Spectator Life

Sooner or later, Airbnb is going to change its name to Airb, partly because it takes less time to type, and partly because it is becoming a misnomer. Increasingly rarely is there a breakfast to go with your bed. I am walking from John o' Groats to Land's End at the moment, so I have been staying in a different town every night, save for when I have been on the hills in a tent, and not once so far has anyone offered me a fry-up. Only once have I been offered any breakfast at all. Neither, by the way, have I even seen anyone in most of the places I have been staying. All but one have been entirely remote-control operations with key codes and key safes. I am, therefore, getting quite nostalgic for the traditional B&B.

Should you visit your local Waitrose store this week – and hope you don’t witness an altercation between a shoplifter and a member of staff about to be fired for doing his job – you might be surprised by a new range of products. In what the company is calling ‘a vibrant, decadent celebration of pure noshtalgia’, Waitrose has launched a series of 80s-themed foods. These include everything from Scotch egg sandwiches and steak Diane-flavoured crisps to rhubarb and custard ice cream and – horror of horrors – ‘peach melba spritz’, which its blurb describes as ‘a delicious blend of juicy peach and ripe raspberry, lifted with sparkling crisp bubbles for a beautifully balanced summer spritz’.

The Eagle in Farringdon used to be next door to the old Guardian offices. I remember eating there back in the early 1990s, when it was offering something of a new approach to dining. A Portuguese-influenced menu was scrawled on a blackboard, and it was exciting and fresh. Placing your order was always a bit of a pain – you had to jostle your way to the front of the always crowded bar, then struggle to make your order heard over the noise endemic to pubs with no soft furnishings – and the many people intent on prioritising drinking over eating. But The Eagle became an institution and (although I'm not sure this is the case) it is reputed to have been the UK’s very first gastropub.

We have all become only too used to the surging cost of heating our homes, filling up our cars or doing the weekly shop. But there’s one price increase that hurts me more than all of these combined: the cost of a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Just five years ago, it was rare to find a wine list without at least one bottle under £25; now it’s increasingly common to find one little under £40. We have reached a point where £35 house wine is now normal. Take Maggie Jones in Kensington. I used to eat there regularly in the late 90s and early 00s and recall it being fabulously cheap – a point emphasised by the magnums of house wine on which they’d mark with a pencil how much you had drunk. Often it was quite a lot.

‘Citrus marmalade?’ Well, that’s a tautology, if ever I’ve heard one. I’ve been making marmalade for a long time and written about it extensively. I wouldn’t quite paint myself as a marmalade obsessive (I’ve met them, and I know that I cannot literally or figuratively compete), but I’m certainly a marmalade fangirl. They line my cupboards and are a breakfast non-negotiable. I seek out unusual citrus fruit, and pore over old preserve cookery books. January is officially marmalade-making season in our house and, for the full month, every window is steamed up, every surface is slightly tacky from over-zealous jarring.

It is 2089. My grandson tugs at the hem of my musty corduroy trousers. ‘Pop-pop,’ he says. ‘Were you alive during the Great Pret Pickle Shortage of 2026?’ There is an almighty crash of thunder. A gust of wind throws open a window. A scream can be heard from outside. I look down at my hands, which are visibly shaking, and compose myself. ‘I was there,’ I whisper. ‘I was there when Pret lost the jambon beurre. Man and sandwich were never the same again.’ I’m being facetious, of course. I couldn’t care less about Pret A Manger’s ham, pickle and butter roll going MIA. The coffee giant claims the sandwich has gone missing due to a temporary cornichon (pickle) shortage – much to the dismay, we’re told, of its loyal, city banker target market.

When I was a child, I always wanted to watch television during supper, but my dad wasn’t keen. He preferred family conversation and as we chatted over a meal he would try to gently steer us towards more pleasant subjects rather than the vulgar or provocative topics I tended to propose. ‘A meal is a sacred thing,’ he’d tell me.  I spent my secondary education at a bizarre school run by a quasi-Vedic cult, where table manners were also important. Before lunch, we chanted a Sanskrit mantra. The organic vegetarian food was to be offered, not grabbed. We sat upright, our backs as straight as any Himalayan yogi. We were told not to eat more than we needed. Naturally, I sneered at much of this as angrily as any teenage Clash fan would.

New wars bring new fundraising efforts. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians who already lived in London or moved here as a result of the war have conducted a subtle but concerted gastronomic campaign on behalf of their country. Somehow, this avoids all shrillness – unlike the dreadful and relentless Cook for ‘Palestine’ movement.  The Ukrainian food scene doesn’t crow about good and evil but it takes a position on those questions anyway – of course. A wartime enterprise can't do anything else. But with front people like the beautiful, tireless Olia Hercules, who has raised millions for her homeland through culinary ‘cultural diplomacy’ missions, it’s an altogether more skilful piece of food politics than other wartime campaigns.

I don’t much miss being a teacher. A pathological dislike of teenage boys, a congenital inability to remember historical facts and an unwillingness to spend my spare moments lesson-planning rather than go to the pub meant that a brief career diversion to pay off my overdraft did not become a lifelong vocation. But there is one thing I do hanker for, that makes me briefly wish I was back in the classroom: the daily delight of school dinners. After four hours of trying to wrangle the Year 10s into memorising the membership of the League of Nations, sitting down for a steaming hot plate of fish, chips and jam roly-poly was a godsend. It was a little patch of civilisation between shepherding the droogs and staring at PowerPoints.

One of the disadvantages of having a daughter who is both given to wayward behaviour in public and named Rose is that my increasingly frantic cries of ‘Wait, Rose! Wait, Rose!’ make me sound like an especially unhinged proselytizer for the middle classes’ favourite supermarket. When we do eventually make it inside the hallowed doors of Waitrose, however, I can feel my pulse rate returning to normal. Like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly so famously said of Tiffany’s, it is a place where I feel that nothing bad can happen.   The supermarket has, however, suffered quite a public relations blow recently with its actions involving its former employee, Walker Smith.

Nations are built from eating habits as well as masterpieces. In Britain, there’s one that is both: Bovril. This thick, salty meat extract paste may not be as wise as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as beguiling as Rossetti’s ‘Proserpine’, or as symbolic of greatness as the Palace of Westminster – and yet it has a clear place among our nation’s intangible cultural assets. As both a spread and a drink, Bovril may be just a wartime ration, a tonic for invalids or a companion on football terraces but it still marks a serious, if ordinary, contribution to our common life.  That contribution, however, may now be under threat.

In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘...pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’  I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all.  Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs.

When we describe something – or someone – as an ‘acquired taste’, it is rarely a compliment. If we say it of Sharon, for example, it means that she is a bit of a pain in the neck. It's the same with food: olives, anchovies and oysters are some of the finest foodstuffs on God's earth but sometimes, in order to truly enjoy them, you have to first quiet your inner doubts by tuning out all the reasons why other people don’t like them.  Those of us who like to devote time to thinking about matching food and booze get called snobs – but we all do it all the time. You would probably choose to have a mug of tea rather than a cup of coffee with fish and chips – and fair play to you if you do.

Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’… I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time.

When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose.  Yet all good things decline at some point. Before Simpson’s closed in 2020, another victim of the pandemic, it had been weakening.