Wonders of the modern world, 13: caviar and Apple

Two signs of the time, one in Brent Cross, the other in Primrose Hill. Both food-related, possibly. Both consumption-related, certainly.

Brent Cross. The Apple store. They have taken the prices off everything. You no longer know what you’re in for without asking someone. Once upon a time, toney restaurants had ladies’ menus — ones with no prices on them, to protect laydeez from the stink of commerce or from bothering their pretty heads with finance or relieving them of the anxieties of responsibility.

Now Apple are doing the same. For different reasons and with different motivations, though, I guess. As dedicated brand-builders, they must think it adds to the mystique somehow. If you have to ask, you clearly can’t afford it: that kind of thing. There are no prices in church, after all.

More than ever, as a former Apple-tiser, I feel I’ve wandered into a foreign land, from one of evidence-based conviction to one of faith. I believe therefore I Apple, that kind of thing. Or perhaps, to rephrase Descartes, I think therefore iPhone.

Primrose Hill. A fish shop. My fish shop. Not that it’s been there for that long, just a couple of years, but it was an extremely welcome arrival to an area which was turning into a cafe.

Last time there, though, I noticed a price list on the wall. For caviar. There were four or five different types of caviar, each priced differently. Now, I’ve got nothing against caviar. Some of my best friends are fish eggs . . . Nor have I have anything against the shop. But . . .

Again, I feel like I’m in a strange land. A price list for caviar. I can’t help read it as a symbol that represents consumption. That is, its presence is more a signifier than an actuality. Customers might or might not buy caviar. No one did while I was there. But they — or at least some of them — take succour from living in a world where their local fish shop has a price list for the stuff, on the wall.

No prices at Apple, caviar prices in a local fish shop. Same thing, I guess. Veblen got it right all those years ago. I buy therefore I am.

Bye. Buy.

PS Yes, I know Primrose Hill is not exactly the city’s bleeding edge but, scratch it a little and you can find its own dysfunctions and social issues. Gosh, you know, just the other day, I saw a piece of gum on the pavement.

Next Filthy Argentinians — to Chilean minds anyway.

Wonders of the modern world: what young(ish) people do with my (our) past

I was at a show last night — Florian Lunaire. It was in a big room above a pub in Essex Rd. It was excellent, as it happens. (Apart from anything else, he has a song called Forever Young. I always approve of songs which share their title with another very famous but quite different song. I'm thinking of writing my own Roll Over, Beethoven — or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Hit Me Baby, One More Time.)

But the show itself is not the point. The point is the music that was played before Florian went on. It was, as far as I could tell, old. When I say old, I mean old. I don't think I heard anything newer than the early 1980s — when not many other people in the room were even so much as born.

The tune I particularly noticed was Prince Buster's Madness. Now that is from 1963. At least. Maybe it's even older. It certainly sounds like it is. So it pretty much pre-dates the Beatles. I probably first heard it at the Tunbridge Wells club I spent nights at it in 1968 or so. They'd play lots of ska and bluebeat and soul. I'm sure that was one of them. But . . . it sounded old, even then.

And now they are playing at a show for today's young people. Which leads to all kinds of thoughts about nostalgia and its meaning for us. And its inconstant handmaiden, authenticity, too, of course. Which maybe I'll get into some time. But for now, just one thing . . .

I did the maths. That tune is, roughly, fifty years old. For me (and mine), an equivalent would be that when I was at the Tunbridge Wells club, the warm-up music would have been from World War One. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. It's a long, long way to Tipperary. My old man said follow the van and don't dilly dally. Boiled beef and carrots, that's the stuff to do you well. Any old iron, any old iron, any, any, any old iron. Etc etc. To a crowd of young men and women in Ben Sherman button-downs and French crops. Possibly not. Probably, in fact.

Wonders of the modern world, number eleven, Bushey Park

Actually, the reality is more striking — by far — than this rather bad picture. It was a mid-late autumn afternoon in Bushey Park. I'd never been there before. Apart from anything else, I always thought Bushey Park was in Bushey — Watford-way, that is. But I found myself round Bushey Park way the other day and decided to walk to Teddington Station via the park — which seems to be vast.

There was a warning on the gate about how I couldn't go in there because there would be live guns firing. Then I realised that only applied to the weekend nights. Then I remembered something about there being too many deer in the park and how they needed to cull them. (And I, being me, wondered what their meat would taste like. And where you could buy it.)

But nothing prepared me for this. A stag with a full set of antlers, having an afternoon nap less than ten metres from the path. When I raised the camera to take the shot, it was even better, in fact. There was a bird wandering about all over the stag. I thought the deer was a corpse, in fact, till an ear twitched and the bird flew off.

I'm sure Bushey Park regulars are surprised at my surprise but, well, you don't expect to see this kind of thing in a London park. All kinds of other things, yes. Things which are illegal in many parts of the world, including inner London, yes. But a fully antlered stag, no.

For once, I feel innocent.

Wonders of the modern world, ten . . . When dinosaurs roamed north London

Other places have gnomes in their front gardens. Primrose Hill has dinosaurs.

It reminded that the great ice age stopped at Finchley Road station. Honest. Back then, there was a great ice cliff, a couple of miles high – half way down where the platform is now, I think.

One day I’m going to walk that boundary — where the ice stopped and the dinosaurs began. (Okay, I may have got my pre-history a little messed up there. But . . .)

Which leads me back to Freud . . .

I hear that Lucien — sorry, Lucian — Freud’s nephew Matthew is moving into the area, following in his great-grandfather’s steps. Elsworthy Road was the psychoanalyst’s first home in exile. Matthew isn’t living there, though. From what I hear, he’s on the other side of the park. Not exactly where Sidney Bechet or Roger Fenton lived but not far. Nor from where Sylvia Path killed herself.

I think of Matthew Freud’s forebear, Edward Bernays. He was the son of the marriage between Sigmund’s sister and his wife’s brother. Vienna-born, Bernays emigrated with his parents, becoming a true New Yorker — a top-dollar pitchman, the PR rep for the Wilson government, Lucky Strike cigarettes and, later, anti-smoking campaigners.

He either did invent both the phrase ‘public relations’ (a replacement for the word ‘progaganda’, made unpalatable by German use of it in WW1) and the practice of public relations — or, by claiming he did, Bernays convinced everyone he actually did it, even if he didn’t. Now that’s what I call public relations, volume one.

Just the kind of thing that it looks like Matthew Freud’s in-laws could do with right now, I find myself thinking.

Wonders of the modern world, number nine

A sign of summer (and neighourhood ethnicity statistics). Some look for swallows. In my part of north London, I look for parking spaces. The other day, I was driving south on Gloucester Avenue towards Camden Town and realised I could have my pick of maybe twenty spaces – which means there are now more Americans living in my neighbourhood than even the number of whole house rebuilds going on would indicate.

When the roads become clear and the parking spaces start becoming become free and easy, then I know summer is really here. It means the Americans have begun leaving. ASL in St John's Wood has closed till September. The mothers have taken their children home across the Atlantic to their mothers for the summer – while their investment banker (mostly) husbands sweat a few more weeks alone in the city.

Where the cars go, though, I've no idea. Maybe they put them into storage for the summer. All I know is that it will all be even clearer by the end of next week, when all the private schools will have closed for the summer. Then, the traffic is so light, you could have a half-hour kip in the middle of St John's Wood High Street.

It's always a shock when I go to another bit of London in late July or August. There are cars on the street. And people. What's wrong with them? Don't they have second homes to go to?

Wonders of the modern world, number eight . . . The pubs of Penzance


A mid-week mid-morning at the Seven Stars, Parade St, Penzance. Like sign, like boozer. The Penwith take on the gastropub concept. Behind the gate is the covered smoking area — bigger, nautrally than the pub itself.

By the way, Parade St is not a place for a parade. It's barely a street. More an alley with pretensions. Anorexics have to breathe in if they pass in it.

Some fun?

Nick Lowe and his Kippington Lodge were probably the first pop group I saw live — they were the local band. Go here and you'll hear Nick talk about that band — and an evening in a Manhattan broom cupboard with a Keith Richards freshly sprung from pokey. Lowe's anecdotalism has been described — by him, I think — as mile-melters, ie they make long journeys pass in bliss. I listened to this podcast while walking round the park with my dog. If anyone spotted me laughing out loud and gave me a wide berth, they will now know the reason for my public amusement. (PS It's Word podcast 168.)

Wonders of the modern world, number seven . . . Samuel Smith’s pubs

Yes, that’s right, a pub chain.

The other week I was taken for a drink by an American cousin. He told me his favourite beer was Samuel Smith’s. I vaguely remembered that the Swiss Cottage pub was a Sam Smith’s house. I also vaguely remembered being invited along for a drink at a Sam Smith’s by my fellow students on my MSc course — and that it was oddly cheap, which is why they chose it, I guess.

So I found myself in the pub that’s marooned in the middle of the gyratory/urban race oval at the south end of Finchley Rd. And fascinated. So fascinated that I paid a return visit the other Saturday afternoon to meet up with one of my oldest friends.

What’s so fascinating about Sam Smith’s pubs? That everything is Sam Smith’s. Not just the beer and the lager and the stout but the soft drinks and the hard liquor, too. Even the crisps and nuts are Sam Smith’s. A kind of integration, vertical and horizontal, that you just don’t see in that trade anymore — though obviously you do in food outlets like, say, Pret A Manger.

It feels almost Soviet or Stalinistic in its consistency and lack of choice — as I pointed out to the eastern European barman, to his amusement and agreement. My friend asked for a packet of Uncle Joe’s nuts.

Imagine a world where socialism had got its act together — cheap, good beer and chilli nuts for all! That’s a Sam Smith’s pub. Not very exciting and full of cheap-date alcoholics, of course. But you can’t have everything.

There’s a suitable touch of puritanism, too. Mid-1950s era decor — dark, fake wood panelling, that kind of thing. No music or one-arm bandits or TV. In fact, now I think of it, the Sam Smith’s pub remind me of two other things.

One, the old Yates wine lodges. Not so much the London ones — which were full of people like me drinking the excellent cheap champagne. Nor the classic Liverpool ones, full of students on the Blob and stuck into the cheap Aussie white (wine, Jim, but not as you know it — think sherry . . . ish). Rather, the ones that had a counter where you queued up with a tray like in a cafeteria. You’d tell them what you wanted — which might include a cup of tea, Yates having been founded as part of the temperance movement. Then you’d pay for it at a till point. Municipalised socialism with a sloshed smile.

Two, George Orwell’s imaginary pub, the Moon Under Water — a name now taken and used (perhaps abused) by the Wetherspoon chain. Wood panelling, warm beer, no music or dancing, conversation. Municipalised drinking with an ernest frown.

I even thought up a slogan . . . Sam Smith’s: it’s as if modern capitalism never happened!

Then I wikipedia-ed Sam Smith’s and discovered that it’s not at all socialist in intent but tight corporate branding — and they took the music out because they didn’t want to pay the PRS levy. Oh, well.

PS While I was there, a ten-or-so-strong group of mid-late twenties came in, all dressed in bobble hats, big glasses and red-and-white striped tops. Where’s Wally, I asked, of course. You tell me, they said, we’re looking for him. They were on a pub crawl along the Jubilee line — on a Saturday when it’s suspended for rebuilding. How English a weekend hobby outing is that? Another wonder of the modern world, I’d say.

Next up What the fuck? (And what the fuckericans.)

Wonders of the modern world, six . . . Cheese and its link to international terrorism

An Israeli cousin, a young woman, who had just spent a couple of weeks with us, flew back the other day. My wife gave her some cheddar to take back for her parents. For some reason, she packed the cheese in a board game she'd bought here, War on Terror. 'Stunning satire,' said the Guardian — not the kind of comment I've ever seen on, say, Cluedo. My wife warned her against the putting the cheese there. 'They might think it's explosives on the x-ray,' she said.

At the Heathrow check-in desk, the young cousin found her luggage was a little overweight. So she removed the board game and took it with her in her hand-luggage. At security, they stopped her. Of course they did. They were worried the cheese was explosives. They didn't like the board game, either. They decided it would worry other travellers. They might think she was a terrorist herself.

Oh, yes. Your average mad bomber spends his last flight playing War on Terror — which comes with black balaclava masks, with the word 'Evil' on them. (It's so hard to play, by the way, that if George W and Osama BL had started it on 9/11, they still wouldn't be finished.)

So security took the game from her and put it on the hold. For free. So now we all know how to get free extra baggage allowance. Put everything in a bag marked Terrorist or somesuch.

Next up Back to the story of a blue-glassed Turk, a column-smashing French painter and a headless young woman. Bottomless, too. Well, not literally but in the sense of reverse toplessness. On the other hand, I guess you could say she was bottomless in a metaphorical sense, too. That is kind of the point of the painting.

Wonders of the modern world, number five . . . the sound of no-hand clapping

It was the Sarah Kane play, Blasted, a revival at the Lyric, Hammersmith. I’d not seen it first time round, probably put off by the reviews which described it as needlessly violent and juvenile.

It’s now fifteen years later. Fifteen years. The same gap as between, say, Elvis’s first hit — or Look Back In Anger — and Pink Floyd’s sixth album - or Last Tango In Paris. Or Anarchy In The UK and Madonna’s Blond Ambition.

It’s a great play, I decided. Of course, it’s violent. Then it was the time of the Balkan civil wars - it’s almost a struggle now to recall how staggeringly violent they were and how shocking it was to have something happen quite so close to, well, Primrose Hill.

It is, of course, clearly marked by Beckett and Ionesco and Albee etc, blah blah. But it is also a very funny play. More than that, it’s a comedy of manners, very English, almost traditional. A couple in a hotel room with a man who wants to have sex and a younger woman who doesn’t and the man ends up — inadvertently and amusingly - short of some of his clothing. As my friend Gerry who was with me said, it’s a kind of Brian Rix farce.

I found myself thinking of it as Noel Coward with — if my Nadsat is still with me — a touch of the old ultraviolence. A couple in two different hotel rooms, playing out the not always pleasant realities of romantic entanglement.

Which is why it’s so funny — in this production at least. Tragedy is, of course, my splitting a finger nail. Comedy, though, is a man (a journalist, a tabloid writer, a buffoonish parody of one) who has . . .

* bitten his girlfriend’s vulva till it bleeds

* been buggered - on his hotel bed - with a pistol by an Irish-accented terrorist (who now lies dead beside the bed)

* eaten the leg of a dead baby (having disinterred the infant from its onstage grave)

* had both his eyes removed — for the terrorist’s snack, I think

. . . and who is standing up to his chest in the baby’s now-emptied grave. It’s raining on him through a hole in the roof, too.

See what I mean about farce. As Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest can be seen as an antic inversion of Oedipus Rex, so this play is inside-out Ray Cooney. Comedy played as tragedy.

Anyway, to continue, standing there, buggered and eyeless, having feasted on unroasted baby, in the pissing rain, he opens his mouth, pauses, then says ‘Thank you’. The human comedy. The precision of the line — and its truth.

I was, though, the only one who laughed - as I suspected I might be so I muffled it somewhat.

Anyway, that’s all by the way of preamble to what happened next - to the reason for this piece. What happened next was . . . nothing. Complete quiet in the audience. Complete darkness onstage. Complete quite onstage. And so on. And on and on and on and on. The sound of no-hands clapping.

I was delighted. At last, I realised, I might discover the answer to a question I’d posed to myself but never got round to asking of someone who might actually know the answer. The question is this: how does the clapping start at the end of a play?

Most of the time, of course, it’s not a question. The final line is delivered with the duh-duh-duh of a joke’s punchline. Or everyone knows the ending anyway. You know exactly where you are when, for example, Fortinbras announces: ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot.’

Sometimes, though, it’s not clear quite where you’ve got to in the play. Is it a pause, a very long one, or is that your lot? I saw Sondheim’s Into The Woods in the park this year and, never having seen it or heard it in full before, I wasn’t at all sure if the end of the first half was the end of the whole thing. I wasn’t the only one, either. My friend Dorothy who was with me felt the same thing, too.**

So the lights dimmed on Blasted and the buggered journalist was, presumably, still there in the dark hole, getting wetter and wetter. All was silence, though.

No one clapped. No one stirred. (Perhaps it’s relevant that it was a Saturday afternoon matinee. Perhaps not.) The silence went on for thirty seconds, then more. A minute, I’d say. Then more, more. Perhaps even two minutes. Then rustles. Then the faintest of, well, not laughs exactly, amusements perhaps.

I’d always assumed — on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all — that the ushers were instructed, under these conditions, to start the clapping. Clearly, I was wrong.

Still more silence. No clapping anyway. Just the sound of people starting to turn round for a check on the house or whisper, not quite quietly enough, to their partner.

Then, finally, it came. The first clap, from someone over to the left of the balcony. And everyone joined in, of course. And the curtain rose and the cast of three — buggered, wet, dead, eyeless etc — stood to take the applause. Even they were smiling. Laughing almost.

* A knowing parody, perhaps, given that both her parents were journalists. But then, for that reason, perhaps not.

** Mr Sondheim himself was there that night, too, as it happens. I saw him at the interval, with a drink being brought to him. Astonishingly, given the obsessiveness of Sondheim fans and fanettes — fanosexuals, too — no one else seemed to notice him. I couldn’t bring myself to go over and tell him about the wonders of his rhymes.

I’ll regret it. I know I will. I bumped into the great TV writer Jack Rosenthal at a party and didn’t tell him about the wonders of his gags. He died not long after. I still regret my inaction, shamefully.

Why didn’t I do something? In Rosenthal’s case, I think because I was worried he’d say something like: which of my plays do you most admire? And the thought of that prospective question emptied my brain of the tiniest detail of his work. Well, all but the title of his Barmitzvah Boy — and that’s not enough to sustain a conversation past its opening sallies.

Next up A visit to the National Portrait Gallery (and maybe the story of Lacan’s con).

Wonders of the modern world, number four

There, on a council estate, in the bit of north London which has stopped being Camden Town and has not quite become Kentish Town, there, just off the main road, slap in the middle of that estate, is a crazy golf course. It's an official one, with all the tricky little holes and tunnels and slopes you get in a seaside amusement park. It even has a sign on it, saying something like: this golf course is for the residents of this estate and their guests.

A crazy golf course on a council estate? I stretch to even imagine the meeting at which that was discussed and agreed. What was said? Could anyone keep a straight face? Did they say things like: swings and roundabouts are so 20th century! Or: it's a narrative which addresses the middle-class hegemony of golf. Or: nothing is too good for council tenants, they deserve a crazy golf course.

I guess that I could, of course, call up someone at Camden council and ask them but, frankly, I'm happier with my musings than I might be with the facts.

I walk past it fairly often and I've yet to see anyone playing on it, though. I've always fancied having a go but the problem is there is nowhere to rent golf clubs for it. Now there's a business opportunity going begging.

Meanwhile . . . Cheap flights

Next up The story of Lacan's con (enfin)

Wonders of the modern world, number three

'Clayton initially lost his place in the team to the more adventurous and flamboyant Eddie Clamp of Wolves.' I read that line in The Guardian's obituary of Blackburn and England right-half, Ronnie Clayton. It was written by Brian Glanville – who, as it happens is a the grandfather of one of my son's best friends and the ex-father-in-law of a friend of mine.

I can't make up my mind what I most love about that sentence. Is it the word 'initially'? Or is it that it's about a football player called Ronnie Clayton? Rather than, say, Amine Linganzi or Benjani Mwaruwari. Or is the charming dislocation between the phrase 'adventurous and flamboyant' and the name Eddie Clamp of Wolves?

Next up Golfing in Camden Town

Wonders of the modern world, two

The Guardian has a section/sidebar in which an ‘expert’ reviews or reflects on a work that relates to their occupation. So . . . there was a saleswoman on Death Of A Salesman.

She didn’t like it, I think. She wrote: ‘Sales is about personal development: it’s about being self-motivated and growing as a person, or peopled won’t believe in you.’

She wasn’t that keen on Willy Loman, either. ‘Willy’s problem is his personality or lack of it.’

If only, I found myself thinking, Arthur Miller were still alive to have his greatest character explained to him so . . . unusually?

Meantime . . .

An instrumental and some dancing.

The first of the three before eight, as mimed three decades later. Or: the other thing Orwell missed out on in Wigan. (The first being not finding the pier.)

Wonders of the modern world, one

Saturday morning, early, on Primrose Hill, with my dog. Bright and chill and damp.

A handful and a half of middle-aged men (mostly) crawling up the hill, in a very strange way. A younger man with an Australian accent is shouting at them (not at all angrily). ‘You’ve got to get under the barbed wire. You’re being shot at. So keep your arses down. ’

Next up What I got up to on a Friday evening in Exhibition Rd.