute a Pizza Town, 700 of which are in the British Isles and yet, apart from the ad campaign following England’s 1996 defeat by Germany in the European Championships, which featured the unsuccessful penalty taker Gareth Southgate with his head in a paper bag, Pizza Hut has loomed low in our cultural consciousness.

On a spanking hot evening in central London, there was nothing too appealing about the entrance to this culinary Mordor: dark-red decor of interlinked rings, dark-red carpets, a faint whiff of what might have been urine and a musty slot of a dining area. The original Pizza Huts were known as “red roofs”, because of their wide gables that angled up to a boxy top but, as a waitress directed us to go down to the basement, it transpired that this was a sort of Pizza Tardis – and an air-conditioned one, to boot!

Down here in the bowels of the earth, there were at least a hundred more covers, some in a sort of mezzanine, ranged around a central arena, off of which lurked a salad bar and an “ice cream factory”. Seated and provided with a menu by an attentive if frenzied waiter, we took a look around at this brave new world of tourists and the obese. The mother-and-daughter combo at the table next to ours, tucking into a large Meat Feast pizza that came in its own skillet, probably weighed in excess of 150kg and they were soon matched on our other side by a father and son of approximately the same weight – even though the boy was only ten or so. I began to suspect that the ubiquitous decorative scheme of interlinked rings was some sort of allusion to gastric bands.

Yes, yes, it’s a snob thing, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all middle class now, so we all go to Pizza Express – the Hut is only for foreigners and the lumpy proletariat. Pizza Hut pizzas feature pineapple, ferchrissakes! And entire chicken breasts! You dob up a couple of shitters and get unlimited fizzy drinks! I nearly had an apoplexy, on the basis that such an old-school restaurant demanded an equally anachronistic stroke. My 13-year-old, who often appears to have the same delirious sense of entitlement as the Prime Minister, looked about him in frank disbelief. The one thing he was looking forward to was the Cheesy Bites, a grotesque circlet of cheese-stuffed dough balls that rims the pizza base – but this was only available with the large pizza and he relapsed into sullen torpor.

I, on the other hand, was rather warming to the chilly environs of the Pizza Tardis. I cruised the salad bar and partook of a weird dressing that looked like the decocted jism of honey bees – and tasted like it, too. I ordered a regular Veggie Supreme and flirtatiously requested extra mushrooms and rocket. When the pizza arrived, combusting-jet-fuel hot, it was devoid of rocket but when I pointed this out to the waiter, he happily toddled over with a big bowl of leaves and flumped them on. I managed half of this – a regular pizza – before giving up. As we rolled back up the stairs, I reflected this: it didn’t matter how déclassé the Hut was; we had been served by a perfect gentleman – Shehzad is his name, although his colleagues describe him as “the bald Asian man” – and that’s surely a sign of real nobility.

Here’s a dinner for two with 1970s sophistication but modern-day products and prices: to start, a couple of prawn cocktails at £2.09 each; to follow, a brace of 8oz fillet steaks weighing in at £12.47. A rustle of salad and a clutch of new potatoes will probably only cost four quid, but instead of a homely salad cream you’ll need to drizzle some Aceto Balsamico di Modena on this and that’ll set you back a cool £14.99.

In lieu of gateaux (a clause I feel I’ve been waiting to type my entire life), a chocolate truffle cake priced at £1.25 a slice, accompanied by a £4.19 tub of Green & Black’s ice cream. Now, none of this would seem anything but £42.33 of reasonableness, were it not that you then went and spunked off £99.99 on a bottle of Dom Perignon Brut, which the shelf tag – sorry, I mean wine list – assured you would be “perfect with everything”.

And what is the name of this establishment, at once oddly timeless and bang up-to-date? Why, Sainsbury’s of course. What could be realer than a meal purveyed by the food retailer that has a whopping 16.5 per cent of the domestic market? However, lugging all this stuff home and cooking it doesn’t qualify – I happen to be almost absurdly proficient in the kitchen, but I know most Britons still, pathetically, think of sous vide as boil-in-a-bag despite the revolutions of modernist cuisine.

Perhaps a better way of judging Sainsbury’s would have been to graze the aisles, crunching a carrot in aisle three, swigging a handful of pic’n’mix over in aisle 13, strolling nonchalantly past the Tupperware while pulling the filaments from a Cheestring and reciting “Cheese me, cheese me not, cheese me . . .”

But while this is certainly a kind of eating many of us are familiar with, there comes a time and a girth when one retreats, gracefully, to the supermarket café to read the Daily Mail (“Happiness is being slimmer than him”) and sip a cappuccino served in a cup the size of a bird bath. I hadn’t visited the café in my local Sainsbury’s for yonks (a very supermarket café kind of term) and remembered it as a frumpy sort of place with modular plastic highchairs bedizened with peas, vinyl pouffes thrown about willy-nilly and a terrific view of the car park. Yes, I went there to scoff – but stayed to . . . scoff.

One of the best things Sainsbury’s has done to its café is eliminate the view – no one in their right mind wants to look at a car park, far better to enjoy an enormous stylised glyph of a cappuccino and a huge slice of cake and a charming prospect of aisles 6 through to 10. The other thing it has done is revamp the menu. Instead of the traditional chips-and-beans fare, the specials were a warm chicken and bacon Caesar salad or an equally toasty serving of chargrilled vegetables with pesto and couscous salad. Neither of these was actually available – this is still Britain after all – but it’s the thought that counts, especially if you’re contemplating a gastric band before teatime. The counter of the new-style café comes complete with mini-muffins and untoasted panini looking sinisterly like insoles. I went for the salmon pie, with some salad and a bowl of Mediterranean tomato soup, while the whelp had a mozzarella and pesto panini.

We sat in blood-coloured easy chairs at a small table and tucked in. Nearby, in an area of equally sanguine seating, a group of youngish men in chain-store suits and Sainsbury’s lapel badges, armed with clipboards, sat discussing the finer points of shelf-stacking. Bit of a busman’s holiday, I mused as I inserted steaming chunks of salmon, puff pastry and, mmm, haddock into my Middle England mouth. Imagine working in Sainsbury’s all day, then during your lunch break chowing down in the windowless café – after a week or two you’d begin to feel pretty, er, claustrophobic.

Still, besides employees I can’t imagine who’d want to eat in the café – surely eating in a supermarket rather defeats the whole point. Then I examined my till receipt a little more closely. With drinks, the aforementioned mini-muffins and a bag of Kettle Chips, our bill came to £14.21, but then my opening Nectar card balance had been 5296 and I’d earned a further 28 points! This gave me a whopping £26.62 to spend in Sainsbury’s, which meant that in real terms I’d made £12.41. Ah, supermarket loyalty – in today’s fickle world it’s the only kind that matters.

An old Australian friend, Kerry Gardiner, whom I met when I was living and working in the Northern Territory in the early 1980s, emails to tell me that the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in Fitzrovia, London, is mounting an exhibition of Aboriginal art that might interest me. He’s right. Ever since that sojourn, I’ve tried to remain connected with the creative world-view of Australia’s indigenous people – and also to stay in touch with the white Australians I met then, idealistic men and women who eschewed the affluent hippie trail to Earl’s Court and instead investigated the red centre and the beige hinterlands of their home country.

These Strine soixante-huitards were radicalised by the predicament of the Aboriginal people, who had been not so much subjected to colonialism as annihilated by it. The British doctrine of terra nullius denied them ownership of their land – and so opened the genocidal gates – while the Australian government refused them citizenship until the late 1960s. On my first journey across Australia, I was shocked to see children with trachoma and rickets at the outstations where the bus stopped. Though white Australia seems to have bucked the global economic downturn, I suspect that you can still look upon such sights today.

Australian Aboriginal painting is familiar to the western eye as a sort of primitivist pointillism: concentric circles of dots, stippled outlines and wavering borders, rendered in bright, primary colours. It is arresting and seems to hum with a visual intensity – as if op art had become a self-consciously mystic methodology. Such apprehensions would be correct: painting and carving are the tangible forms of cultural restoration adopted by a people who came, in recent decades, within spitting distance of total deracination. The superlative mental mapping of the Aboriginal mobs, which, between them, capture the surface of this vast island continent in a reticulation of so-called songlines, is given expression not just in topographic poetry – the “singing-up” of the country – but also by these graphic representations.

It is the abiding fallacy of the west to suppose that cultures that are athwart our notions of “progress” must, ipso facto, be up a cultural creek without a technological or aesthetic paddle. The full sequencing of the human genome now allows us to peek into the deep time of our diaspora and discover that the Aboriginal people of Australia were first out of the African omphalos some 60,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago, they were in Australia and they have been there since, working hard at creating not a stockpile of food but a stockpile of cultural tradition. As a white Australian “political consultant” to the Aboriginal mobs once put it to me: “You have to think of these blokes as like Babylonian or Chaldean magicians who’ve been cultivating their hocus-pocus for longer than all the Near Eastern civilisations put together. If one of ’em tells me to jump, I ask, ‘How high?'”

Australian Aboriginal art is an evolving tradition and, if you go to Rebecca Hossack, instead of dots and swirls, you will be confronted by vivid, fauvist paintings that resist the denotation “naive” – their assimilation of recent, historically codified events to a millennia-old mode of landscape painting is highly sophisticated. Borroloola is known as the “Gateway to the Gulf”, and is situated in the south-western region of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within this remote area, four main tribal groups exist, known as the Yanyuwa, Garrawa, Mara and Gurdanji. The Yanyuwa and Mara consider themselves “saltwater people”, and the Garrawa and Gurdanji “freshwater people”. Kerry thought I would be the ideal person to meet with these Garrawa artists because: “For you to say that you have motorcycled across the Barkly Tableland and know me will help convince them that people can travel across the sea and return and live to tell the tale. Many of their ancestors did not – Indonesian slavers as late as the 1890s took their toll.”

I’ve never visited Borroloola but I’m familiar with its landscape of rocky hills, billabongs and bigger-than-CinemaScope horizons from other travels in the Northern Territory. Given how big this country is, that I’ve been to Nhulunbuy – a mere 400km away as the crow flies – will, I hope, enable me to put Nancy McDinny, Madeline Dirdi and Stewart Hoosan at their ease. These are three of the artists exhibiting and they are the ones who will have travelled all the way from this far outpost to our bustling metropolis for the vernissage. An alternative perspective is that they will have left a place of ancient wisdom, with its deep humus of cultural capital, to visit this ancestor-forsaken antipode, with its hard scrabble of visual arts.

Borroloola: Paintings and Prints from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London W1 runs until 27 August. For more details visit r-h-g.co.uk

People are starving to death in eastern Africa – lots of them, and horribly. I awoke this morning to hear on the radio a report from a BBC man who had interviewed some of those streaming towards a UN-run camp. Thousands were waiting at the gates to get in and each had a tale of almost inconceivable woe – the malnourished child who had died on the march, the ill husband or wife left behind.

What awaits these poor souls once they gain admittance? The UN man told us that there quite simply wasn’t enough food.

So, strike up the band! Wheel out the ever-cranky Bob Geldof! Chuck Bono into the ring for good measure! Dig deep and feel good, because it’s famine time in eastern Africa again – which means it’s also time for those of us in the west to feel mighty proud of ourselves. We may have made poverty history a few years ago, but no one ever said that time stood still and now there’s more history available – and it comes with its own inbuilt poverty. Moreover, a quarter of a century ago, when Bob – with, I think, impeccably good intentions – rousted out the complacent pop stars to do their bit, there was about a third of the people in the perennially drought-prone areas of eastern Africa there are today.

That’s right, you can judge the success of Band Aid and all the other famine-relief charity campaigns by this alone: there are now three times as many people available to starve to death. Result, no? Am I alone in my Swiftian fastness in seeing something just a little bit crazy in this collective impulse to keep people alive at a bare subsistence level so that they can procreate without restraint – as people on the breadline so often do – with the end result that there are many more of them to receive handouts from the World Food Programme a decade or two down the line?

I entirely accept that if you’re of the “every sperm is sacred” school of religious yea-saying to mortification and death, then this is a very good result – but the last time I looked, this was a predominantly secular society; indeed, one in which the utilitarian basis for much policymaking was deeply ingrained.

Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal was that the victims of famine in Ireland be fed with their own babies, and while this remains, in my view, a perfectly reasonable solution, I venture to suggest that it won’t address the real pathology, which is our own. Only a people maddened by their own sense of entitlement to everything – whether material or spiritual – could carry on throwing good money after bad conscience. Despite all our travails, we remain, relatively speaking, high donors to the foreign needy, while Dave “Mrs Jellyby” Cameron is, unsurprisingly, fixated on telescopic philanthropy.

Hanging on to a good conscience while continuing to do bad things, however, is a deranging business, and just as the alcoholic needs ever more booze to achieve the same level of intoxication, so the charitable donor has to sign ever more direct debits in order to assuage that core feeling of emptiness. Deluded though the average Briton may well be, we are not completely psychotic, and we understand that a large chunk of the money we divvy up to charity goes to pay for more fundraisers and more chuggers, so that more money can be raised to keep more famine victims alive, so that the entire sickening go-round may be continued until the last farting trump.

My solution to this particular neurosis is perfectly straightforward: give the dosh to us.

Yes, that’s right, the £9m already divvied up privately to the Disasters Emergency Committee, the £36m given by the government – this money would’ve been better distributed to the British spiritually needy.

A bottle of Château Pétrus, a Longines watch – maybe the down payment on a winter break in the Caribbean: all of these things are guaranteed to make the averagely wealthy person feel rather better about herself than she does already. Hell, it probably works for Rupert Murdoch; why shouldn’t it for ordinary mortals?

I know, I know, you’re worried about the children, aren’t you, you silly sympathetic soul, but I think there’ll be enough for all those middle-class kids who go off to “give something back” during their gap year as well. You know, if I were a starving Somali, I’d see the wisdom in all this. I’d probably applaud it – if I had the strength, that is.