Spectator Life

Is there a greater scam than the ‘ripen at home’ punnets of fruit that the supermarkets flog? Flimsy netted plastic of peaches, plums and apricots promise so much and deliver so little. When ripe, they need nothing doing to them at all; even cutting them with a knife feels like overkill. But, when they don’t, the result is miserable: their wooly flesh clings to the stone for dear life, and to call the flavour lacklustre would be giving it too much credit. In theory, these fruits should be a joy: representing the bounty of the season. All they should need is a day or two on the counter before they’re ripe for the taking.

Keir Starmer is fond of a beer. We knew he liked beer when we knew nothing much about his policies except that they were in favour of everything that was good and against everything that was bad. We could be excused for feeling that the impending coronation of Andy Burnham offers more of the same. A Labour MP told the Today programme that Burnham explaining his policies was irrelevant given he’d ‘already shown he’s a very successful politician’. What we do know is that Burnham, too, likes beer. He and Starmer eagerly lean on the one point where their pose and their personality agree - Guinness for Burnham, real ale for Starmer.

If you’ve ever lived in Marseille – where the habit of exaggeration is imbibed with mothers’ milk – you’ve heard about the sardine that blocked the port. But that’s nothing compared to the pistachio that took over the world. In late 2023, Dubai chocolate, a new kind of chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini and crunchy, toasted phyllo pastry, went viral. Chocolate brands, bakeries and purveyors of fine foods were quick to jump on the trend. Coffee chains began offering pistachio chocolate drinks (iced Dubai-chocolate matcha, anyone?) and delectable pistachio bomboloni – soft doughnuts filled with pistachio cream – came back on the menu in Italian restaurants.

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of the Hampstead Heath Extension, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.  There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

I was, aptly, in a pub when I heard the news. Owing to the time difference between Britain and North America, Sir Keir Starmer had confirmed that licensing laws would be relaxed for this year’s Fifa World Cup, allowing pubs to stay open later into the night.  Shortly after the announcement, I found myself wondering about licensing laws generally. Like most Britons, I had long regarded them as part of the natural order of things; as permanent a fixture of pub life as sticky carpets. But what were these laws’ impact on my own relationship with alcohol and those of my fellow countrymen? Why is it, compared with so many other countries, we feel the need to binge drink? The stereotype of the drunk Brit is by now internationally recognisable.

Many of us have been flirted with by fruit; perhaps it can’t help being fruity, following the principles of nominative determinism. ‘PLEASE DON’T SQUEEZE ME TILL I’M YOURS’ blushing peaches on market stalls used to beg, lest we bruise them with our greedy paws. ‘UNZIP A BANANA’ leered a television commercial, so typical of the licentious 1960s. As if knowing that vegetables can never be as sexy, fungi could only fight back with the highly uninspired ‘MAKE ROOM FOR THE MUSHROOMS’ slogan of the 1980s - a limp retort at best.   What they all had in common was the anthropomorphisation of food. It seemed like a bit of fun at first.

Have you heard of National Biscuit Day, a McVities marketing concoction, which came and went last week? Probably not, but in my view, it was as meaningful a prompt to reflect on British culture as any.  There are, of course, both sociologies and histories of the Great British Biscuit, though more as the silent partner in the Great British Tea. In her book Watching the English, Kate Fox makes the good (if obvious) point that tea and all that goes with it is a social lubricant central to English identity and vital for retaining the ability to keep buggering on.

The French and British have always enjoyed disapproving of how the other eats. Take the British office worker often seen demolishing a meal deal at his desk, whereas in France, eating at your desk is (in theory) illegal; in 1894 French ouvriers were banned from eating in the workplace, owing to phosphorus contamination in match-making factories, and the law stands today, only briefly suspended during Covid.   But on closer inspection, the two nations are more similar than we like to admit. The earliest French women's strikes were a response to that very law, demanding the right to eat at work, since being turned out into the street at lunch left them exposed to harassment.

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. ‘What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?’ he asked her.

If I were offered the option of eating just one country’s cuisine forevermore, it would have to be Greek. Even on a rainy day in north London, just one bite of souvlaki is enough to conjure sun-drenched landscapes, fresh olive oil and vibrant Mediterranean flavours.  Clearly plenty of others agree. Greek restaurants seem to be popping up all over London – with at least five opening in the past two months. There’s more to come with the much-anticipated opening of Zylia in Covent Garden next month, from Greek chef Nick Molyviatis (formerly of Borough Market hotspots Oma and Agora) and Cypriot restaurateur Barry Karacostas. No wonder lifestyle platform SheerLuxe was cooing about ‘London’s love affair with Greek food’ earlier this month.

For centuries, as a dinner party guest you ate what you were served. Nobody dreamed of calling up their host in advance demanding what they would like on the menu. This is one reason why the dinner party somehow made it through the 1980s era of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Social X Rays’ – Mid-Atlantic society-types who ate nothing and resembled skeletons. Previous threats to the dinner party included the first drink driving laws, which Bron Waugh claimed ruined country social life. Then came the cocaine diet guest (no food touched), who has been spiritually succeeded by the equally annoying Ozempic-jabber, bragging to their hostess about how ‘unhungry’ they feel.

I’m one of those gobby vegans who will happily tell anyone why they should stop consuming animal products. But I can still admit what’s obviously true: most vegan cheese isn’t particularly good. I was once ardently devoted to cheese. In my vegetarian years, paneer, mozzarella and halloumi were less foods than companions. I loved how paneer would soak up the spice of a curry like a sponge. Mozzarella was like a spectacle of tensile, elastic theatre and halloumi provided evocative, salty squeaks. I also took delight in the standard toasted cheddar sandwich. Yes, I did get quite fat. But when I learned about what goes on at dairy farms, everything changed.

In P.G. Wodehouse’s Cocktail Time (1958) the characters are frequently ‘lapping up martinis like a vacuum cleaner’. Wodehouse was living in the US at this point, and this was the era of the three-martini lunch. In the ensuing decades, the classic cocktail took a bit of a back seat. But the martini has made a mighty comeback.   Not put off by Sir Raymond ‘Beefy’ Bastable denunciation of the modern youth endlessly sitting around drinking cocktails, I went therefore to find London’s best.  They are not always where you imagine. Archive & Myth is, ominously, underneath Leicester Square’s Hippodrome Casino.

Cast your minds back, if you can, to 1986. A different era. The nation rejoiced as a jolly redhead married the Queen’s favourite son. Britain had a cast-iron prime minister who looked set to go on and on, with nary a dent to her patent leather handbag. A first-class stamp cost 17 pence; the average family home only a little more. There was a Big Bang in the City and a larger one at Chernobyl. And, in the nascent ready-made drinks market, something similarly seismic happened: Marks & Spencer launched the bevvy that spawned a thousand imitators, the ‘gin in a tin’. This epoch-defining moment passed me by at the time (I still had a few years left at primary school). When I was a 90s teen, it was alcopops that commanded the headlines and moral panic.