My Shopping List

Quinoa

Spelt

Amchur

Creme Fraiche but no fresh cream

And 3 red herrings

Seaweed

Hijiki

Sugar free

Goose fat but no fat

And 3 red herrings

A vegetables (Aubergine Apparagus Artichoke)

No C vegetables (Carrot Cabbage Cauliflower)

Caffeine free

Saucisse de Toulouse but no Saucisse de Cumberland

And 3 red herrings

Seeds

Kokum

Ask your local gamekeeper*

Pancetta but no bacon

And 3 red herrings

Pulled pork

Coconut oil

Charred A vegetables

Sourdough

And 3 red herrings

And 2 lbs of Gluten

Good Appetite!

*Advice given in The Guardian

In the gym today a man called across to someone going into the changing room: Trying to sneak past me, are you?  They laughed. They were friends and greeted each other. I make this kind of remark too. Here he is! I say, as someone comes in the door, as though we had just been talking about the new arrival. Or talk of the devil! Even though we weren’t talking about him. Your lot got battered the other day.( Arsenal losing 1-0). All we are doing is creating colour, drama even, where there is probably none. We just want something to be going on while we’re standing around.

However, when there is really something going on, something difficult, something embarassing, something awkward, we suppress the drama, we don’t mention it. We say All right Jeff? (Jeff’s wife just left him) or Good morning Sammy (Sammy’s in trouble with the boss) or Hiya (Julie’s got cancer). We skirt the drama, if there is one.

It might be there is an optimum colour we want in our everyday conversation. There may be a mathematical formula for this. Nothing too vivid but with a dash of story, preferably fictional.

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I am disappointed in Mark Rylance. He has let us all down. Mark Rylance likes to wear his hat indoors, even at Oscar ceremonies. It is normally a trilby. This doesn’t look right to me. For an actor of his ilk it can’t be right. The trilby is too jaunty. You can’t be jaunty all the time. If he wore different hats this would at least reveal a playful quality rarely apparent in his mostly ponderous acting. He could wear a fez now and again, or a bowler. We would look forward to his hats. At his death it would be Hat man dies. Hats, in any case, are suspect. They are worn by men unhappy about hair loss or artists (artists in the fine arts). For artists in the fine arts, which includes art teachers, hats, preferably brimmed, represent creativity.  I once saw Daniel Barenboim in a hat on a record cover. This was ill advised. He is a musician not a fine artist though he is and was losing his hair. It made him look like a show-off, which is the last thing you want going through people’s minds when they are listening to him playing Beethoven. Hats are mostly dubious, politically. As a politician, a hat might well cost you your career. There would be speculation. Why does he have a hat? What’s he covering up. In this, it is much like having a personal trainer, a guru or a personal astrologer, though the latter could work in America. You could never trust a politician with a hat. Much like a beard in that respect. Or facial hair in general. Much frowned upon. In deep winter people wear wooley hats to keep them warm as the head is where 80% of the heat goes from. That last fact is nonsense, by the way. Where else would the heat leave from, as it is the only uncovered part of the body? If you pulled your trousers down over your buttocks, 80% of your heat would go from there. Perhaps even more.

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After thirty years it’s finally come round. The realization that the right brain left brain stuff is mostly bollocks. You remember how they said things like that if you get to an appointment early you are analytical and if you get there late you are creative. And there was me thinking you were just bad-mannered. Maybe that’s a creative act too. Well, apparently, as I heard on Radio 5 Live yesterday, it’s not that simple. The brain is a bit more complicated.

Of course, not being a brain surgeon, I never had any proper authority to speak on that matter. But the real issue for me has always been the word creative. In many ways Shakespeare, whose working method of collecting and collating major sources as well as interpolating bits and bobs of fragments and vocabulary he had heard around town or in official or non-official documents,  seems to have been that of a magpie. One might easily see this as a civil-servantish, mostly analytical working method. Anyway, now the secret’s out. Right brain left brain was bollocks anyway, notwithstanding how you define creative and analytical.

I don’t know if I’m happy or not that the thing I’ve been ranting about for twenty years has suddenly dispersed in air, into thin air, as Shakespeare that faceless analytical pen-pusher would have said. I suppose I’ll find other things to fret over.

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Ever feel that you have entrusted all your hopes to the person least equipped to shoulder them? That it is like handing a key to a man with advanced Alzheimers and saying: Here is the golden key. It is very precious. Put it somewhere private where only you know it is and when somebody asks you for it don’t give it to them, but when I ask for it hand it over to me. Do you think you can remember that?…About the golden key… That’s right, the key that I’ll be giving you… The one that you have to look after for me… The golden key… The golden one… No, it’s a key… The one I’ll give you… No, you have to look after it… No, you mustn’t give it to anyone else… It’s a key…  That’s for you to hold onto… In a secret place… No, not on the table…  Somewhere secret… Golden, like gold, gold coloured…

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In our own micro-ways we all participate in the high Hollywood of everyday life. Recently I have been dealing with the troubling presence of a new cafe on the high street. Now, I have always remained faithful to another cafe where I have a certain privileged reception (oh, nothing too grand you understand, a place by the window, the preparation of my preferred coffee type without me needing to order it, table service where less favoured customers are required to queue at the counter to make their order). Yes. I am a kind of petit bourgeois notable of the establishment as they would say in a Flaubert novel. But now a new cafe sails into my formerly smug, untroubled life. A new cafe next door where the coffee is better and where in winter the heating is actually switched on. Now pressing questions of allegiance arise. Firstly, moral: do I transfer my allegiance? Secondly, material: how do I sit next-door without being seen by the staff of the first cafe, the staff that cradled me for so long with that remarkable set of privileges? Fortunately, there is a block I can go round to enter cafe number two without passing by the shop front of cafe number one. There is also a downstairs area to the new cafe where I would be invisible to the street should the waitress of cafe one pop out to adjust the sign adverising coffee and croissant for the special price of £2.5o. But the moral dilemmas do not stop there. What if I should meet in the new cafe customers of the old cafe, potential informers like myself, spies playing for both sides, collaborators with the enemy? I can only hope that their desire for their identity to remain unknown accords with mine and that we both tacitly agree that the terrible knowledge of our infidelity must remain undivulged. These are the same issues as you find in the more rarefied echelons of the world of espionnage. We are all playing roles in a domestic version of Tinker…Tailor…Soldier…Waiter, where for a better blend of black americano I and many like me are willing to trade our past, our conscience, our peace of mind, yea our very soul.

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I like some tinned fish. I especially like tinned salmon. Red salmon which is pink, not pink salmon which is grey. Tinned salmon is better than fresh salmon which is mostly tasteless. At this point one should talk about farmed salmon but I have no opinion on this. Smoked salmon is a poor man’s poshness. Overrated. Tinned salmon is best. There is also tuna. For me with tuna it is the opposite. Tinned tuna I don’t like though I do like fresh tuna. The problem with fresh tuna is the price. I can’t concentrate when I’m eating fresh tuna because it feels like I’m chewing a ten pound note, which is what it can cost. My friend Emma says she has another problem. When she’s eating fresh tuna if she doesn’t concentrate properly it feels like she’s eating tinned tuna, which defeats the whole purpose of spending the cash in the first place.The key is to keep your eye on the fresh fish left on your plate as you are chewing. That way you remain convinced that you are eating something expensive. There are other tinned fish. Pilchards, now unpopular because of their rebarbative name. Who wants to eat a pilchard? Which is basically just a sardine. As for sardines, you have the choice of sardines in tomato sauce, which is what we had when I was little, so must be best. But there is also sardines in olive oil, which unnervingly leaves the sardines tasting like fish, which is a definite no-no. There is also brine. Don’t bother with brine.

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I don’t know who invented the anagram. Maybe it was Mr Anagram, which may not be his real name. His success has been great. He has figured in IQ tests and quiz shows for many years now and, like the emperor with no clothes, audiences have accepted him, pretended he is fully clad, and laughed at all his tedious jokes. For some reason they have imagined that the ability to rejumble a set of letters into a new word is a literary feat. In the IQ test it is practically the only task that concerns words but as a skill it has no interest and no application. Mr Anagram can also lick his nose with his tongue but that doesn’t make him a genius either. Mr Anagram, you’ve had a good innings for a terrible old bore. Now ucfk ofo!

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When I passed through Burgess Hill (just outside Brighton) on the train today, I was reminded of an old school friend of mine, Iain Bell, who left primary school aged ten to go and live in Burgess Hill or as his Scottish mum called it sunny Brighton. He was probably not my best friend at St Joseph’s. That honour probably fell to Christopher Hylands, but Iain Bell represented an alternative strand in my friendship network, less edgy than Christopher Hylands who lived on the Offerton estate. Iain Bell lived in a relatively posh house on Curzon Green. Christopher Hylands and Iain Bell didn’t get on. They fought for my favour. One Sunday morning, on a visit from sunny Brighton about a year later, Iain Bell appeared at my house. For some reason the question of jam butties came up. My brother used the term and my mum said we should say jam sandwiches and not jam butties. This was all in aid of Iain Bell who was a Southener now and posher than us. I was called upon to adjudicate. In the first of my class betrayals, I plumped for jam sandwiches.

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I was at the physio for my aching back and numb neck the other (they mostly ignore the numb neck though that was why I came in the first place) and I was subjected to presssure to say that things were getting better. This is less tight than last time, said Ben, the physio. I did not point out that last time another physio had seen me (Flo) and this was the first time Ben had set eyes on me or my back. We can see improvements he said. Can we? I thought. I suppose over a three or four session block (this is the NHS) they are asked to create  what people nowadays like to call a narrative with a happy ending. If my back has a narrative I’d opt more for the Waiting for Godot option.
This reminds me of one time when I was in Paris and a man heard me speaking English and asked me to come to a restaurant where they were shooting a Gordon Ramsay programme for British TV. I went. Ramsay was standing gracelessly outside the place, scowling at everyone. We were served a rotten meal, offered by the waiter a choice of red wine or white wine (talk of dumbing down) and then I was even presented with a bill (I had at least expected it to be a free meal). I asked the waiter what the programme was called and was informed: Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Oh cheers, you might have told me. As I was leaving I could see cameras set up for interviews with diners. I asked one of the production team if they wanted me to give my opinion about what I thought of the meal. No thanks, they said. What I had just eaten was the improved menu cooked up by Gordon Ramsay. This restaurant had already been turned around. My opinion, if it were negative, would not have fit into their narrative.  The telly format is that the expert in cooking, personal makeover, house makeover, life makeover, whatever, operates an improvement. The implication is that our expertise is unimpeachable. We’re still asked to believe that the bankers know what they’re doing. Why this insistance on the inevitable upbeat outcome? I too am a believer in incremental effort as the best way forward to improvement, but only a fool or a propagandist would believe the narratives we’re fed. It is an example of form dictating content. We jam anything we do into the same brightly coloured  box. And Ben, my neck is still numb!

peoplearerubbish.com