O is for ‘OK, I won’t’
 
Elvis’ final words. His last girlfriend, Ginger Alden, former Miss Traffic Safety and Miss Mid-South, had told him not to fall asleep reading in the toilet. ‘OK, I won’t,’ he replied.

His last read was either The Scientific Search For The Face Of Jesus by Frank Adams or The Shroud Of Turin by Ian Wilson. 

His last meal, according to Albert Goldman, was hamburgers and French fries at dawn the previous day, prepared by his cook Mary Jenkins. Despite her urgings, Elvis wouldn’t touch his food on the day of his death. 

Other sources say a different cook, Pauline Nicholson, served him ice cream and cookies at 4am — just the day after he’d had a cavity filled, by the way.

Tomorrow Not Presley but . . . oh, dear, publishing

F is for Fred

Fred was my guide on the tour of the Sun Studios in Memphis. I took it on a bleak November morning and fortified myself for the trip with breakfast in the attached cafe, third booth from the window — which is where Sam Phillips used to conduct his business in the early days of Sun when it was known as Miss Taylor’s Restaurant. 

I ate — of course — a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Truly, ‘a breakfast fit for a king’. (Anyone interested in repeating the experience in the privacy of their own home should consult one of the Elvis recipe books: Are You Hungry Tonight? by Brenda Arlene Butler, say, or Fit For A King by Elizabeth McKeon. Or go to Higella's version here.)

I laughed as I ordered it from the waiter. He gave me a dishwater look. ‘Do people always laugh when they order that breakfast?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, resignedly.

Because of the earliness of the hour and the chill of the day, I was the only one making the tour. I had Fred all to myself. But he did the whole thing as if there were a big crowd. He is, after all, an actor of sorts. The story he told is really a script he’d learned. But he’d learned it well and spoke it with surprising freshness. 

It was a very good story, anyway, a well-constructed history — from Sam Phillips starting the label right through to U2 using the tiny studio to record When Love Comes To Town with BB King. 

Fred outlined the social background, told me about the musicians, played snatches of songs, showed me the instruments and the equipment used. It’s literate, accurate — and honest. At one point, Fred stood in the corner by the door to the control room and grabbed hold of a big old microphone, a great hunk of time-dulled stainless steel. You think: I know that microphone, I’ve seen it in pictures, it’s the one Elvis used when he recorded at Sun. And Fred said: ‘This is a microphone just like the one Elvis used when he recorded at Sun. Not the real one. But one just like it.’ 

Thanks, Fred.

Tomorrow Bill Gates and the untold secret truth about Elvis

My second Olympic memory . . .

I happened to be in Penzance when Britain (I can't help it, I find it too hard to type Team GB) won its first gold medal. 

A local girl had won it. I had myself photographed in front of the gold post box but I don't have that picture to hand. What I do have, though, is a picture of that gold winner's parental business. It's an ice cream shop in Newlyn. 

Here is the shop.

And here is the celebratory notice put up by her parents. It's a crop from the previous photograph. I would have got closer but that would have involved standing in the middle of a busy and narrow road. Also, there was so much sun falling on my camera that I couldn't see what I was photographing. It was just point, pause, click, hope.

One Yes, it is a piece of cardboard with Gold written on it, not very well.

Two Yes, it is me in the reflection.

Three No, I can't make up my mind either about what I feel about the display. 

These are the possibilities, I guess . . .

a) What kind of parents (whose daughter has just won an Olympic gold medal) can't be bothered to do more than reuse an old scrap of ice cream material packaging?

b) Is it perhaps a moving antidote to the hi-octanity of other celebrations just about everywhere else?

c) Do I like its modesty and amateurism in an embarrassingly pomo manner?

PS Truth be told, I don't like the ice cream much. It only comes in one flavour — vanilla, they call it, but white would be a better description. It's made with milk rather than cream. The only person I know who likes it — or claims to like it — is a Famous Five-ist.

Who put the bermp?

An old article of mine, entitled Who Put The Bomp?, has just been published in French. Hence the silly approximation of a Clouseau accent in the heading above.

It’s in a Parisian magazine, Feuilleton — a quarterly, I think, and something like McSweeney’s. This issue, Spring 2012, also includes, among many other things, a piece by Murakami Huraki, with illustrations by Robert Crumb.

It’s one of the best-looking wordy magazines I’ve ever seen. The design for my article/essay, which stretches over eighteen pages, is just gorgeous. The piece appeared twice before in English (The Observer and Mojo magazine) but it’s never looked this good.

Nor has it previously been graced by footnotes — eg explaining that a Geordie is ‘Surnom donné aux habitants de Newcastle’. Nor, dipping into false modesty, have I ever been flattered by a biographical note describing me as a ‘figure parmi les grands noms du journalisme rock anglais’.

So what is the piece about? It’s an attempt to answer the question in the title — which was posed in a minor 1960s pop hit written and sung by Barry Mann. He was the husband half of the Mann-Greenwich partnership — writers of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling etc etc etc etc etc (plus a few more et ceteras).

My answer runs to about seven thousand words and takes in not just Geordies but Manchester City fans, Baltimore, the building at the junction of Gloucester Avenue and Regent’s Park Rd, Elvis Presley and the early 16th version of spaghetti al burro e formaggio.

How did I make these links? You’ll have to read the piece. You’ll find the magazine here. It’s 15 euros.

Don’t read French and want to read it? Well, you could find an old copy of Mojo/The Observer. Or you could wait till I finish the book I’m working on (hard) and read a new version of it there.

How did I come to think of such a mad topic and write such a mad-sounding piece? Ah, you’ll have to wait for the book to find that out, too

Next My Springtime for Hitler moment.
http://www.boutique-feuilleton.fr/vente-au-numero-xsl-351.html

On the ninth day of Christmas . . .

A kebab roll at Lahore.

Just off the Commercial Road. Once upon a time it was the tiniest of takeaway joints. These days it's all dressed up and getting bigger every time I go there. It's now even got frontage on to the Commercial Rd.

Things don't change, though. The takeaway kebab rolls (lamb, minced and herbed, with salad, wrapped in circle of bread) are an eternal. For £3.50. 

Sometimes I eat there, too. There are marbly surfaces. An open kitchen. All male staff, cooks and waiters. Big TVs on every wall, mostly with football playing. My friend Paul who has subcontintental history and knows about these things tells me it's just like the real Lahore, a little bit of Pakistani life in east London.

The social mix is a delight, too, particularly on Friday nights. City dealers, getting drunk on byo booze. Essex families (Gavin & Stacey alikes) driving up against the rush hour flow. Mix and match Asian/English families where one woman will be in an A4 skirt, with her breasts hanging out and another will be wrapped in black. Strict Muslim families where — I've seen this with my own eyes — the beard of a pater familias shouts at the waiters to take the cutlery away before they will sit down.

Or maybe I'd go for a falafel at Marco Polo, a Lebanese cafe on Marylebone High St - my regular breakfast after early morning visits to the dental hygienist. (You don't want to turn up with bits of toast in your interstitials, now, do you.)

Till tomorrow . . .

On the second day of Christmas . . . the partridge but not the tree

I know the bird thing is meant to be the first day of Christmas but somehow I got it in my head that the twelve days start on December 26. I was wrong, of course. 

(The truth - the embarrassing truth - is that I took that Boxing Day start from iTunes. That's when you start getting free stuff from iTunes that you might or might not want. Today is some Coldplay stuff. I've downloaded it and will listen to it, just as I listen to Coldplay stuff again and again - without ever being able to remember I've listened to it.)

So, let's say yesterday was the first of my twelve days and so I gave you a list of what I think you might want to listen to this season. And today . . .

That partridge. Pheasant, too. And woodcock even. Everyone should eat them. The perfect meal for these straightened times. Honestly. That's not just from a comfortable north London perspective.

I always liked to eat game but it's only recently that I realised just how cheap it is.  I was buying a couple of pheasants in the local farmers market (please, no correspondence about the absence of an apostrophe in farmers - that solution is as good as any). I saw I was only paying six quid or so for a brace - as we gamers choose to refer to a couple/pair/two. That is certainly cheaper than a decent chicken. I'm not talking organic, that's so much hogwash. But I am talking about a bird that hasn't been subjected to extreme rendition and then kept, for its thankfully all too short life, in avian Guantanamo.

Partridge are little pricier and woodcock even more. But still  . . . these are bargains. (Though not if you buy them in, say, St John's Wood High St where they stick the arm in and price them up to six quid each. My guess is they make in the region of four pounds fifty profit a bird. Nice region, to paraphrase De Niro in Midnight Run - or rather George Gallo who wrote the movie.)

So . . . high-protein, low-fat, free-range and cheap. To the purchaser, anyway. A friend of mine who 'shoots' tells me the 'real' cost of these birds is maybe thirty quid. That is what it costs 'guns' in 'syndicates' - love the gangster language, don't you.

Again then . . . not just good for you and the bird and cheap but also subsidised by the rich and gun-happy among us. Not just a trifecta but a quadrafecta. A quintafecta, if you reckon game tastes as great as I do. Even if you don't like game, you could always consider eating it as an act of class revenge. Take that, you wanker banker, you could say, as you slice off some nice rare pheasant breast or scoop some lentils out with your junipery partridge.

So, as Swift was kind of on the right track when he proposed eating children as a solution to the Irish famine, if he were around now I think he'd join me in suggesting a resolution to the current unemployment and obesity thing. Another paraphrase: qu'ils mangent du perdrix. 

Oh and sprats, too. You can feed a family of five on a kilo of those.

But, I hear you say, I don't know how to cook game. Here's the secret. There is no secret. You put the birds in a hot oven for half an hour. You take them out. Sure, you can do other stuff. Add salt and pepper and some herbage. Protect the breast with bacon or foil. Leave them to sit for five minutes. But that'll do. Heat, eat.

With? Lentils or barley. Same thing. Boil and drain will do. Add salt, pepper, fried onion, diced carrots/celery, thyme or other herbs, stock - even better. 

Sprats? Dust in flour. Fry in oil. Take out. Eat. Add lemon juice, paprika or dip in mayonnaise.

Food and recipes, that's  just what you need today of all days, right?

See you tomorrow.

The dietary requirements of the average north London rioter . . .


The smashing etc time reached to within a few hundred metres of my house, to Chalk Farm station. I was expecting more damage, I guess, but all I could see was broken fronts — all now guarded by calm policemen — on Evans cycles, Sainsbury's mini store and this, the local Domino's pizza.

Notice that the sushi place next door was left untouched. As was Marine Ices over the road. And even the Marathon kebab bar — though the some of the clientele there really wouldn't take kindly to their consumption patterns being disrupted.

So . . . just Domino's Pizza, please — the chosen dinner of rioters. Perhaps even now, in Ann Arbor, the owners are thinking of that as a slogan. You are, it was often said, what you eat.

PS1 I was there because there was an online call for people to help clear up this morning. It was needed, I'm pleased to say. It had already all been cleared up, by the council, I should imagine.

PS2 Perhaps I should have guessed that: I was woken up this morning by the council street-sweeper doing the kerb outside my house.

Party pris

Those of you who get my occasional blogmail update would have been invited to the launch party for my book, Filthy English. I thought those of you who couldn't make it might like to know who did . . .

I have learned that the best way to put an invite list together for a party is to do it the same way you'd prepare a bride's outfit - or, as I point out in the book, write a sexy blues. You mix something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

So, among the trades and professions represented were: journalist (of course), ceramicist (and hat-wearer), tax lawyer, editor, receptionist, architect (a brace, at least), psychoanalyst (more than one, in fact - a complex of them, perhaps), actress (too evocative a word to be collapsed into the sexless actor), record producer (currently working with the Pope), photographer, parent counsellor, publican, Indian hotel owner, Iranian golfer, pre-school teacher (several, in fact - they were quite unshocked by the language), travel agent, artist (from Warsaw), charity lobbyist (from Fulham), record company owner (from north Acton), astrologer (from Kentish Town), sex writer (see previous blog posting), teacher, therapist, research scientist, Shoreditch building owner, cartoonist, dance student, school administrators (German, English), press agent (three, at least), charity manager, university lecturer (retired), builder, kitchen designer, magazine designer, pop musician (French, English, Welsh), art teacher (retired), paratrooper (veteran), jewellery maker (and bike-racer), caterer, printer (from Bermondsey) and stilt-walker (one, stiltless).

PS1 You'll find more details of the party here on my publisher's blog site.

PS2 The word in the picture is spelled out in fairy cakes. They were made by my daughter. The photo was taken by this lot.

PS3 The Independent ran a big hunk of my book. It's about swearing on TV. Read it here.

Next up Those filthy English songs, in full.

A tale of two dumplings

Some years ago now, my father-in-law had a stroke. So it was decided that, to lighten the load for my mother-in-law, we would have that year’s seder at our house.*

The seder meal is a fairly standard one — though it varies from family to family. The one I’m used to starts with chicken soup plus all the trimmings. Bits of chicken, noodles and — most particular and important of all — kneidlach. Little dumplings.

I’d eaten kneidlach many times, of course, and can’t say I’d liked them much. They’re the kind of thing, I guess, that you have to grow up eating to appreciate. About the size of a very large marble and the colour of a camouflaged tank, they’re heavy eating. To my mind, they’d be better put to use as large calibre ammunition.

I’d never made them, though. I’d not even watched someone make them. So, charged with providing a batch for fifteen or so people, I did what I thought was the most sensible thing. I looked up the recipe in Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food — to Jewish food what the OED is to the English language.

I followed it carefully, finely chopping the coriander, beating the egg whites into peaks and folding them in with a knife. These kneidlach were fantastic, by far the best I had ever eaten — light, fluffy, fragrant, joyous.

I’m not a big praiser of my own cooking in public but I was about to say something when I caught the air of general distaste around the table. These aren’t right, was the clear and general vibe. These are not kneidlach as we know them. But they’re much better, aren’t they — light, fluffy, fragrant etc etc. Absolutely, I was told. That’s what’s wrong with them. Kneidlach are meant to be heavy, leaden, drably coloured. Home is where the heartburn is, I guess.

So I never made kneidlach again. Which is where this story might have ended. Then I happened to be reading a New Yorker profile of Claudia Roden. In it, she told a story about what she, a Sephardic Jew from Cairo, thought of the food served by her husband’s Ashkenazi family in London. She found it quite awful, leaden, colourless and flavourless — dreary, central European, stodgy. In particular, she hated the kneidlach.

Years later, she took her revenge. When writing the kneidlach recipe for her masterwork, she invented her own recipe for them — a Sephardic reimagining of an Ashkenazi staple. Which, of course, was the one I followed so carefully. So light, so fragrant, so . . . inauthentic.

* The seder is the Passover meal, the one that Jesus is tucking into in the Da Vinci painting that the book got all coded up about.

I have seen the future and it’s . . . asparagus

A couple of weeks back, I went to the last game of the season at Arsenal. They played Stoke. They won easily. The man next to me chanted at the Stoke fans: we pay your fucking benefits, we pay your fucking benefits.

At half-time, I went to the loo. As I walked in, I was hit by a really strong smell. Not piss. Not shit. Not unpleasant but not pleasant either. For a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then I could. It was asparagus-scented piss. Someone had obviously just had it for lunch.

Forget rants about prawn-sandwich eating fans, that just displayed the shallowness of Roy Keane’s cultural horizons. He hadn’t even noticed that prawn sandwiches have been the cheap option in supermarkets for a decade at least. (Then football players, like pop stars, are so cossetted that they often don’t even know you have to actually buy plane tickets and need to remember to take your passport with you.)

No, asparagus-consumption is the new measure of the new football fans. Maybe they could open a farmer’s market at the ground on match days. Maybe that man next to me could start chanting: you don’t even like asparagus, you don’t even like asparagus.

Next up I have seen the future and it eats shoots and leaves