…the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich, – that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot. (Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right, 1869)
Still true, 140 years later. Eating anything from a railway station is an exercise in extortion and gustatory torture. For the price of a decent curry in any West Midlands town, you're presented with a rock hard, tasteless lump of 'bread' containing stale and flavour-free substances masquerading as cheese, meat or vegetables. Douglas Adams knew a lot about British railway and pub food. He once speculated that British pub food was meant as
'a form of penance for some forgotten, but unimaginably dire sin. The sausages are for those who know what their sins are, and wish to atone for something specific'.
This is probably why Arthur Dent retired to an obscure planet to become a tribe's Sandwich Maker. Douglas Adams also had something to say about academia:
“It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matter indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.”
Despite fixing my email, I'm feeling very grumpy, despite a fine lunch with a colleague and the sunshine. Normally in these moods I'd buy some obscure indie or more books online, but even tweedy consumerism's not cutting it these days. Though I did just buy the new St. Vincent album.
Clearly food is the answer. I'm going to buy as many varieties of pulses and beans as I can find and cook an enormous chilli, washed down with a fine Gewürtztraminer (screw you, wine buffs) or something similar. And catch the Dr. Who repeat because it's one of the things I sacrificed to keep kids safe at the UK School Games the other day.
This morning's Today programme finished with a discussion of the term 'gastro-pub', which has been dropped by the Good Food Guide. One of the speakers, who apparently opened one of the first such establishments (the Eagle in Clerkenwell) explained that now all pubs serve great food, it's an irrelevant term. 'All you need is a pint of mussels', he said and defined gastro-pubs as places which serve excellent, interesting food with minimal service to keep down costs.
Right. The Dark Place is full of pubs. The hogshead, the Royal London, Wetherspoon's, The Litten Tree, the Giffard (Goth pub: the menu is brilliantly called Noshferatu) and a massive range of nasty chain pubs.
Not one could be described as a 'gastro-pub'. Those that serve food have fully-equipped kitchens: microwaves to defrost and a deep-fat fryer. Eating out in this town is an utterly miserable experience once you stray from the acceptable curry houses and the one extortionately expensive Italian place. The pub food is enough to make Mr. Creosote turn away at the door. Everything is fried. Nothing is cooked from fresh ingredients. Pints of mussels are not to be found. Nor are bone-marrow on toast, or anything 'deconstructed' or served with 'jus'.
One honourable mention: if you go down to the Great Western, you'll find a roaring fire and a basket of free crumpets to toast on it. Some nights, they serve free Black Country Tapas: good bread, ham and raw black pudding.
So I'm sorry that the metropolitans have declared the death of these establishments before they ever got to us, because eating out round here is the closest you can get to spiritual and sensual death. I like animals, and I like food. I firmly believe that if you're going to kill something, you've got to treat it with enough respect to do something good with it. This is why I only eat vegetarian soup and salads at work: the kitchen is an exercise in mediocrity and all involved deserve to be reincarnated as kebabs. It's not the fault of the staff: given the ingredients, budget and time, I'm sure they'll do great things. But the canteen's purpose is to fuel us, not delight us, which I think is a shame.
So, gastronauts: if the Londoners aren't coming to your pub, move up here. Please?
This is lunch at The Hegemon. It's been lunch every day since mid-June. It costs 99p, is refrigerated to the point of hurting my teeth, and is served in plastic.
Despite this, nobody has as yet described me as a shadow of my former self.
Heading down to the canteen, I dine on some miserable salad and a bowl of Red Lentil and Vegetable Soup. It seems familiar. I wonder idly if it's related to the Red Lentil soup served on Tuesday and the Vegetable soup served yesterday. I decide that it probably is.
No matter though - at least someone's eating well. According to the kitchen staff, the Vice-Chancellor's leaving bash is scoffing the best of everything. Through the low partitions, we can admire the acres of gleaming crystal, and listen to the jazz band noodling while the guests nosh.
Does this sound bitter? Well, perhaps I am. After all, 150 of my colleagues lost their jobs during this VC's stint, and we've all taken a large pay cuts while her income reached £240,000. No wonder that these items - received today from Left on the Shelf, my favourite bookshop - will be prominently displayed in my office.
Poster
Postcard of a Philip Berkin cartoon in Private Eye
Apparently British food is disgusting. The haggis, Stilton, Yorkshire pudding, scallops, Lancashire Hot Pot, oatcakes, game pie, wild garlic: the lot. Revolting.
Eh? I know that the British used to have a reputation for awful cuisine, but I suspect that's a result of the postwar drive to industrialise food. Lots of us still eat appallingly, but this country has an amazing range of foods available, especially if you have a disposable income.
Oh yes, he also says that 'British women are not very attractive'.
We were idly chatting in the pub on Friday about our student diets, and my thoughts turned to the menu were I to host a dinner party based on my undergraduate cuisine (1993-1996).
First year was easy: I was still vegetarian, and no cook. Life was far too interesting to stay in the kitchen (other than at parties), and so I lived mostly on bags of carrots and the crisps which inevitably accompanied beer (real ale from the start apart from the occasional vodka and frequent recourse to Chateau Manville from Kwik's: 99p a bottle for this mid-strength perry; I assumed the Chateau was a derelict house in Bolton, and even then suspected that the plastic 'cork' wasn't a sign of quality). This was also the year I was introduced to the curry, a life-long love affair. Our local takeaway was the Shahin in Bangor, run by some Bangladeshis who'd moved first to Sweden then to North Wales (they left Scandinavia for a British education - the fools). In return for helping the teenage lad with his homework a couple of times, excellent free curries were occasionally proffered.
Gradually my palate widened, mostly thanks to housemates with a) cooking skills and b) parents who would pack them off to university with a big box of frozen home-made meals. Left to myself, I bought packets of Sos-Mix vegetarian 'meat' and such things. Other meals I'm particularly ashamed of are packets of dried pasta in dehydrated sauced (Knorr? Batchelor?) which were completely disgusting and took longer to cook than actual pasta in real sauce, the same stuff with rice and Fray Bentos pies served with oven chips.
I think I started eating meat again by the end of first year, and so second year saw an explosion of taste. Suddenly, the world of disgusting cheap frozen food was open to me, mostly sourced from Kwik-Save, Farmfoods and Iceland. Cardboard pizzas. Chicken Kievs, Scampi. 4p loaves of white bread (brown was compulsory at home, so white felt, to quote Mark Corrigan, like pudding - for a while). Every student kitchen I shared had the obligatory 10kg sack of rice: basmati when I got the chance, horrible brown rice if someone else bought it. Marmite (on crumpets, another verboten foodstuff at home) formed a large part of my diet - the vitamins in that alone kept me alive, and I gradually picked up some culinary skills from housemates. So did Kwik-Save's huge, cheap bags of Broken Biscuits. Mmm.
The joy of being completely new to cooking was that there were no rules. I could put any flavour with any food and be happy. One of my favourite treats was a novel twist on Italian: cooking a good plateful of salted spaghetti, then putting it in the microwave with a bar of Dairy Milk perched proudly on top. I recently bought a bar of Lindt's plain chocolate with salt flakes - sadly, it failed to reproduce the deliciousness of my own invention. The vanilla alternative was vats of macaroni cheese which would last a week.
Sometimes, I'd wildly and randomly swing from cheap horrible food to stupidly extravagant ones. We'd buy steak fairly often, but occasionally I'd appear with a slab of venison and a greedy grin. I have no idea from whence it came, but it was good - probably reduced at the supermarket on Sunday afternoon, just before closing time. I also had my first prawns and mussels at the Bangor Mussel Fair down the docks, and acquired a wok for interminable stir-fries.
I actually can't remember when I started to cook properly. Vegetables did appear at some point, often from Cefni Fruits, the Pot Noodle of grocers: rotting rubbish bought at the wholesalers when the other grocers had gone home with the good stuff. Old Man Cefni was a mean and uncaring character. The windowless rooms above the shop he (illegally) rented to my friends stank of decay, corruption and desperation, to which they could do no more than acquiesce.
Needless to say, I put on roughly 4 stone between fresher's week and graduation, most of which is still, unfortunately, with me. I literally don't remember ever thinking about the health implications of anything which passed my lips, and discovering that I had a gut and needed jeans in more than a 28" waist was a huge mystery. I did give up alcohol for some years but not for health reasons: I was just bored.
Right, your turn. If you're a student, on what are you dining? If you're past that, or never went to university, what did you eat in those early years of independence?
Of course, this is the perfect excuse to play these: it'll happen to you!
A Labour MP is proposing that hospital food conform to minimum health standards (I know, isn't it amazing that it doesn't already?). Joan Walley is being supported by MPs from all parties. The catering suppliers say it won't cost any more than the swill they serve now (I'm not sure why they aren't already providing healthy food if that's true). At the moment, children can be given food which would be illegal if provided in schools - low on vitamins, high on fats.
It's a Private Member's Bill - i.e. they're rarely given time for discussion, and a single MP can end the whole process by shouting 'object'.
Let's see if Paul Uppal lends his support, or even bothers turning up. Who knows, perhaps he'll be the government lackey told to object'.
I hate fish. I really, really hate the smell of it, the fishy taste, the bones, the skin, everything about the whole thing.
Which is unfortunate, because it was served for dinner every Friday at home, because we were good Catholics. Only once I went to university was I allowed to do myself a fried egg or something instead. Before that, if I didn't eat it over the course of the entire evening, it was served for breakfast and subsequent meals ad infinitum. I would cover it in tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, anything to make it less fishy, and I'd still gag. At some point, we got a cat, which was bright enough to sit under my chair on Friday evenings. I seem to recall sneaking the offending substance into a drawer in the dining table prior to my feline friend appearing, but it wasn't a long-term solution.
How would you persuade me that fish isn't poisonous muck? And what foods make you retch?
In the interests of full disclosure, only fish makes me feel like this - I adore prawns, mussels, scallops etc., and I merely dislike rhubarb, gooseberries and raspberries - all things my mother grows in abundance.
Poor George Borrow is stuck in a meagre hotel in Pentraeth, Ynys Môn, in 1862. They don't get 'proper' meat very often, and so he's stuck with Box Harry:
Those whose employers were in a small way of business, or allowed them insufficient salaries, frequently used to 'box Harry', that is, have a beef-steak, or mutton-chop, or perhaps bacon and eggs, as I am going to have, along with tea and ale instead of the regular dinner of a commercial gentleman, namely, fish, hot joint and fowl, pint of sherry, tart, ale and cheese, and bottle of old port, at the end of all'. (Wild Wales, 203)
And that's what travelling salesmen got to eat. I'm going home to do something miserable with a leek. So much for progress…
I probably won't be online tomorrow - my Northern Irish and French chums Gareth and Stéphanie are paying a visit. Gareth, as a good loyalist, will no doubt exercise his right to march through my living room while I protest powerlessly from the bathroom.
They've now painted my floor pink. Like a veal chop. Or human flesh. Between that and the Cadbury's Chocolate colour of the ground floor, I think about food from the moment I get to work, which isn't good for a fat bastard such as myself.
I was effortlessly put down in the pool today. I managed my 60 lengths in a decent enough time, and apologised to the lady with whom I shared the lane for drifting over. As we chatted, she mentioned that she'd 'only' done 160 lengths but was getting bored. I resisted the temptation to hold her head under the water, largely because she could probably hold her breath for longer than it would take me to weaken.
Budgens, a small supermarket chain, is selling squirrel meat as delicious, nutritious, sustainable and a good way to deal with vermin.
He's absolutely right. The Map Twats dined on free range squirrel a couple of years ago, acquired from Neal's garden. It was fat-free and tasty, though it could have hung for longer. We roasted it with a little salt and pepper. If we did it again, I'd serve one squirrel per person - there's less meat than on a rabbit.
Of course, I'd really love to try red squirrel, but there are only 5 of them left, so that would be a little unkind. Oh well. Koala next. Juicy, tender, easy to catch.
Well, well, well,
the coalition government's crusade to abolish government continues with the decision to scrap the Food Standards Agency, in a bold move which has delighted the junk food industry which donates so much money to the Conservative Party.
The argument is that people shouldn't be told what to do by governments.
Which is a nice idea, were it not for a few flies in this particular chocolate mousse.
The food industry is a global, multibillion-£ industry with massive resources and the full weight of the lobbying and advertising industries at its beck and call, whereas your average shopper has neither the time nor the skills to weigh up every claim made. It's not a level playing field.
Secondly, the food industry doesn't have your interests at heart. Shocking, I know, but it makes money by getting you to eat cheaper, worse stuff, more of the time. They lobby constantly to fill foods with nastier additives, bulk products and the like, and to resist health warnings: they've recently managed to get the 'traffic light' system cancelled so that shoppers remain confused. They've even got the minister attacking Jamie Oliver's heroic drive for healthy school dinners as some kind of sinister Stalinist plot (let's not forget that one of Margaret Thatcher's earliest ministerial decisions was to abolish the minimum nutritional standards for school food). Andrew Lansley won't be tucking into a Pizza Pocket or a Turkey Twizzler tonight because he's a highly-educated multimillionaire - but he'd like you to because it benefits his friends.
The Tories and Lib Dems are crowing that these moves empower the individual - classic liberalism, but it's total bullshit. Cheaper food is almost always the worst food - look at the discounted stuff in supermarkets. Many people in the lowest socio-economic groups can't find fresh, healthy ingredients easily, especially if you're living on a housing estate with poor public transport - this is why poor people are now fat, whereas in the 19th-century, the rich were fat and the poor were thin. There's plenty of food available, but it's often stuffed with fat and sugar.
People aren't stupid. They're sometimes uneducated and often massively uninformed because industrial food is totally dominant. Governments are meant to be our defence against capitalist exploitation, but those days are over. We can't make these decisions individually in the midst of a system designed to deceive - that's why we form governments.
'We're all in it together' - but you're on your own.
Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First, said: "Although the headline figure remained unchanged at 0.3%, government spending was revised up from 1.1% to 1.5% signifying that the recovery is still very reliant on state spending
You know, the one the Tories have abandoned in favour of sacking hundreds of thousands of people and cutting essential government services. Thanks Dave! Love ya!
PS. The next big plan is to hasten the privatisation of the NHS, so that it merely channels tax-payers' money to private corporations. Anyone with complicated illnesses will be abandoned, preventive medicine will be abandoned and the health service will become a feeding frenzy for pharmaceutical companies flogging dubious drugs to a desperate public. Like America, really. Nobody voted for this stuff - but we get what we deserve, I guess.
Just because it crossed my mind (and hey, what's blogging for if not that?): a quote from Stewart Lee. For non-soccer fans, Gary Lineker was a famously nice and successful striker who now infests our screens offering bland commentary and advertising crisps. Lee is officially the 41st best stand-up comedian ever.
We now know that crisps make little children fat. Why does Gary Lineker choose to advertise crisps? He can't need the money, he's on television all the time. His family run a fruit & vegetable stand in Leicester market, "Lineker's Fresh Fruit & Veg" - he could advertise that. He could help to save human lives. But instead he chooses to advertise crisps. Why does he advertise crisps? It can only be that Gary Lineker is sexually aroused by the idea of obese children dying.
I'm not given to advertising, but some things deserve the publicity.
I went to Wolverhampton Art Gallery the other day, along with The Well of Lost Blogs, which was a pleasure in itself of course.
But you can share some of the joy: by eating that establishment's Wensleydale, Apple and Walnut Cake. Words literally fail me. I don't have the adjectives to explain how perfectly it worked.
Emma, despite being a vegetarian, gave me a Christmas present of fine pate, cassoulet de canard and a fine saucisson de canard. Finer friends would be impossible to find. All hail Emma!
I shall have to find an appropriate gift in response. I'm currently considering a sack of potatoes. Any thoughts?
My last formal poetry class of the year. Attendance is lowish, but they've all read the poems and are suitably horrified by some, touched by others. A good, opinionated debate ensues and I've been shown interesting ways to read lines I hadn't thought about before.
Urge to kill… falling… falling…
Haggis (ignore all the stuff about piping it in etc: that's Victorian BS invented for tourists and those Scots who gave away a country and then wanted to relocate the nation in something other than political power) for dinner tonight. Mmmm. Sarah was in Edinburgh for a meeting, and bought me a lovely MacSween's one - king of haggises (haggi?). Astonishingly, their vegetarian one is just as delicious, though how anything not containing 'heart, liver, lungs and spleen' can be delicious is a mystery I'll never solve.
I don't usually bother. I'll have a fry-up with the Map Twats on Saturday mornings, or sometimes make myself a bowl of porridge (salted, of course).
I never start the day with a four-pack of Skol Super-Strength Lager, unlike two chaps I bumped into on the way to work at 9.00 a.m. Perhaps when I get the sack I'll have that kind of leisure…
I'm marking essays and presentations today, and running a poetry workshop. Neal's off to a stag weekend, involving paintballing. As one of the guests is a 'journalist' for The Sun, we've commissioned him to shoot the guy repeatedly at close range. Media Studies in action!
Nesh is an electrician. He came round to my house yesterday and changed the battery on a smoke detector.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be particularly heroic or even noteworthy. Even I can change the battery on these devices. However, this particular one was mounted in the middle of the ceiling miles away from any wall against which a ladder could be lodged. Not just any ceiling, but a 25ft high ceiling. Additionally, the damned object was beeping every thirty seconds, 24 hours per day. It was like living in Das Boot, with its sonar beep driving into my brain incessantly. But Nesh has solved it, despite his visible terror.
Neal's deserving of cheer too, for his cooking ideas. We did a Spanish stew last night, and it was utterly brilliant. Sweat garlic, onions and diced potatoes. Add a whole, large smoked chilli, lots of diced chorizo, big chunks of morcilla (or black pudding, it's the same thing), olive oil, canned tomatoes, herbs, and a load of Puy lentils, then serve with watercress salad and hunks of crusty bread. Hot, nourishing and delicious. I'm going to do a vegetarian version tonight, as the Map Twats are doing another recording session for the Christmas Album.
Yesterday evening was one of the most expensive few hours of my life. This ball had better be good, now I've invested in a serious (and rather beautiful) dinner suit and all the accoutrements.
Suits are great. I don't often wear one, though I own several. They hide all imperfections.
Well, not quite all. One of my suits was tailor-made for me. Even that one, when I wear it, looks like it was borrowed from somebody slimmer, taller and more handsome. In a suit, I'm still a short, portly product of millennia of hauling pigs over Irish bogs, but it adds a little self-confidence.
The expensive evening didn't end there: Emma was cruel enough to point out that the (long-awaited and much unmourned) bankruptcy of Borders Books heralded a large sale. So off we trotted, she to buy sparkly pink things, allegedly for young relations, I to amass a stack of literary theory, science fiction and maps, lovely, lovely maps. After the shock of getting to the till, all we could do was hotfoot it to Café Rouge (the independent French bistro nearby was full) and stuff our faces, washed down with a fine Fleurie.
I could get used to this life actually. Must find a rich girl. One lacking in discrimination and self-esteem, obviously. I was so exhausted this morning that I skipped my swim, so I'll have to go tomorrow and Friday. Ugh.
