Archives for August 2013

I ran into the crime writer Philip Kerr at Gatwick – he and his family were happily on their way to Corfu, while I was gloomily en route to Berlin to do some work with my German translator. Kerr was ebullient and ridiculously fit-looking – full head of dark and luxuriant hair, tanned and solid. I was wraithlike and skulking about in the duty-free shop, wondering if I could slit my wrists with a Swarovski crystal gewgaw. When I told him my destination, a faint shadow seemed to cross his handsome features and I thought: fair enough. After all, Kerr has been writing his Bernie Gunther thrillers, which are set in Berlin, for decades – and he probably thinks of the city as belonging to him in a perverse way. That’s what writers are like.

“You should go to swim out at Wannsee,” he said. “There’s a beach on the lake and you can sit in a deckchair and watch the Germans in all their Naturheilkunde glory eating footlong wurst.”

I said, “Hmm, I’m not sure I want to go to Wannsee – it always makes me think about the Nazis doing their worst.”

Kerr was undeterred: “Fair enough – but if you’re in town, make sure you eat at Borchardt. It’s the place for an echt Berlin meal.” Regular readers of this column know that a truly echt Berlin meal is a currywurst gulped down in an Alexanderplatz chain outlet, but I didn’t want to be pissy, so I told Philip I’d give the idea some serious thought.

That evening, after a long day combing through text with Teutonic efficiency, I thought to myself, sod it, enough with the low-rent nosh, I’m going to splash out for once – if Borchardt is as echt as Philip says, then it’ll count as a real meal on that basis alone. I found the place lurking on the ground floor of a big, gloomy, mid19th-century building a block behind the Unter den Linden. Inside, the dining room was big, square and uncompromisingly plain – white napery, leather banquettes, white ceilings held up by huge, marble Corinthian columns. A maître d’ with film-star looks passed me over to a waiter wrapped so tightly in his spotless apron that I thought: were I to have surgery, I’d like this man to perform it.

The medic seated me at a table in the equally four-square courtyard that the dining room opened on to and gave me the menu. I used to have a girlfriend who collected the mistakes in the English translations on foreign menus when she was on holiday. For her, “plume piddling” offered in Kathmandu or “streak and chops” proposed in Positano was the very soul of wit. At the time, I thought it all pretty feeble but then that was when I still thought there was a soul of wit – not just a labouring and sclerotic heart. Seeing that “shit take mushrooms” were offered on the Borchardt menu caused me great pleasure. The supposed German preoccupation with excreta here elided seamlessly with my own avocation, for was I not there to take the piss?

Then, when I saw that “young veal” was also proposed, my cup of sparkling mineral water ranneth over. I mean to say, just how young can veal be, given that it’s pretty juvenescent to begin with? After all, most veal is killed at some time between 20 weeks and a year, although there is the delicious titbit known as “bob veal”, which comes from calves slaughtered when they’re at most a month old – and often only a few days old. Here at Borchardt, there was “young veal”, which was presumably very young indeed or they wouldn’t have made a big deal about it. Perhaps that’s why the waiters were so surgically precise: before the long evening at the dining tables began, they were assisting at operating ones, where cow foetuses were delivered prematurely, then butchered for their ineffably tender meat.

Such Burroughsian musings (The Naked Lunch exhibits an unhealthy preoccupation with “slunks”, or aborted cow foetuses) stopped me from staring too much at my fellow diners – always a problem for the solitary. True, there were two young men at an adjacent table who were drinking cocktails of such pinkish luminescence that I couldn’t forbear from asking the waiter what they were. “Aperol and prosecco,” he told me, setting down the half-dozen fines de claire I’d ordered in front of me.

As I went on staring at the Italian cocktail and slurped down the first of my French oysters, it occurred to me that while Philip may well have been right about Borchardt, I’d managed to lose an authentic German experience completely . . . in translation.

“Free Nelson Mandela with every large public building,” my wife wryly observed one evening as we trudged up the stairs to the Royal Festival Hall, passing a particularly dreadful outsize bronze head of the world’s most famous former prisoner. For some readers it might seem a little de trop to be taking a tilt at the almost wholly bogus iconisation of the former leader of the African National Congress, even as he lies dying in a Johannesburg hospital (and indeed, by the time you read this, he may well be dead), but I say: you’re not the sort of readers I want, so if what follows looks likely to offend you just get back to balding, or reading Clare Balding’s memoir, or whatever else it is that you do to ease the stricture of your conformity.

There are actually only two big public sculptures of Mandela in central London – the aforementioned head and a life-size bronze in Parliament Square that depicts the father of the new South Africa either arguing passionately or possibly milking an invisible cow. But if Mandela has a political significance in this country it is that he symbolises more than anything else the woeful behaviour of the bulk of the British political establishment during the apartheid regime.

In the mid-1960s it was the Labour government of Harold Wilson that kicked sanctions against South Africa into the long grass, and as late as the early 1980s Margaret Thatcher (remember her, of the recent quasistate funeral?) was referring to Mandela as a terrorist. It took a student-led campaign in the late 1970s in the US to begin a serious British squeeze on the economic underpinning of a regime that kept the vast majority of its population disenfranchised and in semi-slavery – and that was only a decade or so before Mandela finally walked free, almost 27 years after his conviction at the Rivonia trial.

Not that you’d think this from the comprehensive rewriting of their memories that so many Britons have indulged in. Nowadays everyone did, does and always will love Nelson Mandela. He has become a cuddly and unthreatening black manikin to be propped up at the end of the collective bed. Many white people revere Mandela not because of his principled co-founding and leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC, but because when at last the ANC gained power, he restrained those of his comrades who would cheerfully have buried that spear in the dark hearts of their former oppressors.

Many black people, by contrast, revere Mandela because his political activism lies safely in the past, and the memory of it can serve to mask the uncomfortable present of South Africa, a country led by a man who has yet to answer a raft of accusations – including rape and extensive corruption – as he hides his own face behind the mask of power. And if Jacob Zuma’s leadership is a parlous business, then how much more troubled is modern South Africa itself, with its stratospheric murder rate, its rampant inequality and a resurgence in the superstitions that always dance attendance on poverty and impotence.

Meanwhile, we have Mandela Way and Mandela Close, the Parisians have an Avenue du Président Nelson Mandela, and there are umpteen Mandela stadia, bridges and sports centres the world over. Mandela is one of those “icons” (ghastly expression) that acquire an ever bigger following purely by virtue of their recognition factor, and in the process what was genuinely remarkable and noteworthy about the person is forgotten in favour of this bowdlerisation. Of course there are those in British political life – step forward, Peter Hain of the perma-tan – who did play a principled part in opposition to the apartheid regime, but then Hain, too, was a South African before he mysteriously became a Welshman (a transmogrification that always reminds me of Christopher Logue’s poem “When all else fails,/Try Wales”).

The idea of replacing the statue of the revered Mandela in Parliament Square with one of the rather less well-loved Hain may strike many as being deranged, but I’m all for it. Such a move would confront us regularly with the reality of our political system, which specialises in turning youthful iconoclasts into middle-aged placemen. We should leave icons where they belong – in places where they can be worshipped by crowds of the utterly credulous.

It’s a strong claim: “The best fish and chips in the world”; as is another bon – but ungrammatical – mot, attributed to the Master Fryer himself: “There is no chip ever cut by man which cannot be cooked to perfection in three minutes.” Taken together, these propositions suggest a sort of fried-food cosmology – or possibly a gnosis, because, if you want to acquaint yourself with Harry Ramsden’s second law of chipodynamics you’ll have to pitch up at one of his 30-odd restaurants, which are scattered throughout the British isles much as . . . well, much as the crushed, dead chips were scattered on the tiled floor of the food court when I swung by the other day to test empirically the validity of his first law.

Of course, Ramsden himself is long gone. An interwar figure, he appears in sepia tones, grinning out from the chippy’s wall and, with his wing-collar and natty hat, closely resembling a cross between Wilfrid Brambell and Neville Chamberlain. He started the business in a hut in Guiseley, Leeds, in the late 1920s, but it’s grown and grown over the years, being snaffled up by corporate after corporate then regurgitated through mergers. The hut grew into a 250-seat restaurant – apparently the biggest fish-and-chip eatery in the world – but now this has gone the way of all chip fat: down the drain. After losing money for some years, the parent company flogged it to an outfit called Wetherby Whaler.

I’ve eaten in various Ramsden’s over the years, hanging on pathetically to the notion that buried in their red-and-white Formica frames there must remain beating a distinctively northern heart. But then, what’s in a white rose? A Harry Ramsden’s by any other name would probably taste remarkably similar. What I’m driving at here is that the food has not been great – contra Harry’s law, I’ve found soggy chips, pulpy fish in grotty batter, and mushy peas with the flavour and consistency of plumber’s mastic. I gave up on the chain for years after finding myself sitting over one too many inedible carbo-fests and ruefully contemplating boshing something up out of these building materials masquerading as nutrition.

Still, everyone deserves a second chance (except for me; I deserve at least 50), so I headed for that little beachhead of the north in the south, Euston Station, to see whether anything had improved. To begin with, the signs were not auspicious – there was the previously mentioned detritus on the floor, while on the counter sat a styrofoam tray in which reposed all of the lately fried elements tending towards gelid entropy. I shuddered, and thought: I don’t have to do this . . . I could pick up some sushi at M&S, or a burger from the King, or some noodles from Nam-Po! – hell, I could even buy a baguette from Delice de France and another from Upper Crust and have a sword fight with myself, scampering this way and that across the concourse until I was arrested by the British Transport Police. (And surely, there can be no richer and more satisfying humiliation than that.)

Still, when the going gets tough, the tough get eating. The man behind the counter was the sole of courtesy as I havered between cod, plaice and haddock; a wholly otiose decision, since, as we all know, there should be a moratorium on the fishing – and by extension the eating – of all four. But before long I had my own styrofoam tray and was ready to assay Ramsden’s second law.

Well, I can report that the chips weren’t too bad at all: their outer layer pleasingly browned and crispy, their insides firm and yet melting. The batter on my cod was also of the right ductility, while the fish within flaked to perfection. As for the mushy peas – on the basis of their texture alone I would’ve sworn I was eating guacamole. True, I make no mention of the flavours of any of this food, but why would I? If you want flavour, stop at home – fast food aspires to the condition of being photographed, not consumed.

I ate about half my chips and all my battered cod and mushy peas. I drank my crap coffee, I listened to the train announcements and wished I were about to head north out of this cesspit of gourmandising towards a more earthy realm where nowt folk were queer and nowt needed frying for more than three minutes – including bruschetta. For all I know, Harry Ramsden’s may well serve the best fish and chips in the world, or the appearance of this slogan on their walls may be entirely accidental. The truth of both propositions is by no means inconsistent.