Archives for 2011

I was meeting up with someone I worked with, ooh, getting on for 20 years ago and whom I hadn’t seen for pushing 15. I was coming from Manchester; she from Soho, London. We compromised on Drummond Street, that row of ethnic eateries parallel to Euston Road. Time was when you could eat a vegetarian thali here, then limp-fart along to the end of the road and buy an ex-Red Army greatcoat at Laurence Corner, a truly legendary army surplus store – so legendary that, when I ran into Paul McCartney at a party once and the subject of Laurence Corner came up, he told me that he’d bought his first double bass there back in the 1960s.

I suggested that we eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House “for sentimental reasons” – but this was pretty much a lie, my associations with this south Indian vegetarian restaurant being largely negative. I once ate there before boarding the Deerstalker Express to Inverness, and during the night developed septicaemia of such virulence that, when I got to the hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney, the following day, my infected hand was the size of a nan bread and chilli-hot streaks of sepsis were shooting up my arm. I’m not saying that this had anything to do with the Diwana, which has always struck me as perfectly hygienic and has decor not dis­similar to that of a sauna in a Swedish health spa, but you know how the mind is, always associating ideas willy-nilly for day after day; frank ly, I sometimes think that it might be a relief if the sun didn’t rise tomorrow.

No, I wanted to eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House because I happened to know that, at lunchtime, it puts on one of the most curious culinary spectacles known to humankind: the all-you-can-eat buffet. Whoever first hit on the idea of offering unlimited food for a fixed price was some kind of crazed genius, because while you might think that this would be an incitement to gluttony, I’m pretty damn certain the opposite is the case.

A fixed amount of food for a predetermined sum introduces a creeping barrage of anxiety – from menu choice through portion size and on inexorably to l’addition – that can only be assuaged by stuffing your face (or, in modern parlance, “comfort eating”). The all-you-can-eat concept, on the other hand, relieves the diner of her cares, allowing her appetite to shrink to its natural size.

Yes, I’d bet the farm – or, at least, a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner – that all-you-can-eat buffets put out markedly less food per diner than the menu-mongers. Granted, my empirical sample is only, um, me – and I’m not so much a lady-who-lunches as a girl who favours a Ryvita smeared with cottage cheese come noon. Indeed, apart from strategic meetings – such as encountering someone I haven’t broken bread with since the Major premiership – I’ve long since dispensed with the meal altogether.

So, there I was, standing in the Diwana Bhel-Poori House, waiting for my quondam colleague and watching while happy office grafters piled their aluminium salvers high with rice, chapattis, assorted vegetable curries, fruit, chutneys and so on, but absolutely appalled. A sign tacked above the buffet read: “Please use one plate per person, eat as much as U like.” When it comes to being non-U, substituting “U” for “you” is enough to put anyone off their shoots and leaves. Not that I needed any putting off: the sight of all that tasty nosh, mine for a mere eight smackers, utterly nauseated me.

What would happen if I were to eat all I could? In Marco Ferreri’s 1973 masterpiece, La Grande Bouffe, four dyspeptic gourmands gather in a country villa with the express intention of doing just that, their ultimate aim being death by buffet. The film won the critics’ award at that year’s Cannes festival – fitting when you consider that, taken as a whole, film critics have to be the professional group whose eyes are manifestly bigger than their intellects.

When my lunch partner finally pitched up, I mentioned none of this to her and went about the business of eating lunch as if it were second nature to me – indeed, so relaxed was I that I ended up consuming a normal-sized meal. After we parted, I limp-farted to the end of the road and stood there staring melancholically at the corner where Laurence’s used to be.

I suppose the moral of this tale is that, in the all-you-can-eat buffet of life, petites madeleines are always for dessert.

At the end of the first half of Derren Brown’s current stage show, Svengali, the accomplished prestidigitator and manipulator of minds makes a plea that no one in the audience should reveal any of his act’s content, lest they ruin it for others. Fair enough. A cynic might say that Brown’s more concerned that no one devalue his shtick, but actually these are two sides of the same palmed coin – and besides, I happen to believe Brown is generally a good thing who adds to the gaiety of the nation.

True, he’s not an illusionist with the stature of, say, the Great Lafayette (né Sigmund Neuberger), who perished in Edinburgh in the notorious Empire Palace Theatre fire of 1911 while performing his signature “Lion’s Bride” illusion, wherein a smallish woman was metamorphosed into a big cat. Such was Lafayette’s hold on the public that when a fault in a stage light caused it to plummet and ignite the set, the audience, assuming this was all part of the show, sat still and watched while the illusionist and ten other crew members were incinerated.

As I say, I’ve no desire to rain on Derren’s parade, but I do think the methods he employs to obtain the raw material of his performances are worth discussing because they teach us so much about that critical component of human folly – suggestibility. Besides, I think it unlikely that the Venn intersection between New Statesman readers and potential Derren Brown audiences comprises many members – possibly I’m the sole one. The first time I saw Brown, a few years ago, he told the massed ranks of the goggle-eyed in no uncertain terms that nothing he was doing in any way involved the supernatural. In this he was following a grand tradition of professional magicians acting as debunkers of the paranormal, the most notable example of which was Houdini himself. Nevertheless, during the interval I overheard several people saying to their companions words to the effect of: “Ooh, he says it’s not real magic – but I think he’s lying.”

Two psychological phenomena were operating simultaneously here. First, the average Derren Brown audience member must be more suggestible than most: why else would she or he be there in the first place? After all, if you don’t unconsciously wish to be fooled, why go and see an illusionist? Second, Brown’s impassioned assertion of the rationally explicable nature of what he was doing constituted an example of negative suggestibility – primed, by him, to disbelieve everything he did and said, the audience flatly denied this truth.

I assert that Brown primes his audience to disbelieve everything he does and says, but I should qualify this: like all adroit manipulators, he wishes them consciously to question everything overt while unconsciously they absorb a great deal of covert instruction. To give one example: at the very beginning of each of his feats he throws balls or frisbees out into the audience, then asks whoever has caught one to come up on stage. This appears a completely random way of selecting his participants, but in fact he has already refined his selection to the more suggestible – because, when a frisbee flung by a magician is flying across an audience, who but someone who wishes to be manipulated would stick their hand up to catch it?

Once these gullible souls get up there, he subjects them to a further culling. In poker circles, good players become extremely adept at spotting another’s “tell”, the unconscious tic that reveals when someone is bluffing. Brown is a master of reading these tells: the little spasms we make when someone has hinted at a truth about ourselves we are concealing. Holding their hands, looking into their eyes, persuasively uttering their names, Brown has only to ask these already self-selectively suggestible people a few questions in order to establish whether they are what he requires for the rest of his act – namely, people who can be told what to do without being aware of it.

Hm, I wonder what other social groups exhibit the same characteristics as Derren Brown’s audiences? Let’s see . . . self-selecting for a willingness to suspend disbelief while also desperate to be told by a charismatic figure what they should do . . . That sounds uncannily like the psychological profile of a typical political party member, and, like Derren’s dupes, party members are also fond of hand-holding and first-name-calling. Indeed, the only distinction between the audience for illusionists called Brown and the one for, say, party leaders also called Brown is that the former are unlikely to become disabused given that what they’re after is purely entertainment, practised by some one they actively chose.

Birds Eye sold £7.5m worth of its Traditional Chicken Dinners last accounting year – and as these meals are made in the Republic of Ireland with imported chicken breast, “homestyle” gravy, potatoes and garden vegetables, I can understand why. True, they’re not exactly what I’d call hearty, but the chicken tastes fine, and while Birds Eye cannot vouch 100 per cent for the bonelessness of any given foreign breast, mine was reassuringly pliant, and even had a stippling of recognisable skin. The roast potatoes were firm little nuggets, the stuffing – shaped like a pellet of solid fuel – worked for me, and although the gravy was insipid, the carrots and peas swam friskily in its brown slop, and were surprisingly al dente. I can say with some certainty that I have paid five times as much for a chicken dinner in a restaurant – while enjoying it five times less and having to wait five times as long for it. The only cooking required here was an eight-minute spin in the microwave.

Yet, when I triumphantly bore my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner home from Mohandra’s convenience store, Mrs Self was dismissive: “Oh, you’re going to eat a TV dinner, are you?” Mohandra, when I queried the £3.90 price tag – there were other frozen roast dinners in the gondola costing less than two quid – observed that: “You pay for the brand.” Both of them implied I was engaging in unspeakably infra dig behaviour. And yet . . . and yet, what could be more real than a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner?

Patented in the late 1920s by Clarence Birdseye, the quick-freezing method, whereby food is pressed between cold metal plates while bathed in super-cooled air, has become the staple food-processing technique of our era. Birdseye was quite a character, perfecting his method while ice fishing with the Inuit of Labrador. That frozen food should have allowed for a colossal expansion of the volume of exploitable resources in the world, and so undoubtedly assisted in the destruction of the Inuit’s traditional lifestyle, is hardly Birdseye’s fault – unintended consequences of actions that seemed perfectly all right at the time are all around us. I’m one myself.

No, quick-freezing food has to be seen as the fourth agricultural revolution, which followed in a direct line from Mesopotamian domestication, through crop-rotation and the synthetic production of nitrogen fertilisers, to our own benighted decade. No! I was not having a TV dinner – I never eat in front of the television. (Mostly, it must be admitted, because applying a knife and fork to something in my lap always makes me think of the sequence in that film La dernière femme, where Gérard Depardieu cuts his penis off with an electric carving knife.) No! I ate my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner in the traditional way: at the kitchen table with my children, who were tucking into fancy Waitrose chicken goujons.

To begin with, the kids showed some interest in my novel menu choice, and we all marvelled at the non-standard shape of the compartments in the tray (something like cedillas), but they soon veered off on to other subjects – string theory, Boulez vs Stockhausen, the deciphering of Minoan Linear B – leaving me to wonder how they might have fared if sent to sea with Captain Birdseye, an advertising personification of such legendary effectiveness that a nationwide poll once established him as the best-known sailor in the realm after Captain Cook.

I have to say the continued plain-sailing of Captain Birdseye in the current miasma of paedophile obsession is something of a mystery to me. You don’t have to be that paranoid to be suspicious of a white-bearded fellow in a yachting cap who likes hanging around with a “crew” of pre-teens. Still, I assume he’s been CRB-checked – so that’s OK. Nor can my enthusiasm for Birds Eye altogether blind me to the human costs of that form of corporate cuisine, whereby one fat enterprise chows down on another.

In 2006, Unilever sold the business to that sinister form of words “a UK-based private equity group”. This one’s called Permira, which sounds to me like a neologism coined out of pudenda and permafrost – and possibly a rather suitable one. Back in 2005, Unilever closed the Grimsby factory where fishy fingers had been made since 1929, with a loss of 650 jobs. There’s no suggestion that Permira is contemplating any further closures, although when I called the Birds Eye press office to ask for sales figures, they did seem a little . . . wary. So, I thought I’d do my bit for the recovery and urge all of you to stay in this week and eat a Traditional Chicken Dinner – and none of your home-cooked muck: make it a Birds Eye.

What psychologists term the “availability error” is prominent in so many different forms throughout our mental life that it’s debatable whether this constitutes a form of delusion at all. Still, some examples are so egregious that unpicking them may help us in the general direction of better mental hygiene.

A few weeks ago a serviceably pretty young woman went to a big ugly house to meet a handsome man who happens to be the president of America, and his mildly steatopygic wife. For the occasion, the young woman slipped on a fairly nondescript dress. In due course, when photographs of this prettyish woman wearing said dress appeared in the papers, there was a frenzy as thousands upon thousands of crazed punters attempted to log on to the website of the British high-street label Reiss to buy it.

Put simply, the availability error consists in judging by the first thing that comes to mind; in this case, we can summarise the thought processes of the wannabe Reiss-buyers thus: Kate Middleton is wearing that dress and looks good, therefore if I put on that dress I will look good as well. We could elaborate, because undoubtedly there is a further murkier tier to such unreasoning: Kate is wearing that dress, therefore, if I wear that dress, one day I will be queen of England (as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Bongo-Bongo Land, etc), hobnob with the Obamas, wear diamonds the size of pigeons’ eggs – and so on.

A variation of the availability error that I’ve discussed in this column before, in connection with my propensity – or otherwise – for urinating into the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, is the halo effect. The halo effect implies that if one person has a single, very obvious, characteristic, the rest of his or her attributes are invariably perceived in the light of it. This is why – despite all evidence to the contrary – good-looking people are often viewed as sagacious, amusing, possessed of phenomenal ball control, and so forth.

Ms Middleton is no film-star beauty, nor has she ever done anything in her short life worthy of note save part her thighs for the heir to the throne, then marry him. Be that as it may; paradoxically, her approachable, girl-next-door vibe becomes incorporated into her halo, so that potential dress-buyers formulate syllogisms of this sort: “All girl-next-door types wear mid-range fashion labels, Kate Middleton is wearing a mid-range fashion label, therefore Kate Middleton is a girl next door.” This conclusion won’t necessarily sell that many £175 Shola dresses (the Reiss design that Middleton wore to meet the Obamas), but it will, of course, sell the object – the Windsors – to their subjects, at a time when the populace might well resent the spectacle of hereditary multibillionaires lording it over them without even minimal concessions to such coalition virtues as choice and fairness.

The use of the availability error and the halo effect by advertisers is nothing new – when I was a kid, there was a scare to the effect that big corporations were pushing their product by inserting subliminal imagery into feature films. The rumour was that, for a split second during some parched scene of Lawrence of Arabia or another, an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola was flashed up on screen, ensuring that, come the intermission (remember them?) everyone would rush to the foyer and begin guzzling down the sinister sarsaparilla.

In fact, most advertisers have no need for such subterfuge – they can openly supply the imagery and we will subliminally influence ourselves. Thus shampoos provoke orgasms, mobile phones collapse cities like packs of cards and cars . . . Well, cars morph into just about everything imaginable and then chomp up the road. Do I believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with this? Yes, I think there may be.

Take Chinese Elvis. He runs a not terribly successful restaurant on the Old Kent Road, and once or twice during the evening’s sittings he emerges from the kitchen dressed as the King to sing “Suspicious Minds” or “Heartbreak Hotel”. He doesn’t look a bit like Elvis, and he certainly doesn’t sound like him, but such is the potency of the late rock monarch’s halo effect that, even years after his death, it can still garrotte the unsuspecting. In fairness to Chinese Elvis, he’s only helping to sell his food – which isn’t too bad – but it remains a bizarre aspect of contemporary commerce that stuff can now be sold not only by the famous, but also by their impersonators – and how mad is that?