The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

A long time ago, when I could still bear to eat in social contexts, I attended a dinner at London Zoo given by the Royal Zoological Society. I was seated beside an expert on crustaceans who told me two things: first, that the fattest and tastiest crabs lifted in Cromer, north Norfolk, were found in the proximity of the town’s sewer outfall pipe; second, that he and his crustacean-expert pals liked to go on holiday to Belgium, where they would go from one moules frites joint to the next, challenging each other to identify the greatest number of parasites in any given kilo of mussels. Strangely, they never tired of this little game.

The parasites were entirely harmless – but still, there’s always something a tad suspect about mussels. To my mind, they’re rather like oysters that have been working out too much and hitting the sunbed as well – sinisterly tanned and toned. Still, my mother was very fond of moules marinière and used to cook them for us – no mean feat in England in the 1970s, when often the only fish available came in the form of Shippam’s paste. There’s something hugely inspiriting about a great, foodie waft of freshly boiled mussels: they smell at once nutritious and piquantly dirty. If raw oysters are the cunnilingus of gastronomy, then mussels are … well, best not go there.

In the mid-1990s, when I was the Observer’s restaurant critic, I was packed off to review a new restaurant called Belgo that had opened in Covent Garden. The gaff was subterranean and steely-clad. There was one room with long refectory tables, at which diners sat to be served by waiters dressed up as monks. The menu was heavy on the muscle-bound bivalve, and there was also a substantial carte featuring obscure Belgian beers brewed by real monks and a selection of Dutch genevers. These latter came in shot glasses set in depressions carved out of wooden paddles wielded by the monk-a-likes – so, it was an open incitement to get horrifically pissed on gin, which we duly did, and the evening ended … well, best not go there either.

I remember thinking at the time that the Belgo schtick was pretty much the apogee of themed restaurants; a sort of Blade Runner-meets-Trappist vibe prevailed that required only dry ice – or clouds of incense – to achieve total inauthenticity. If you had told me then that, 15 years down the line, Belgo would have several branches bedizening London, together with several more belonging to a subsidiary chain called Bierodrome, well, I’d have licked a tonsure in the top of my own head. Ho-hum. Such is the queer cavalcade of history.

It’s doubtful whether Belgo/Bierodrome qualifies as a Real Meals subject, as you could spend your whole life in Nuneaton or Nairn never clapping eyes on one of these joints. But that’s just the point: people need to be warned. An innocent provincial lad or lass, unsuspectingly treading the
streets of the Great Wen, and finding them not only not paved with gold, but also lined by Belgian-themed restaurants, could be severely traumatised.

Jaded as I am, I still felt pretty nervous entering the Belgo in Holborn the other evening. Still, I’d arranged to meet my god-daughter there – she’s fashionably wheat-intolerant and we needed to talk.

Actually, it turns out that the other Belgos don’t tog their staff in habits, and the interior was pretty standard for a mid-price eatery: tables, chairs, bar, etc. Not only that, but the staff were absurdly solicitous. The young woman who served me my starter of black pudding and apples told me about the blood pudding made in her native Hungary – later, I found out she’d just written a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Frankly, that’s more social intercourse than I’d reckon on in an average month.

Bea – my god-daughter – chose moules marinière to start, while I had a kilo of Thai-style mussels for the main event. They were fine, although by no means overwhelming. Bea’s main-course salmon was overdone – but isn’t it always? As for desserts, I like sugar as much as the next 25 morbidly obese men who’ve had gastric bands fitted, but the cheesecake was still way too sickly. We finished up with espresso and mint tea. The bill came to 60-odd quid. All in all, it was an anodyne, mid-price, themed Belgian restaurant experience – not the heart of darkness I’d feared.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

The other day I was walking with a brace of my children up the steep road that approaches Brighton Station from North Laine when I observed a long, dark, liquid rivulet flowing down the pavement, and then a young man, blind drunk, and hobbled by his jeans, which were at half-mast. I pointed out to the boys the paradoxical purity of the line of pee – it’s unusual to see an entire urination so graphically demarked – and then the high-fashionableness of the dosser, whose boxer shorts were fully exposed.

Whence comes this rage among young men to hoist their underwear up above their outerwear? A rhetorical question: we know it comes from da ghetto, and we know also – or can easily deduce – why it comes from there: young, poor African-American men were in no position to afford the full designer fig mandated from the 1980s on, so they opted for the pants alone and then made a fashion statement out of pulling rabbit’s ears of Klein or Hilfiger from behind their waistbands.

There’s also, I think, the curious constraint on the legs the fashion demands – is this not a subconscious allusion to a post-industrial and trans-generationally idle workforce? Especially when combined with carpenter jeans that have never been near joinery, the punchy boxer shorts seem an ironic statement of the form: “There is no striding work available for the likes of me, so I will stumble about the place, fettered in a denim-and-cotton chain gang.”

To suggest that any given style of dress is folly is surely the height of tendentiousness – after all, is it not the case that the fripperies of every generation appear surpassingly absurd to the dandies of the last?

When I summon up memories of beseeching my mother to sew flowery inserts into my jeans to create exaggerated flares and, a mere three years later, trying to force my feet through the eight-inch cuffs of drainpipes, well, it makes even the most priapic of codpieces, the most erect of coxcombs, the tightest of corsets and the most steatopygic of bustles seem tame.

And yet … and yet. I still can’t get over the outer-underwear; every time I see a young chap hoick up his jeans so that a little cloudy puff of underpants issues from the waist it occurs to me that many thousands of other young men must be doing exactly the same thing at precisely the same moment.

It’s like that, style, isn’t it? No matter how many newspaper supplements there are, how many magazines, and how many TV shows telling you what thong you should part your arse cheeks for, there still seems an instinctive and herd-like impetus to changes in habiliment: one day you see someone looping their scarf in a certain way, the next you notice that everyone is looping their scarf like that. Fashionistas prate on endlessly about clothing as a means of expressing individuality, but it takes only a decade to elapse for us to look back and see that we were as undifferentiated as buffalos in our recherché hides.

However, it wasn’t until I sat down to write this piece that my own underlying neurosis concerning exposed male nether garments became clear to me: like Freud en train to the completion of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I realise that it is within the tucking-in of my own psyche that the underlying dirt is to be found. My father had a singular lack of personal modesty: he would wander around the house stark naked, a sock in one hand, while querying in fluting tones: “Has anyone seen my other sock?”

Even in public he found it hard not to breach the taboo of common decency. His own nether world, for as long as I knew him, consisted of elephantine grey flannel Oxford bags, and even more elephantine flannel underpants, usually of a distempered hue. As this ensemble was lashed in place by a thin leather belt, Dad often got discombobulated, and on these occasions he would, quite unselfconsciously, un-belt, unfasten and unzip his trousers, then rearrange these wads of cloth.

So it is this, the memory of the primordial outer-underwearer from da ghetto of the London School of Economics, that I am trying to repress when I see all these fellows flaunting their pants. It is not the madness of the crowd that this illustrates – but one of my own.

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

If the historian Oswald Spengler were alive today, Wimpy is the kind of fast-food joint he’d be eating in. Actually, given how cheap it is – and assuming yet more Möbius strips are torn in the space/time continuum – Giambattista Vico and Philip Toynbee might well join him for a Bender, fries and a foaming beaker of Coke. For Wimpy embodies the history of fast food conceived of with the circularity of a burger bun, rather than the linear progress of a machine-cut chip.

Wimpy’s origins seem lost in the mists of time but, by the early Fifties, there were 12 of them in the US; then stodgy old Lyons got wind of the newfangled burger phenomenon and bought the Wimpy name. The first UK branch was implanted in its Coventry Street Corner House in the West End of London – and the rest, as Spengler might say, is history.

But history of a Spenglerian kind; for while by the early Seventies there were more than 1,000 Wimpy Bars and restaurants in as many as 23 countries, then came the barbarians, swishing their savage golden arches. In response, Wimpy mutated through various takeovers, ceding a province here, losing a satrap there, until, in 1990, the remaining 200-odd counter-service restaurants (the “bars” having long since been lost) were sold off to a management consortium.

I’d like to say that the last 20 years have brought a resurgence of Wimpy, a revival of the ancient virtues that made it the only British burger joint of the imperial age. Sadly, this isn’t the case – true, Wimpys hang on, doling out counter service in Roadchef service centres and mega-bowling alleys (whatever they might be), but the restaurants are reduced to a mere rump, a Flavius Stilicho, exerting pitiful authority from some gastronomic Ravenna.

Yet still they soldier on! Since 2008, the restaurants have been retro-branded in their original red-and-white livery and the menu has been expanded. I took Family Self along to the Wimpy in Clapham Junction for a meal and I have to say it was a most deliciously nostalgic experience. For anyone over 45, the Wimpy Bar is synonymous with the burger. Back in that fabled time, a Wimpy burger had a distinctly beef burger-ish taste – quite different from the modern meat patty; and came also with a particular relish, ready-smeared.

My wife, who, like some latter-day Petrarch, takes pleasure in chronicling the battles of yore, reminded me that when this relish was swapped in favour of a mayonnaise-based gloop in the mid-Seventies, it caused great unrest among the proles. I couldn’t consciously recall being in a Wimpy since the Eighties, so whatever mutations the chain had been through passed me by: here I was, sitting once again at a melamine table, being served by an adolescent reassuringly mailed with retro-acne. I opted for a newfangled jalapeño burger, Mrs Self for a quarter-pounder. One of the boy-spawn essayed – at my urging – a Bender; the other had a chicken burger of uncompromising asperity: no salad, no sauce, just white bread and white chicken unnaturally compressed.

Although I couldn’t quite face one myself, I was keen to find out what the Bender was like. It’s one of the queer involutions of history that, back in the heyday of the Wimpy Bar, “bender” was the derogatory epithet most employed by adolescent boys to refer to homosexuals. I’m not sure when the Bender entered the Wimpy menu, but its presence there is a testimony to how we now live in a more tolerant and inclusive society. I think. Anyway, the Bender is quite simply a frankfurter bent and crenulated so that it resembles a porky laurel wreath that can
be inserted between buns. My boy had a bite and pronounced it “exactly like a hotdog”.

My jalapeño quarter-pounder was pretty feisty for the high street – not the bland madeleine I’d been hoping for: a sweet taste that would transport me back to a less tolerant but more innocent age, an era of Fair Isle tank tops, platform soles, a functioning mining industry and Butskellism. No, no, however much I yearned for a circular history, it was not to be found in the compass of a burger bun. Outside, the traffic groaned while overhead the blue sky yawned devoid of contrails – all aeroplanes were grounded; soon we would be running out of Ethiopian sugar snap peas. Truly, this was the real decline of the west, a cataclysm from which even Wimpy could not escape.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from April 22:

I don’t know Gordon Brown – do you? I don’t know Dave Cameron, either, not even remotely. As for Nick Clegg, he’s an enigma – albeit not one I feel driven to solve. Presumably Miriam González Durántez has penetrated further into the Clegg mystery, hacking her way through the jungle of his id, and so doing has drawn closer to the lost city of Clegg-Dorado.

Closer, maybe, but such is the ineffable character of human identity (and this, bizarrely, includes even someone as squeakily, blandly, wipeably clean as the boy Cleggster) that we always remain hares in the pell-mell race towards greater intimacy. One may travel half the distance towards knowing someone, then half the distance that remains, then half of that further distance – and so the desideratum of genuine knowledge will remain always beyond reach.

We know this intuitively from our relationship with those who are closest to us: our lifelong partners – even our own blood relations – remain curiously unknowable. We may have smelt their farts beneath the duvet, we may have changed their nappies, we may have administered Oramorph to them when in extremis – yet still we do not know them. If this is the case with those we interact with sensuously, psychically and physically, how much more opaque must be those we’ve never met?

One of the greatest follies of the current era – cultivated by the mass media, reaped in a whirlwind by social networking – is this delusion of proximity: the victims of paedophiles who cruise internet chatrooms are said to have “met” their abductors online, while presumably those ignorami who follow the likes of Stephen Fry on Twitter feel they are treading in his footsteps along a lonely strand.

But it is in the realm of political campaigning that we encounter the most egregious faux intimacy. In times gone by, when the pyramid of power was still more acuminate, those at the apex saw no virtue in manifesting themselves as human at all. The rulers of the ancient despotisms of the near east were gods, and so depicted in suitably hieratic forms: winged and coiled, their features flattened, wreathed in potent symbols. Even the absolute rulers of our own early-modern era had no requirement to be knowable: they were naught save the sum of their powerful parts. Think of Holbein’s Henry VIII, with its geometric configurations of flesh, ermine, hair and cloth of gold, quartering a rectilinear body – this was portraiture as heraldry, not a representation of persona at all.

With each extension of the franchise, it became more and more difficult for our rulers to affect the monumental ataraxy of a Rameses. Nevertheless, they kept it up for as long as they could – even after the Second Reform Act, Victorian politicians were still portrayed in profile as biblical patriarchs, their long beards stiff with the oils of holy rectitude.

However, come the representative democracy, come the representative man (or woman, although less so because they rightly resist such bowdlerisation) – and come also the media that make it possible to delude ourselves that we “know” them. Politicians have come to believe that it’s a requirement for office to establish that, were the electorate in a position to cut them, they would indeed bleed – hence the spectacle of teary Gordon and weepy Dave contending for the title of Lord High Lachrymose of Oprah.

Back when democracy was upfront and highly personal, the citizenry had no need of such attitudinising on the part of elected leaders – they knew Pericles and Demosthenes bled when they were cut, because more than likely they’d been round to their places and seen them shaving. Nowadays such immediacy is impossible, so the attempt to convey an impression of it – for example, by giving interviews in domestic dishabille – is rightly understood by the electorate as mendacious lunacy.

We, the people, know that modern British prime ministers need first and foremost to be efficient managers, administrators and accountants – effective at the core bureaucratic tasks, good at delegating and adept at balancing devilish detail with the wider picture. If such paragons of office work did indeed exist, who on earth would want to know them personally? So, keep it to yourselves, chaps.

The latest Real Meals column is here:

Even people who know absolutely nothing about British politics of the past two decades still know that Peter Mandelson once mistakenly referred to mushy peas as guacamole in a Hartlepool fish-and-chip shop. So widespread is the awareness of this epochal solecism that when I was on an eco-holiday last year, deep in the Congolese rainforest, I was accosted by a group of Ituri pygmies who suggestively poked my groin with their spears while chanting: “Mishy-mushy, mishy-mushy, mushy-pea-Pe-ter!”

I took this all in good part; I certainly didn’t try to persuade them that – as some assert – the tale was apocryphal, and put about by Neil Kinnock as a slur upon the hated spinmeister. Didn’t try, because even if the guacamole faux pas hadn’t happened, it really should have, so perfect an image is this for the rise of New Labour. Mushy peas as an accompaniment to the traditional British fast food of fish and chips encapsulate everything northern, heavy-industrial and emphatically Old Labour; superficially an unattractive green mulch, they are actually tasty and full of protein, and are also a further metaphor for the old-fashioned virtue of collectivism: individual peas pressed into the commonality of the Styrofoam pot.

By mistaking this wholesome staple for a faddish dip – the sort of thing that the quintessential arriviste Abigail would have served at her ghastly party – Mandelson incontinently exposed himself as the effete, southern bourgeois that so many socialists (remember them?) believed him to be. Years on, as we career towards an election that will be decided entirely on least-preference votes – for the candidates electors least despise – what is left of the once-groaning Labour board? The bag-Byerses and rat-Hoons have scuttled away with the crumbs; cheesy Blair has faded until only his cosmetically whitened grin remains. Yet there sits that behemoth “Lord” Mandelson, dipping his silver spoon into the guacamole of the Prime Minister’s ever-envious brain.

If Mandelson’s mushy pea moment was the apotheosis of the British labour movement – you can’t be what you don’t eat – the beginning of that whimpering end lay years earlier, when an EU directive terminated the ancient eco-ritual of wrapping battered cod (or haddock) in sheets of newsprint.

Soon enough, not only will the notion of wrapping takeaway food in newsprint seem hopelessly outdated, but newspapers themselves will have gone the way of all flesh. Who’d have thunk it, as the Guardian might say, that of this triumvirate – mushy peas, Mandy and an influential regional press – only the former will still remain?

Yet since time out of mind the noble chippie has stood proud on the British high street, a zinc-and-white-tiled shrine to unsaturated fats, wreathed in the mephitic yet queerly wholesome odour of fryers as deep as the Mariana Trench. Why, just the other evening I repaired to my local chippie and ordered some plaice and chips (to be told there was only cod – or haddock – available), and was served a repast that oozed conservatism. The fish went straight from the freezer into the batter, then the fryer; the chips were fat and tasteless; I stood waiting, staring abstractedly at a Pukka Pies advert that had never seen better days, but, best of all, my mushy peas came in a tiny Styrofoam pot, of a size suitable for a dip – guacamole, say – rather than a serious vegetable.

The quest for the perfect fish-and-chips meal can remain endless. Such is the diversity of chippies that there is always another greasy mountain to slither over. I have sought this deep-fried unicorn horn the length and breadth of Britain, motoring through Lanarkshire to the town of Biggar, which boasts “the finest fish-and-chip shop in Scotland” (it wasn’t too bad; the chips were a bit soggy), standing in line outside the famous Sea Shell of Lisson Grove (plaice available!), and even crunching batter behind the fishing sheds of Hastings Old Town.

This last experience was depressing, for while Hastings boasts the only inshore fleet still to land on the south coast, the fish wasn’t fresh at all. It’s an irony that Mandelson would no doubt appreciate, that while it was deep-sea trawling that first made fried fish a viable, cheap food for the working class of Victorian Britain, it’s the same industrial fishing that will ensure it ends up as a scarce delicacy. As for avocados …