Food

Bob Bob Cité is a restaurant dangling like testicles from the underside of the Leadenhall Building in the City of London. It is shaped like a series of yellow train carriages, for a voyage no one will ever make; the building above it manages, in the way of the age, to be both absurd and frightening. People call the Leadenhall Building the cheese--grater, but it does not make me think of kitchens. Kitchens are human and intimate; from the atrium, which is guarded by security men, this building looks like the innards of something vast and inhuman. This is the sequel to Bob Bob Ricard, a Soho restaurant for rich men with anxiety disorders, hollow legs, and nervous thumbs.

A slice of history Pizza Express is to undergo financial restructuring, leading to fears that it could go under. How did the pizza industry in Britain begin? — The first record of an Italian restaurant was the Italian Eating House off Leicester Square, opened in 1803, though it is not known whether or not it served pizza. — The Olivelli restaurant in Store Street, Bloomsbury, opened in 1934. Early documents found on the premises included a recipe for margherita pizza. — Pizza Express was the first chain of pizza restaurants in Britain, its first branch opening in Wardour Street in 1965. — Pizzaland opened its first branch in 1970. It was bought out and its branches converted to Pizza Hut in 1996.

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European--style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a new Brexit-themed restaurant in Britain, but I have yet to see it.

Oxford is a pile of medieval buildings filled with maniacs, and is therefore one of the most interesting places on earth. It is easy to go mad in Oxford — it’s the damp — or grow other worlds, like John Tolkien, whose Middle Earth, I suspect, was largely an emotional defence against the conversation at High Table. I found the cognitive dissonance between the landscape and its purpose so alarming, like finding David Cameron riding an Ent, that I went mad, and so know far less about Tudor foreign policy than I should. It was more awful than it sounds — that is youth’s anguish — and I could not, for years, visit Oxford. But I went last week, holding copy of Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire as a comfort blanket.

The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, and this is more apt than you can know. Inside there is faded Victorian grandeur mashed with Arthurian legend mashed with Kazakh oil baron chic mashed with three-star hotel in fading south coast resort. There is sinister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets, staff dressed for serving tea at some ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from every window, the sea.

Picture the scene: we are filming the opening link for The Great British Bake Off. Here I am in the woods, dressed in a lion suit; Paul Hollywood is the Tin Man, Sandi Toksvig the Scarecrow, and, guess what, Noel Fielding is Dorothy. I leap out on to the yellow brick road, roaring — I feel a hammer blow to my ankle, and end up whimpering like the Cowardly Lion I’m portraying. I have snapped my Achilles tendon. Danny the medic, who has had nothing more exciting than bakers’ cut fingers to deal with for three years, finally gets to use his ambulance, wheelchair and considerable skills. He doses me with painkillers and sticks my foot in a bucket containing more ice than water. Soon the agony of that has wiped out any injury pain.

I’m on holiday with my family in Turks and Caicos, and maintaining my current weight is proving difficult. Regular readers will recall that I lost about half a stone at the beginning of 2018, after an army of offence archeologists started sifting through everything I’d written, dating back more than 30 years, looking for evidence that I was an unsuitable person to be involved in education. Since then, this type of inquisition has become much more common — scarcely a day passes without someone being defenestrated from public life on account of having said or done something imprudent in the past — but 18 months ago it was sufficiently distressing to cause rapid weight loss.