Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus

Some weeks you just have to face that there are interplanetary forces beyond your control at play. You have no choice but to accept that the fucking Moon is on Uranus and move on or, more likely, move sideways, like a hobbling crab on a rocky beach looking for shelter in a crevice.

This last week has been one of those weeks for me: I am liberally using the term week to cover the last ten days and counting. The shit fest may last a fortnight or longer, who knows.

There have been shootings indirectly, but worryingly and freakishly, connected to my future, I kid you not. There have been misunderstandings; acute pains; a sense of foreboding and dread; darkness.

On a political level, the UK chose to leave Europe for the stinkiest reasons possible, unleashing a tide of ill feeling and queasy regret that is wafting across the Irish Sea; making these last few days as depressing and unpredictable as the I-am-taking-a-dump-on-your-head-Seven-Plagues-of-Egypt weather that has put the kibosh on the brief summer spell we had at the end of May.

To top it all up, I went to bed last night having learnt that Partido Popular (a de facto criminal organisation mired in corruption and malfeasance) has won the election in Spain, getting more seats in Parliament in this second round than they did at the end of December. Their “ideology”, and I am using the term very loosely, revolving around the worst tenets of greedy free market policy and intrusive narrow-minded social conservatism, has garnered around eight million votes. I realise once more that Franco’s ghost is still haunting Spain: a mediocre, vindictive, choke-the-air-out-of-the-country spectre that will not be rid off until we perform the collective exorcism that we are too pusillanimous to face.

There just aren’t words to describe the ill feeling that has taken over me. Well, there are, in English they mostly start with “f”; in Spanish they include some highly scatological takes on the holy host. I will spare you the details.

I tend to make minor corrections to these rotten spells through food and drink but fate has not finished slapping me around just yet. This afternoon I stood at the cash register of my local supermarket with a bottle of bubbly and some coffee cake, amongst other treats, hoping they would provide an antidote to the poison of the week. As I am about to pay, the cashier informs me that they are not taking Bank of Ireland cards as the servers are down. I have no cash. I leave everything behind and I go home with my tail between my legs.

There is some cheddar cheese and the dregs of some take away salad in the fridge.

Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus.

Brexit at Tiffany’s? No. We are a tabloid.

Sometimes, more often than I care to admit, I have to bow down to the wit of tabloid subeditors…

Was it for this that all that blood was shed…?

Romantic Ireland is dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave

Ah, well. Happy Paddy’s Day everyone!

 

Celluloid Bites (5): When Harry Met Sally

Sit at a table in a French restaurant and, in the clumpiest of un-Gallic accents, order a wine which displeases the chef as an accompaniment to your main, and he will march into the dining room, sommelier in tow, to look you square in the eye and tell you that the restaurant will serve you no such wine with your meal. Or so we have learnt watching that country populated by terribly surly, or terribly charming, people (for there is no middle ground) that so often passes for France in Anglophone, and particularly American, films. I imagine this is a Libertarian’s idea of how far that busybody and interfering matron they call the nanny state can whoop us Europeans into submission: not only are we duped into believing in free universal healthcare and unemployment assistance; we also are happy to be told which wine to drink with our meals. Don’t hold it against me but, entre nous, I would love it if, appropriately subsidised to match my spending power, I was told what wine to drink with every meal I eat at a restaurant. It would save me that tiresome ritual of choosing the second less expensive wine and pretending that I care or know what I am doing when it comes to tasting it.

Not so Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, who as a patron of formidable exactitude in her restaurant orders, embodies the American ideal of demanding individuality in several scenes where all manner of ingredients are to be substituted, served on the side, or entirely eliminated, to please her taste buds and dietary requirements. To watch Meg Ryan’s concentrated frown under a panoply of outmoded hairstyles as she peruses a menu that she will shortly blitz until it is barely recognisable, is to witness a transformation that is as entertaining and charming as it is ground breaking. For here we have all the ingredients that traditionally made for the insufferable shrew of male-centred chauvinistic nightmares: the brittle demands and know-it-all self-sufficiency coupled with the frosty and forthright sheen of the waspish hyper-educated woman. This time, however, those same ingredients are expertly handled and turned into comedic gold by Norah Ephron, who not in vain was an excellent cook as well as a very sharp scriptwriter, and thus Sally Albright emerges to honour her surname in every sense of the word: verbally sparring the lackadaisical but zingtastic Harry Burns and managing to hang on to her thought through idiosyncrasies in every frame of the film. So that for the first time we have a romantic heroine who only changes the length of her feathered hair and width of her shoulder pads to signal the passing years for absentminded viewers but does not budge an inch to meet the demands of love or marriage.

Norah Ephron’s script is commendable to a quasi-Aristotelian point: it seems to generate its own perfect brand of romantic comedy, one where laughter and common sense are expertly matched, and where a feminist outlook is effortlessly paired with hetero-normative romance. In When Harry Met Sally, Ephron managed to prove that opposites attract to an extent that goes beyond the purely dramatic to enter the terrain of ideology. I imagine the world it depicts and the narrative it unfolds as a sort of Heaven for straight female overachievers: a place where professional acumen and steely resolve are a clear sine qua non for women but one where women and men make each other laugh and form friendships so valuable that the thought of losing them seems a more frightening prospect than the dreaded spinsterhood of yore. By showing us that a woman finds love when she meets a man who is happy to be her equal, Ephron and Reiner manage to give us one of the first feminist fairy tales on the silver screen. No fairy tale that delivers its moral through a woman faking an orgasm in a crowded Manhattan deli could be otherwise.

If we are lucky, we will also have what Sally is having.

The teeming many and the stately few

Two weeks ago I received a collection notice from the post office in my area in South West Dublin: I expected the international letter to contain the ballot papers for tomorrow’s general election in Spain. Getting the vote when you live abroad is a complicated and hazardous process for Spanish migrants. Register with the embassy and, as a result, lose your rights to universal health coverage in Spain; then follow a process of inscription in the electoral census for migrants and ask for your vote every time there is an election; finally, if you are lucky and you get your papers, as I did this time but not for the last regional elections, vote by post or at the Spanish Embassy.

I have been bemoaning this paean to red tape cynically calculated by PP to hinder the migrant vote, which would be overwhelmingly against them, since it was introduced, turning what was a straightforward procedure into a Kafkaesque process. But I must admit that this time it has served me well: the journey for the vote has been illustrative of longer roads and more difficult journeys. You see I cycle everywhere: I cycle when it is windy and I cycle in the rain and I cycle early in the morning and when it is close night and I cycle past hoodlums and, sometimes, past the so-called genteel. Cycling I weave in and out of the many paths of this city, some dark and some bright, some narrow and some wide, and I get to know it at a ponderous pace unknown to the speed of cars; and I get to know it with a sense of invulnerability, unknown to the lone pedestrian. We all should cycle through our city: we all should travel through the unfamiliar and disquieting now and then.

My journey to the vote began with my cycling in the close darkness of a December night fighting the damp Dublin winter chill uphill to the Collection Office in Crumlin, my local Post Office. Crumlin is expansive but tightly built. Clusters of two bedroom terraced houses rendered in pebbledash with a short drive and small back garden built as social housing for tenement dwellers and the deserving working class. In Crumlin you have no choice but to rub elbows with your neighbours and at Christmas squint at the brash displays on windows, walls, or roofs. The area smacks of grit and hard earned comfort punctuated with the Baroque decorative efforts of the working class: white ladies displaying their marmoreal charms on window sills, scallop blinds shading a vase with iridescent plastic flowers; a Doric porch fronting a 60 metre square house. Here live taxi drivers, deliverymen, plumbers and bricklayers and, increasingly, since the days of the Celtic Tiger property boom, interlopers, like me, who paint their doors Farrow and Ball grey and remove all ornamentations from their front windows. I feel quite at home here: Crumlin is not far removed, allowing for striking architectural differences, from the area I lived in as a child growing up in Madrid. In electoral terms this is a section of the vote that needs to be conquered, no doubt, but is not pandered to by majority parties. The aspirations and prospects of its dwellers are largely in the shadow of that middle class that apparently represents everybody and ends up being a faceless zero in an unworkable political equation.

When I finally arrived in Crumlin Village shortly before the Post Office was due to close, I was welcome by a waft of hot air carrying the succulent smell of coronary-inducing chips. The smell reminded me of my granny’s own very working class street in Madrid and of the couple who ran an old fashioned crisp frying and peanut roasting shop. I pictured myself standing there against the mint green tiles on the walls, holding a gifted and very greasy bag of crisps straight out form the oil vats at the back; my grandmother and aunt exchanging pleasantries with the owners, Bernardo, a stocky man with a shock of wiry grey hair, and Pepita, whose size oddly matched her name to my child’s ears, “little peep”. This was a rare olfactory memory for me and it made me wonder whether everybody has one and about the Poustrian smells of the upper classes. And I am unable to imagine what smell, haphazardly experienced in a public place, makes them travel back in time. I think of the forbidding fortresses they call homes and of lives where public space is only a space of transit between private spaces designed to keep the great unwashed away. I cycle home with my ballot papers safely in my bag. On my bike sometimes I feel like I can do anything. Perhaps this time we can, Podemos. But this is only the first part of my journey. The vote, I think, will be secured when I take it to the Embassy the following week.

And so, the second leg of the journey begins on a much milder night and it is an easterly journey to affluent Sandymount, passing through even more affluent Ballsbridge. Two well-heeled and very kind ladies direct me along the way when I am forced to stop and squint at nearly invisible street signs perched a top remote walls in the dark. Steep stairs at the end of wide and pebbled drives lead up to austere Christmas wreaths: no garish displays of seasonal cheer here. Money knows that money is not secured through public ostentation but through private deals: a truth that escapes the cruelly-termed “chavs” and “knackers” who think that glitter and horsepower will act as lucky charms for prosperity. The signifiers of wealth are as elusive as the closed circles of the very wealthy and they are constantly changed to leave us behind. The Lutheran sobriety of the unadorned facades of the stately houses in Dublin 4 is a smack on the face of the Baroque pretensions of their Dublin 12 counterparts. Don’t be fooled by sentiment: their inhabitants will never be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

It is unsettling to cycle through unknown parts of town: in narrow alleys you can be jolted by unsavoury looking characters ducking in and out of the road. Dublin 4 is also unsettling but in that post-apocalyptic and semi-feudal barrenness that lone pedestrians or cyclists, stranded or forced by circumstance like I was, experience when moving through the deserted streets where the very rich live. Front windows are high and cinematic in scope but mostly reveal airy rooms with high ceilings and subdued lighting; I can only guess the comforting warmth of a fireplace beyond eye reach. The houses I pass are the size of at least six or eight Crumlin houses. I think of an old and depressing trait of humankind: some have to make do with their slice on their terraced road, and that is, to my mind, doing pretty well, in a world where millions starve or are blown apart or both; a minority, though, believe they need more. They have to be at the centre of a very wide canvas, commanding a large space, territorially announcing their dominance. Other paintings are teeming with life moving with the insistence of tingling ever flowing blood just awakened. This is not one of those pictures. There is an eerie stillness to the deserted streets that makes me think of wolves and turrets hiding invisible bowmen. The air smells of nothing.

I was approaching the Embassy with my vote already in its envelope and I thanked them for putting me through this journey, which turned out to be a fable and a parable, like most journeys once they are committed to paper. After forty minutes cycling to get to the Embassy, I realised that my vote directly addressed the disparity that I had witnessed, that I was voting as if to say my eyes are open and I see these differences and although my street is narrow my mind is wide and is not up for the taking. With a bit of luck, tomorrow Spain will be awash with the faces, light, and smells of its people voting for change.

Happy Christmas!

Don’t treat me this way*

A small child, six or seven years of age, zigzags his way to the top of the queue at the cash register in Aldi. I am balancing a clear plastic bowl of salad, a packet of mixed nuts, crackers and cheese: a lunch just about the right side of the divide between wholesome and tasty. He triumphantly holds a box of assorted chocolates and when he gets the approving nod of his mother he places it down on the checkout conveyor-belt with a thud that flashes orange and fuchsia before my eyes. Watching him I am transported to similar childhood experiences: an ice-cream machine releases a yellow and brown curlicue into a cone; my mother hands me a chocolate-covered donut; my grandfather opens a tin of assorted biscuits.

Later that day, I nurse a glass of Tempranillo sitting across from a friend in a bar. The conversation and the bar are warm and I could consider how this glass of wine is my own victory over the utilitarian bent of a workday. But the wine carries a bitter sweetness beyond its warming effect and it strikes me that in this emancipated form, I am an adult version of the child in Aldi: well behaved according to some standard too remote for me to grasp; prey to the same binding powers that dole their reward in consumables. I have been trained since childhood to accept the correlation between acceptance and consumption.

My friend tells me about a party thrown by a bestselling author he attended recently: there were fancy Michelin-starred canapés and a free bar but he was most taken with the mini-burgers, ice-cream machines and the pick and mix section from which guests could liberally scoop their own sweets. We could not think of a more clear image of success than a whole pick and mix section at your disposal: “sweet dreams are made of this”, to quote the Eurythmics song that was a hit when I was a sugar-charmed child. And then my friend breaks the bazar quality of the image when he says:

“It wasn’t more fun than a dinner party thrown by any of my friends. The invite even stated the finishing time of the party: one a.m.”

A pause and his eyes light up:

“The week before we attended a dinner party at a friend’s who lives in a house just like ours and we had a sing-a-long that lasted until five in the morning. That was way more fun.”

This is just to say that singing is better than sugar; and revolution, a trill that shuts down the checkout at a supermarket.

*I misremembered the title of this hit by The Communards, Don’t Leave Me This Way, but I don’t regret it: you could do much worse than using Jimmy Somerville’s gutsy falsetto to vindicate singing and revolution.

First world problems. Third world problems

I’m enjoying some game with my friend, and not precisely Monopoly: the kind of game that had feathers and flew freely or cutely hopped or elegantly glided until they were shot, then plucked and skinned. A bottle of Bordeaux rests on the table, two thirds full as we tackle the pheasant with leaks and mushrooms in a cream sauce. We had teal seared on the pan and sliced in thin stripes for starters. I picked it off the plate with my hands and ate it eagerly: it was nutty, firm but just-so tender, coated in butter, it looked like Snowhite’s heart broken to pieces. I may, just may, punch somebody in the face to eat it again, if it came to that.

My friend savours the pheasant, takes a sip of the Bordeaux, and sighs:

“Pheasant is so dry and flavourless compared to teal.” He says.

A beat.

“The definition of a first world problem.” He quips.

And we laugh. We were still laughing about it as we had our chocolate cake for dessert.

My friend is gone home and I am listening to my favourite Spanish radio programme, Carne Cruda, as I wash the dishes after dinner. Javier Gallego, the presenter, is discussing immigration with a journalist who has written extensively about asylum seekers and economic migrants and also campaigns for their rights. They are talking about the thousands who have sunk and drowned in the sea trying to reach European shores. They are talking about the detention camps that isolate and vilify those who survive the journey: there are more than a hundred camps all over Europe.

Then an African immigrant, now established in Spain, joins them: he is one of those people who can bring their spirit to the tip of their tongue no matter what language they speak. His Spanish is punchy, more than serviceable, more eloquent for being a bit rough around the edges. His vowels are rounder than those of a native speaker and there is a staccato rhythm to his speech, as if his tongue was hitting on polished pebbles on a beach.

He says that it took him six years to get to Spain from his homeland in Sub-Saharan Africa. He says it took him six years to get to Spain because he had to make many stops on the way to work and get together more money to pay for the next leg of his journey. He says that sometimes it worked and he moved on, and other times he was robbed or scammed and he had to start all over again and that would delay him some more. He says he is in Spain because he wanted a better life. He wasn’t fleeing from anybody. He had no work or prospects where he came from. Matter-of-factly he says that he was beaten in the detention camp where they put him when he arrived. “They should come in to tell us about Spanish culture so we understand its rules better, not hit us or shout at us,” he says. He was glad to get out of the camp.He now works and studies and volunteers at his local church in the outskirts of Madrid.

He says he is routinely stopped by the police, singled out because of the colour of his skin. The police ask for his papers and every time they do it he is shamed. He tells Javier Gallego of a time he was just waiting for the bus. “I was one among many others waiting for the bus, he says, but the police came to me, the only black at the bus stop, and asked to see my ID card, everybody stared at me, thinking that I had done something wrong, and I said to the police, if I was a criminal, I would stop because this is so shameful. The shame I feel every time you do this would make me stop. But I am not a criminal.” A brief silence falls on the air. “Can you tell he is working as he speaks?” The journalist/campaigner asks Javier Gallego. “He has barely any free time and the free time he has he volunteers at his church.”

Then Javier Gallego thanks the African man for his time and he hangs up and then Gallego plays a track from a play on emigration that will soon open in Madrid. In the track another African is reciting a piece, one line echoes in the silence of my kitchen: “What kind of world is this where a million cans of Coke can move freely but a man cannot?” He asks.

I am rinsing plates looking out onto the pitch-dark garden: the sink is filling fast, and I sink my hand in the water to retrieve the flecks of pheasant that are clogging the drain.

Stop inviting those shitheads for dinner, please

I am breaking some rules today: this piece is my response to the recent regional and municipal elections in Madrid and I am going to publish it in Spanish first. If you are itching to read it in English you just have to scroll down.

“El estofado de gaviota indigesta”

Cuando empecé este blog, me propuse escribir acerca de todo con una sola limitación: que el hilo conductor fuese la comida. Esa norma, a pesar de alguna pataleta que otra, me ha resultado más grata que frustrante y, cuando menos, contribuye a que lo que cuento aquí sea menos predecible. La metáfora gastronómica acecha agazapada y cual aguerrido maquis me asalta por sorpresa y da forma inesperada a ideas que sin ella quizá no serían más que lugares comunes.

La comida como metáfora de la vida requiere cierto esfuerzo pero he aquí que por primera vez desde que inauguré este blog encuentro en los resultados de las recientes elecciones autonómicas y, en menor medida, municipales, en la Comunidad de Madrid, una situación que no tiene que buscar su simbolismo gastronómico de manera oblicua. Empezaré por decir lo obvio antes de entrar en materia: es probable que Manuela Carmena sea la próxima alcaldesa de Madrid y la primera desde Tierno Galván que parece tener el compromiso, la sencillez, el talante y la bondad necesarios para liderar una ciudad tan ilusionante como echada a los infiernos. Cuando vuelva por allí brindaré con cava por ella y por Ada Colau, el azote de los saqueadores y usureros, que ahora está al frente de Barcelona. Ojalá estén en lo cierto los que predicen que el futuro en política es cada vez más municipal y arrabalero: más de tú a tú y de puerta a puerta.

Estos resultados, de llegarse a los acuerdos necesarios para que estas mujeres formen gobierno, son bonitos sin más y hablan por sí mismos. De modo que aquí se quedan, adornando la mesa y regalando la vista, el gusto y el olfato. El plato que nos pueden servir para la alcaldía estará bien cocinado y aderezado. Tiene ingredientes frescos, está preparado por mano sabia y servido con mimo y agrado.

 Lo que me quita el apetito y me deja mal sabor de boca son los porcentajes de votantes que siguen colocando en puesto preferente a candidatos del PP. Así como es emocionante y, en un mundo menos desquiciado que el de la política regional madrileña, sería simplemente cabal, que medio millón de madrileños se decanten por Carmena, resulta desesperante y delirante rayando lo paranormal que Aguirre obtenga aún todavía más votos que ella. Que Cristina Cifuentes, el latiguillo fascistoide que azotaba a los sufridos y desesperados madrileños que se atrevían a protestar los desmanes de su partido, sea probablemente la próxima presidenta de la Comunidad de Madrid a pesar del hedor irrespirable del PP y de su desdén por el bienestar de los madrileños, eso tiene que venirlo a explicar Stephen Hawking con la última de teoría de cuerdas y universos paralelos.

Señoras y señores votantes del PP, si alguno de ustedes entra en esta tasca ubicada virtualmente en una de las callejuelas de mi querido Lavapiés, sepan que están ustedes empeñados en invitar cada cuatro años a gentes zafias y desagradecidas: de las que no traen ni una mala botella de vino peleón a la comidita del domingo; de las que entran a codazos en los bares a la hora del aperitivo y, vociferantes, le quitan el turno a todo el que esperaba pacientemente; de las que vuelven loco al camarero y no dejan ni un duro de propina; de las que se llevan la cubertería y plagian recetas de familia y las hacen pasar por suyas propias sin vergüenza alguna; de las que se comen todo y no friegan nada; de las que nunca invitan, ni hacen fondo, ni pagan a pachas; de las que solo hacen sobremesa para cerrar tratos y forjar contactos. En suma, de las que no se conforman con alimentarse: de las que rapiñan y depredan.

Señores y señores votantes del PP, dejen de invitarlas, ya no las quiero ver más a mi mesa: estamos quitando el mantel y los platos y, dentro de nada, los echaremos a patadas de esta tasca.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

When I began this blog, I decided to write about anything and everything with one limitation only: the connecting thread would have to be food. That rule, in spite of the odd hissy fit, has turned out to be more enjoyable than frustrating and, at the very least, contributes to make what I write about here more unpredictable. As a metaphor, food skulks in the shadows like a stealthy but courageous guerrilla that takes me by surprise and gives unexpected shape to ideas that without it would perhaps otherwise be nothing more than common places.

I won’t lie: using food as a metaphor for life requires a certain effort, but today for the first time since I started the blog, I find in the results of the recent regional, and to a lesser extent, municipal, elections in Madrid, a situation that is not in need of the oblique symbolism of food. I will begin by stating the obvious to anybody with any knowledge of or interest in Madridian politics: it is likely that Manuela Carmena will become the next mayor of Madrid, and the first since Tierno Galván that seems to have the commitment, sincerity, backbone and good heart necessary to lead a city as exciting and as gone to hell as Madrid. When I am back in my hometown I will toast her health and Ada Colau’s, the scourge of plunderers and moneylenders, now at the helm of Barcelona.

Those results, if the necessary agreements allowing these women to form government are reached, are simply good and speak for themselves. So here they will stay garnishing this table and delighting our eyes, our taste, and our nose. The course we may be served for the mayoralty of Madrid will be well cooked and dressed. It has fresh ingredients; it is prepared by a wise cook and served lovingly.

What spoils my appetite and leaves a bitter aftertaste is the percentage of voters that continue to vote for PP candidates. Just as it is moving, and in a less maddening world than that of Madrid politics, it would be simply sane, for half a million Madridians to vote for Carmena, it is despairing and delirious bordering on paranormal that Aguirre has obtained even more votes than her. The idea of Cristina Cifuentes, the fascistoid whip that has flayed the poor Madridians who dared protest the abuses of her party, becoming the next President of the region of Madrid in spite of the unbreathable stink of PP and their disdain for the welfare of Madridians, is beyond my understanding and may be a matter for Stephen Hawking to decipher in his next account on string theory and parallel universes.

 Ladies and Gentlemen who vote for PP, if any of you lands on this watering hole, virtually located in a back lane of my beloved Lavapiés, please be aware that you are hell bent on inviting for dinner coarse and ungrateful people every four years: the kind that do not even bring a shitty bottle of bargain bin wine to Sunday dinner; the kind that vociferously elbow everybody who was patiently waiting their turn out of the way to get to the bar first; the kind that drive the waiter crazy and do not leave a tip; the kind that take the cutlery and plagiarise somebody else’s family recipe and pass them as their own without shame; the kind that eat everything and wash up nothing; the kind that never pay, stand a round, or go Dutch; the kind that only do after dinner talk to close a deal and make contacts. The kind, in sum, that are not happy to merely eat: they have to prey and despoil.

Ladies and gentlemen who vote for PP, please stop inviting them, I don’t want to see them at my table anymore: we are finally taking away the plates and the table cloth and soon enough we will kick them the hell out of this bar for good.

Tea break

“I think it is ‘ne-pawl’, yeah. I think that is the correct pronunciation.” The man in the grey fleece puts the newspaper down, looking up, a benign but quizzical smile spreading across his jowly face peppered with a five o’clock shadow. He is waiting for the final nod that will seal the debate.

“But I think you can also pronounce it ‘ne-pahl’. I think that is also right. That’s the way they say it on RTE. I think both are correct. Wouldn’t you say?” The older man’s questions are always rhetorical, although most ignore this feature of his speech just as they have grown accustomed to his crystal clear pronunciation and perfectly parsed sentences.

“Ah well. RTE. What do you expect? It’s because “a” in Irish is “ah”. That’s why they say it that way. It has always been ‘ne-pawl’. You cannot trust the RTE pronunciation to be correct.” The man from the North in the blue shirt with the firmly fastened top button and matching indigo tie smiles wryly, letting his sarcasm bounce off the polished surface of the older man’s manners.

“I´d say both are correct.” The older man iterates, and then glances at the picture on the front of The Irish Times once more and, deftly deflecting the trajectory of the last volley he was served adds, “The clothes she is wearing are so colourful. You would not think of anything tragic looking at those vibrant colours. The colours you see in Asia…“ And for a moment his sentence trails off, uncharacteristically bereft of his usual fluency as he takes a sip of his tea, “…it’s a whole different culture.”

“That it is.” Says the man in the grey fleece and he pushes the plate of shortbread biscuits towards the older man, who is trying to reach them across the veneered oak table.

Going up the larder

Food teases the palate, fills the stomach and fuels action and movement but it is also a social, cultural and class signifier as I attempt to demonstrate with most lines in this blog. In this passage from On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan exhaustively and elegantly proves that this is the case by showcasing his protagonist’s induction into the Oxford upper-middle class through food. I propose a game to travel down our personal and social memory: read the passage and try to remember the first time you tried each of the items here.

“During that summer he ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yoghurt –a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel. His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables –the aubergines, green and red peppers, courgettes and mangetouts –that came regularly before him. He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of under-cooked peas. He had to overcome an aversion, not to the taste so much as to the reputation of garlic. Ruth giggled for minutes on end, until she had to leave the room, when he called a baguette a croissant. (…) He encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. Many of these items tasted only faintly repellent, and similar to each other in some indefinable way, but he was determined not to appear unsophisticated. Sometimes, if he ate too fast, he came close to gagging.

 Some of the novelties he took to straight away: freshly ground and filtered coffee, orange juice at breakfast, confit of duck, fresh figs. He was in no position to know what an unusual situation the Pointings’ was, a don married to a successful businessman, and Violet, a sometime friend of Elizabeth David, managing a household in the vanguard of a culinary revolution while lecturing to students on monads and the categorical imperative…”