London is an aspirational place.

Londoners live tough lives, I would say. Costs are high. Public transport ineptitude is high. Tension is high. We have a lot of civil servants on our cases, from commissioned traffic wardens to bicycle police. We are squeezed for space. Houses are expensive. Food is expensive. Beer is really expensive.

But Londoners for the most part do not give a shit. Brits and foreigners alike flood here en masse year after year, raising the temperature even higher. Why? Because the streets of London, though we scoff at the sentiment with supersubtle irony, are paved with gold.

We desire so much of our lives in Britain. London is the ground zero of desire. Of course the dream comes in many different flavours. Perhaps one wants tabloid celebrity and to live in a fat mansion in Hampstead or Chelsea. Perhaps, if one feels they are above commercialism, one wants to be adored by broadsheets and live in a ramshackle bohemian mansion in Stoke Newington. If New York is the Big Apple, then London is the Fat Pie, and everyone wants a slice. It is probably an eel pie.

Londoners spend so long crammed inside small flats dreaming of expansive gardens and parties to have in them. Lacking an estate, the many parks of our fair capital take the brunt of our exterior relaxations. And when the sun comes out it is fucking war.

Some Londoners regard a nice spot in their local park as a subclause in the tenancy contract of their home. They do pay an extra £500 a year just to be five minutes closer to the park, so perhaps they have a point. People can get a bit tetchy over space in some parks.

Parsons Green used to be a pretty quiet sort of place. If you watch the old west London police dramas from 20-30 years back, you will see Fulham as a somewhat deprived working-class backwater. Now the area is full of blond young lads and lasses looking for a taste of the good life, hoping to follow in their parents’ footsteps up the golden ladder. Parsons Green addresses are a big part of that good life. If you live there you have on-your-doorstep access to the wealth of exorbitant cafés, outrageously priced gastro pubs, deliciously good schools, and of course the rolling expanse of Parsons Green itself. Well, it is actually quite a small park, but this fact seems to have escaped the hordes of sunbathers and boozers who descend upon it as soon as there is a hint of a shadow. [I have to add that there is a poncy pub on the edge of the Green,  known unofficially as the Sloany Pony, which sells mediocre grilled burgers to park-goers at extortionate prices. I am sure they use organic meat.] 

There is of course nothing you can say against people looking for a nice bit of greenery  and fresh air. But this park becomes as crowded as a nightclub. It is about as peaceful and relaxing as a visit to casualty. People just don’t want to miss out. 

Free festivals cash in on this impulse to seek out big outdoor spaces. I have myself attended two of these this Summer: The RISE festival (Finsbury Park) and Stokefest (Clissold Park). They are fun but perhaps could do with being a little bit less completely overrun.

When you think about it life is going to be tough, or at least take a lot of effort, in a city where people even relax intensely. 

Anyway, here is a list of things I have seen people doing in parks this summer:

1. drinking from a leather hat

2. laughing purple as their dogs fought brutally

3. giving away holy books

4. simulating sex

5. singing Oasis improbably loudly. It really was impressively voluminous

6. playing cricket with a traffic cone and a (half full) can of beer

7. lying down, drinking, talking, and generally relaxing

8. flyfishing (see below)

I think the black plastercast completes the image nicely.

It is just like that neo-con nightmare: a spontaneous, nationwide terror-cell uprising.

Every year, all on the same day for some bizarre reason, ants grow big and sprout wings. And bugger each other in mid-air. Here the terrorist comparison ends.

Any way, the spectacle is faintly gruesome, as the sight hoards of insects appearing to your eye always seems to be. But ants are ‘clean’ insects, and not bad eating so who cares?

The answer to that seems to be ‘young children’. Let’s be sexist about it: young boys, they love playing with insects. I used to when I was a kid and so did these young tikes in West Kensington the other day:

I know what you’re thinking, and yes it is always a risky business taking photos of children in public. One minute you are photographing your son learning to play football, the next minute there are people holding candles singing ‘burn the stinking nonce’ outside your house. Anyway, these kids were fascinated by a nest of flying ants, and were evidently considering the best way to kill them. One of them was clearly not playing ball:

“Do you believe in God?” he cried mightily

“Yes” replied his colleague

“Well then, why are you killing one of God’s creatures? HA!”

I really liked the ‘HA!’. It was worthy of Torquemada. Bloody hell, you just want to go and kill some ants after a hard day’s work and then someone goes and brings God into it. 

But as Gloucester reminds us in King Lear, the gods have their fun too: 

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.

I was going to discuss it with the boys. But, having already taken a photograph, discussing poetry with them was sure to get me lynched by a gang of scally mirror readers. Anyhow they were more interested in their new game whose rules they were just perfecting. It involved killing the ants with a bottle and a ball, a kind of cross between cricket and divine wrath. I wonder what to-hand items gods use to sport with us? Perhaps a wad of torn-off cloud and the odd aeroplane.

During the day, Portobello market can be a noisome place, seething with tourists and trendies from all over the place. The most photographed shop in London must surely the travel bookshop off Portobello Road which featured in “that fucking film.” Every time, and I mean every single time, I walk past it, there is someone photographing that establishment once sanctified by Hugh and Julia.

In the evenings however, the crowds recede and the place feels almost tranquil. There is still lots of life and living. But it is just in better proportion to the environment.

 If I lived in the countryside, I would probably go for a Sunday evening stroll up a hill or along a stream. But I don’t. and because it is only a short distance away, I went for a twilight tickle down Portobello road.

There is more graffiti than you would expect by a stream. Like this enormous graf of Samuel Beckett. It sort of sums up the area quite nicely.

It is hard to believe but here is another sale in a dinosaur shop. Ridiculous.

Photographers were setting up for a shoot here. I think it must have been for a Habitat catalogue. Funnily enough I just worked on a play with a girl who had set-dressed for the same publication.

A charming haberdashery. How quaint are there alliterative mottoes. However, apparently they rip you off mercilessly, according to a passer-by who kindly offered me her retail wisdom.

This is one of my favourite buildings in London:

Trellick Towers, designed by a chap called Goldfinger, is both monstrous and iconic. It is listed for being a pioneering design along the lines of Le Corbusier. I just remember the first time I saw it was at the Notting Hill Carnival. I was a bit worse for wear, to be honest and had been stumbling round the carnival route for a good while. I looked up and expected to see more of the elegant regency terraces. Instead I had this beast of a tower block grinning down at me, resplendent in its ruthless functionality, menacing the heavy clouds above with its dark concrete.

Ever since I have been awestruck by it. I can see it from my studio window and had often wanted to see the view from the top. I once snuck in there with my chum Greg and we went to the top floor. It was an unbelievable view. The Westway (the biggest artery into central London) snakes right by it, pulsing with cars. From up there you clearly can discern the bizarre mix of outrageous wealth and brooding poverty which makes Notting Hill the neighbourhood it is, and the carnival such a singular experience. I should confess that I have a cute little mug with Trellick Towers on it. How’s about that for admiration?

Some kids were trying to rouse their mate on this otherwise empty housing estate. I hate accidental rhymes.

Portobello Green: the last of the market traders were packing up their stalls. There is something sad about a market being packed up.

This guy sells military surplus and uniforms out of the back a van, and clearly loves it. He told me he was going of to a desert tomorrow where he will be fitting out a load of people re-enacting an old battle. 

Local authority sponsored street art. Flower memorial made from newspaper. It looks really good, catches your eye, and makes you think about how these memorials catch your eye and why.

This, however, was a load of shitting fuck. It looks better here than in real life because reflections have obscured most of it in the pic. It is a crow, clearly drawn by an amputee doing a handstand. It hopelessly commends itself by having the exact digital time it was drawn printed on the top left. So what? It is rare that a piece of art is upstaged by the brick wall on which it hangs.

Five seconds before this photo was taken I saw something which I thought was really great. We had stopped in this excellent tapas place for dinner. Great Spanish cheer and food. The waitress in the pic had just poured the man on the right another drink. She did not get a new glass and pour the wine with a measure whilst printing out a receipt. She poured it straight into the glass as it lay in his hand,  maintaining their conversation. He just sat there and drank, a happy customer being taken care of.

There was something so hospitable and friendly in this simple little difference from the cultural coldness drinks are served in bars in this country. It was like a wild west saloon but with less horse poo.

[continued]

I have found after much research and experimentation that there are two crucial factors in cooking a good chicken:

1. Buy a good chicken

2. Do not ruin it

This may sound horribly obvious. But so many times I have been served a chicken by people I know, or by restaurants where they have tried all sorts of tricks from Heston Blumenthal or Gordon Ramsey, and therefore presume their chicken is cordon bleu. But they ineluctably neglect one of these two foundations of roasting a good pullet. And the chicken is disappointing. They have put butter and crap under the skin, they have rubbed it with herbs or spice, they have slow cooked it, crisped it, inverted it, stuffed it with a smaller fowl, stuck a little top hat and monocle on it, or even used organic salt, would you believe, and all with the best of intentions. But the result is never as good as when you simply buy a genuinely good chicken (not necessarily an expensive one from a UK supermarket) and do not ruin it. If you follow these guidelines then the flesh will be delicate and moist, the skin will be crispy, and the gravy will virtually make itself.

This last point, I should like to add, is the best way of measuring the quality of a good chicken, in my opinion. If there is enough good fat and good juice in the flesh, and the bird has been cooked at the right temperature for the right amount of time, the cooking juices will only need the slightest of hydration and seasoning to form a  creamy and delicate gravy. This is why I like cooking chickens in Switzerland. An inexpertly or, more to the point, cheaply reared chicken will not have the right balance of fluid and fat to make a good gravy. However, Olympic athletes have been known to inject themselves with the gravy from Tesco’s economy chickens to promote muscle-growth and anabolic rates, so there is something to be said for these sorry animals.

Another trick that supermarkets use is Known Value Item pricing bias. An item of known value is a product, such as a tin of Heinz beans, whose price can be objectively compared between rival stores. Supermarkets know that your average customer will be far more likely to assess and remember the price of a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes than a tomato, for example, which would necessitate an assessment of quality and a price per weight. Each box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes is the same in each different supermarket. But every tomato is different: it could be from anywhere in the world that produces tomatoes, its flavour, texture, ripeness etc. are variable, and it is not easy to see how much each individual tomato costs, unless you weigh them all individually and work it out. Therefore, instead of competing with their competitors for low prices on fruit and veg, supermarkets find it more effective to drop the price on a KVI, such as the products of Heinz or Kellogg’s, and tactically increase the price on vegetables. Retailers know that more often than not, their customers will just scoop up a load of spuds into their trolly and off they go. They won’t even check the price of non-KVI’s till they get their receipt, if at all. 

Very clever. But what has this profit-honing tool got to do with the way we eat? Well if you think about it, KVI’s are going to be pre-packaged, homogeneous foods. Non KVI’s are going to be un-uniform, natural foods like fresh fruit and vegetables. Therefore generally the supermarkets are going to be pricing pre-packaged, pre-prepared foods more competitively than fresh produce. But is it simply the supermarket which is leading us away from the holy land of fresh food, cooking and reality? 

Again, an issue here is the word ‘Known’ in KVI. In England, knowledge of the true value of food is on short supply. If English consumers were better at discerning quality of fresh produce, and demanding it over pre-packaged food, we would be able to bring that to bear on supermarket purchasers. The ruthless buyers of today’s colossal English supermarkets have become the chimera of the general population’s woeful relationship with food.

To summarise this point, I believe that we have become culturally divorced from food in the UK. We have lost any cultural sense of good produce and good taste. Supermarkets which spring up in the name of efficiency and convenience reinforce and extend this trend. They give it momentum. Supermarkets have for the last decade been retailing (supposedly) higher-quality higher-price product ranges, but this does more harm than good. Why? Because consumers now believe that the way top find better produce is look for better packaging, and a higher price tag. While the produce is often marginally better in these posher product ranges, we are not using our senses and instincts to discern good food. We are cheating ourselves not only of a great sensual experience which is our birthright as animals, but also of the refinement of our judgments and tastes which should be occurring every time we go shopping.

The efforts of the English over the last 20 years to improve the way they eat and cook may have been well-intentioned but, in reality, self-defeating.  I think that the impetus for finding out about better quality produce has led to the rising importance of packaging and the influence of the marketer, advertiser, and product designer in the way we buy from supermarkets. Similarly, we are desperate to learn how to cook, and who do we turn to? TV Chefs and food writers. Now of course this new breed of celebrity and cultural icon can confer some of their knowledge to their audiences. But do you think they learnt to cook by watching telly? We are convinced the food they make is good quality because they are on TV and because they say it is. But whether it is or not is irrelevant. We cannot tell, because we cannot taste or smell it, nor can we feel it or properly see it.

Learning to cook off the telly is like learning to paint by listening to an audio-guide.

Cooking is not about following a recipe. It is about following your instincts. To cook a pasta sauce correctly, you cannot follow a timer. You use all your senses to determine exactly when the consistency, concentration, and delicacy is right. You know what the end result should be, and you don’t stop until you get there. How do you know? Because you have grown up in a culture where you and everyone else has always eaten good pasta sauces and have done for generations. Like a knowing what a good cup of tea tastes like: not too watery, not too milky, not over-brewed, just the right colour, just the right temperature, in just the right mug. Imagine a French chef trying to teach a Frenchman how to brew a cup over the telly. Sacrilege.

Sadly, the divorce from reality in TV cookery education is not an exception to the norm of televisual communication. It is an effective example of how the medium of television divorces the viewer from reality. TV is also highly addictive, which convinces us to allow it deeper and deeper into our lives and our systems of knowledge. However, this is one for another blog.

[To be continued in another post]

I love food.

I love cooking. I love good eating. I love figuring out how to cook food which is ruthlessly healthy and intensely tasty. I love cooking for friends. I love cooking on big occasions for lots of people. And I love cooking for myself. I love buying food.  I love talking and arguing about food. But I truly hate something about the way we the English relate to food.

I use the term English advisedly here: I cannot really comment on the other nations of the UK. Anyway, any Sassenach discussion of Scotch cuisine always starts with haggis and descends ultimately into gasping about deep-fried mars bars. Look, the Scots just enjoy them. And having heart-attacks.

I grew up in quite fortunate gastronomic circumstances. My family is fairly cosmopolitan. My parents used to live in Italy, and we used to drive all round Europe for our family holidays, which meant I got to eat loads of different types of cuisine at source, as well as get a feel for the produce of slightly more demanding cultures.  At home, my parents always cooked amazing food, for which I shall always be indebted to them.

I became aware of the horrors which lurk in English cooking when I started going to school. I went to my local state school which I loved. However, I was one of those kids who brought a packed lunch (like the international kids of whom there was a good number). I was traumatised by the sight and the smell of the slop being dished out. There was hard oily pastry covering some weird sweet meat-jelly (as a main course). The boiled potatoes smelled of dishwater and were lousy with wretched black lumps. Dessert? Think saccharine pink biscuits doused in a sputum of watery custard. I could describe more of the horrors but I should move on to the merciless dinner ladies. They wore thick glasses which distorted their eyes (honestly, they all did) and, while I am sure they were all perfectly nice people, they forced the poor children in the care to finish every last festering lump on their plates. My god, why? Why did they think I did not want to eat it? Because I had an eating disorder at the age of five? Because I was evil? Because I was trying to give them more plate scraping work to do, just despite them?

Incidentally, my uncle (who went to the same primary school as me) was so traumatised by one session of a dinner-lady bullying him to eat some putrid fish that he never has been able to eat fish ever since.

What was strange to me was that so many of the kids thought the food was fine, even better than what they got at home. And I don’t think my school was unusual. Nor have things changed much, if Jamie Oliver is to be believed. Kids are still getting used to eating swill.

Interest in food has changed in England over the last 20 years or so. People want to eat and cook stylish, healthy, and what they deem to be good food. But here is the problem. ‘What they deem to be’.

In Italy, I would say that people generally know what a good pasta sauce or tomato tastes like. They know because they have grown up eating good sauces and good tomatoes. The English have not. The tomatoes we get in supermarkets here are for the most part laughably poor quality. If any of you know any Italians, ask them. Even better, go to Italy and look at the produce. And weep. Farmers and retailers have to supply Italians with good produce because if they do not, it will not get bought.

Let me put it like this: an Englishman cannot for love nor money find a satisfactory cup of tea outside of Britain. It is always wrong somehow. These bloody foreigners just don’t get it, right? For all their poxy coffees and fine wines, they don’t know what a good cuppa should taste like. That is what English food is like to foreigners.

In England we have been getting a bit more clued up about food. We WANT to learn. We look up to Delia Smith, Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsey et al. We adore the holiness of organic food and decry g.m. farming as Satan’s cruel machination to kill our children. We watch interminable cooking programmes on the cancer-box.  But these good intentions are nothing if when it comes to buying good produce, we take more interest in a ‘taste the difference’ label than the smell, taste, and feel of the food. We talk the talk well enough, but are yet to walk the walk.

We wrap our food in rubbish. Next time you go to the supermarket, take as much food as possible out of its wrapping and make a pile. Bags, boxes, cartons, cling-film. It is staggering what supermarkets do. Not only  is the amount of packaging an achingly avoidable environmental problem, it more importantly separates us from the sensual experience of the food. All those subconscious senses which have evolved over tens of thousands of years so that we can quickly determine the best, safest and tastiest foods are cut off by the plastic.

Some may say that this is the fault of supermarkets. However, I would say that they get away with all their crap because we let them. We will pay more for a product just because it has been pre-sorted. We trust that taste-the-difference food will taste, well, different. We do not demand it. We do not say ‘these tomatoes have clearly been ripened in a lorry, I shall take my custom elswhere!’ or ‘this beef has been clearly butchered by an epileptic monkey and that pork I had is more water than meat, I am not coming here again!’ or ‘raspberries in December?  no wonder they taste like tramp’s piss! Good day!’ or ‘fuck me, Jamie, those mussels smell like a dog’s gall bladder! Go see a doctor!’

I think we English are obsessed with getting a good deal when it comes to food shopping. We clearly love these patently mendacious 2-for-1 offers (supermarkets still use this pricing ruse so we clearly have not grown wise to it). But still we seem to pay so much more for our lacklustre vittles than other European countries. Maybe this is the trick. Supermarkets universally overcharge, making their customers desperate for a bargain.

I was chatting to an onion farmer recently who was telling me all about his view of supermarkets. Essentially, he said supermarket purchasers know nothing and care less about the quality of food. They are ruthless in their price demands. That is all that matters to them. They are no different from stock-market commodity brokers. Farmers are squeezed, and standards go down. These unscrupulous purchasers can get away with it too because the majority of their customers cannot tell the difference.

Similarly, people complain about the rights of battery chickens. But the English have been buying scrawny, tasteless chickens and watery, nasty eggs because we think they are perfectly edible and fairly priced (judgments with which I would disagree). The battery chicken is the result of these two elements: the English consumer’s economic priorities and their ignorance of quality. I was in Switzerland recently, and even the least expensive chicken in Migros was better than anything I have found in Tesco or Sainsbury’s.

[I shall continue this directly in another post. This needs to be spread over several posts for mercy's sake if nothing else]

Back again, after another wedding weekend. I have been to three weddings so far this Summer, and they all have been lots of fun. I have started to feel a bit like a wedding photographer with all the snapping I have been doing. I am considering dedicating a new section on my website to wedding photography, a much maligned field if you ask me. Coincidentally, I got chatting to a random on the tube recently when he took an interest in my SLR. It turns out that he was a wedding photographer, and did not have much to say about the subject beyond its financial ramifications. Nice enough chap though.

Anyhow, we shall see what comes of that in the future.

I have found a new medium for portraits:

Witness the bizarre and outlandish magic of Magna.Doodle! The subject is Mr Matt Dawson esq.

I really was not convinced at first. The device only lets you erase in a large sweep across the board. Someone round the dinner table suggested using the the back of a magnetic head-torch on the back of the magnadoodle like an eraser and it worked! Lovely jubbly.

I like the clean contrast of the black line against the light honeycomb. I like the fact that you have to rub out each picture before you can start another one. I like the fact that the board is properly known as a ‘magnetophoretic display’. I like the fact that it is the only drawing medium I have ever found which doesn’t let me cover everything in mess and shit.

I cannot do any more because the magnadoodle is safe in its home in the kitchen of my friends’ new house in Bristol. I might have to start scouring the charity shops for one. Or an etch-a-sketch.

If you know me you will know that I am not TV’s greatest fan. I lived without a TV set for several years and now I watch very little. I only watch crime dramas made in West London in the late 1970s, and the odd sporting event or film. 

This is because TV is, for the main part, totally bollocks. And watching a programme which is touched by some sort of merit will still very rarely be more productive than reading, listening to music, or sleeping.

BUT

The Prisoner was a great discovery for me (not that you need a tv to watch it, mind). It was made in the 1960s when the formulae of modern tv had not been boiled-down into the refined opiate of today. Also, the production team saw themselves as being a little bit on the intellectual side, for better or for worse. As such they set out to make a programme which would pick up where Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell left off.

The Prisoner, for those of you who have never seen the show, is set in a bizarre psychological prison, which looks and functions like an isolated sea-side village whence there is no escape. The eponymous character, also known as Number 6 is our hero. We learn (during the preposterously long introduction to every episode) that he ‘resigned’ from some abstracted powerful company/agency, and was abducted to the village in order to find out his motive.

Number 6 represents the free-spirited, heroic individual. The village represents society which is under the thrall of the system: the conspiratorial powers that be. Number 6′s resistance to interrogation, and protection of the secret of his motives represents the individual resisting the tyrannies and oppressions which arise in the modern world as a result of power, politics, economics, and the darker sides of human nature.

Patrick McGoohan (below) stars as the Number 6. He also co-created the programme, and had a large part in the production of the series. What’s more,  is unspeakably cool, and a snappy dresser to boot (I have adopted the blazer and black polo neck to my putative wardrobe for when I have grown up).

Now the series has real flaws. Firstly, and most obviously, the deadly sentries which keep everyone in line are big, bouncing, soggy, white beach balls. I imagine the creators thought this would be symbolic, futuristic, and terrifying. In reality, it is an embarrassingly laughable device, and undermines the dark power looming over the village. They needed some evil bastard meting out punishment, not a silly twat.

Secondly, because of the programme’s lofty theme, you feel that the writers expect a lot of their subject matter. Sometimes they struggle to make a convincing point about oppression and resistance in society. You feel that there are occasions when they duck behind the weirdly symbolic characters and situations so they don’t have to pin down their social critique.

There are many other things you can point to in The Prisoner which are not quite right. For example, the bizarre trampoline-based duelling sport that Number 6 engages in from time to time. It simply must be up there as one of the most ridiculous sci-fi sports ever dreamt up. I am sure there are one or two in Star Trek too.

But, despite all its shortcomings, The Prisoner is absolutely brilliant.

Number 6 is the sort of chap that would beat James Bond at cards, impregnate his girlfriend, then fight for the rights of the lowliest underdog. He would deftly sort out a baggage mix up in a Croatian airport in Croatian, beat up a car-jacker, then make a forthright speech about Liberty from the top of a big cake. He is an activist and a gentleman. And an Olympic-level boxer.

The programme does provide some genuinely interesting and intelligent insights into society, free-will, and individuality. I thought the episode about political elections was particularly good, for example: Number 6 Stands for election and cannot help but be subsumed by the political system. Individuals are subject to the systems they exist in, and struggle to break free from them because of the natural human desire for liberty of thought and action.

Now I heard the other day that there is going to be a remake of The Prisoner, starring Ian Mckellan. The issues raised back in the sixties have not gone away, but I cannot help but think that ITV (hmmm…) will trivialise the issues in the production. It will be flasher, snappier, more modern and tempered to modern, hypnotic television-watching habits. It will cooly carve away anything too naff, and make it all quite accessible. But what it will almost certainly miss is the maverick boldness of the original’s production. It was possible in the 1960′s to make a genuine attempt at high-brow television. Nowadays it would be seen as pompous.

The main system of social conformity nowadays rooted in the television. Perhaps the best thing would be to avoid watching it in the first place.

***

P.S. Alas, Mcgoohan is no more.