Zak Asgard

Tourists seeking to understand life in London often come up short. It’s not their fault. It is often said that London is a metropolis made up of city villages, each with its own unique personality and characteristics. Most tourists never make it past the invisible walls of central London. Why would they? No one flies to London with thoughts of visiting Tooting or Deptford, though they should – Tooting has, without a doubt, the best curry restaurants in the city. We Londoners scarcely know our own city. We are all blind men touching various parts of the elephant’s body. Many tourists return home without any idea of what it means to live in London.

We can thank Herbert ‘Herb’ Cobb McDonald for the modern-day all-you-can-eat buffet. Herb first introduced Las Vegas – and later the world – to this gastronomical abomination in 1946. The Buckaroo Buffet cost one dollar and promised ‘every possible variety of hot and cold entrees to appease the howling coyote in your innards’. The coyote of my innards has never been appeased by an all-you-can-eat buffet. On my last visit it was starved. Back at the table, the food smelt grey. I thought about all of the nice places I could have visited with £23 If John Hick can find God on a double-decker bus in Hull, I can find the answers to life’s biggest questions at the back of an all-you-can-eat global buffet.

As Sober October comes to an end and we turn our attention to two months of forced festivities, it might be time to ask ourselves if these month-long periods of sobriety actually do anything. In short, I’ve found the answer is that they do. This year, I attempted Dry January. Why? For one simple reason: shame. There are few emotions in life more powerful and more potent than shame. And what is a hangover if not chemically-induced shame? The first time I got really drunk was at a house party. I was 15. My friend and I were new to alcohol and so we thought it clever to buy a litre of Disaronno Originale and eight pints of Kronenbourg. ‘Is that going to be enough?’ I asked. ‘Probably not,’ my friend said, ‘but we can always steal some more at the party.

Snus is a smokeless nicotine product that you insert between your gum and your upper lip. Your saliva soaks into the pouch which in turn releases nicotine, entering the bloodstream without a million tiny pesky tar particulates. In the UK, it is illegal to sell tobacco-based snus, though the non-tobacco variant, also known as nicotine pouches, is legal and widely accessible. The industry is worth something like £250 million and is growing rapidly. It’s a discreet way for smokers to opt for a safer hit of nicotine – so, inevitably, Labour is looking to ban it. I think part of the charm of snus is its subtlety. A vape can be garish and obnoxious Labour’s authoritarian approach to nicotine products is a confusing one.

Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate you on your 19th birthday. We’ve all tried to sneak past them, to argue with them, to convince them that your best friend ‘is like that normally’ and ‘definitely not throwing up in his mouth right now’. We’ve all tried to high-five them. We’ve all been scared of them. We’ve all seen them hit a posh bloke called Hugo for saying ‘My daddy can buy this place.

I used to think that chefs were egotistical maniacs. Some of them are. But the vast majority of chefs are hardworking individuals coping with enough stress to send a beta-blocker into cardiac arrest. I spent more years than I care to admit moonlighting as a bartender and waiter. I worked with dozens of chefs. Some were brilliant, some had trouble frying an egg. Others spent more time with cocaine than flour. One tried to drunkenly glass me in the face with a bottle of Moretti, another became a very good friend.  I learnt a lot from chefs: how to shuck an oyster, how to tastefully plate a dish, how to chain-smoke a pack of Marlboro Reds without throwing up. I also learned that a chef is the pacemaker of any good establishment.

I was standing in a filthy sports hall at the back of the local leisure centre. A bony man with a shaved head handed me a green belt. ‘Well done, Master Zak,’ he said. Ten-year-old me bowed and walked towards the wall of parents. They had been stood there for three hours, watching other people’s children take turns punching the air, shouting a few mispronounced words of Korean. Someone played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ through a tinny speaker. One of the bug-eyed ‘instructors-in-training’ gave me a toothy grin and a thumbs up. I’m almost certain he worked there for free. Sitting in the back of the car on the way home, dobok still on, I realised that after four years of combat sports and a variety of colourful belts, I had learnt nothing about defending myself.

You really have to force yourself to love flying. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half with an air conditioning unit that won’t turn off and two babies locked in a battle of who can scream the loudest is not in my ‘Top 10 Days Well Spent For Zak’. But the plane is an experience. Though commercial air travel has been a possibility since 1914 – some argue earlier in the case of airships – we still go through that shudder of glee (or fright) when the plane does the impossible and leaves the ground. For all of the pitfalls of flying, the miracle of air travel means there’s always something endearing about planes. The world doesn’t make sense here. Drinking a pint of lager with a Nando’s at 3.50 a.m. is perfectly normal This does not apply to airports.

London’s food scene is a Petri dish of Michelin-starred bistros, gastropubs, and overpriced tourist traps where waiters crouch by the table and call you ‘bud’. The days of staying at home, watching Raffles, and eating tinned fruit with evaporated milk are long gone. London’s new culinary culture is an expensive one. But one institution has remained true throughout this tsunami wave of progress: BYOB restaurants. Or so I thought. It’s not that they don’t want us to finish our drinks, it’s that they can’t afford for us to finish our drinks BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle’ or, if you’re boorish like me, ‘bring your own booze’. I think the ‘bottle’ gives it an undeserved prestige.

There are some who would love to spend an eternity by a pool in Spain dancing the ‘Cha Cha Slide’ until they pass out on a sun lounger. There are others who would prefer to spend the afterlife with bifid-tongued demons than wait in line for a subpar continental buffet. I fall into the second camp. It’s not that I think all-inclusive holidays are without purpose, it’s just that I think all-inclusives have passed their sell-by date. I’m sure that Gérard Blitz’s initial idea for an all-inclusive came from a good place: his desire to entertain the masses. But these resorts are a far stretch from the original straw huts and bartering beads of Club Med’s 1950s design.

Churchill immortalised the phrase the ‘special relationship’ in his 1946 ‘Sinews of Peace’ address. He was talking about the UK and the US. And when we think of America and Britain’s relationship, we think of the wars we’ve fought together and the diplomatic camaraderie we’ve shared over the past hundred years. We think of Iraq and Afghanistan. We think of Reagan and Thatcher waxing lyrical over the phone. But there’s something else that’s special about our relationship, and that’s Britain’s fascination with American culture. I was indoctrinated into American culture from an early age in the form of television I’ve spent my whole life watching America. We all have.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the English seaside. It’s idiosyncratic, a little kitschy, a little gross. There are those pre-war beach windbreakers. There are tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches in packed lunches. There’s a mangy dog nipping at your feet as you run into icy waters. It’s always windy, often pebbled, and full of litter. The spit of sand stretches out along the English Channel and unfurls into Poole Harbour We love it like we love mushy peas – that is to say we learn to love it. But Sandbanks is nothing like that. Sandbanks is considered a cut above, and it is. The chintzy aspects of seaside towns like Paignton and Bognor Regis are lost on Sandbanks and its £13 million bungalows.

It’s that time of year. The sound of a Silesian Bratwurst connecting with cold lips. A security guard getting aggy with the actor playing ‘the elf’. Ketchup spraying into the air like celebratory champagne. Spilled mulled wine inebriating the local rat population. Overpriced tat sold in gift box form to drooling tourists.  It’s Christmas market season. A confusing month of crowded streets and impulsive shoppers. But Christmas markets have nothing to do with Christmas. They did once. They do in Germany. But these markets, the central city cesspits, are nothing more than shoddy farmers’ markets in tinsel.  ‘No, thank you. Merry Christmas.’ We walked away.  There is an idea of a Christmas market – something that is almost holy.

Self-pity and Deliveroo go hand in hand. You can’t have the latter without the former. It’s impossible to watch a rain-drenched driver fight with his moped’s side stand – while you sit torpidly in your pants by the window – without the heavy feeling of self-loathing. There’s something shameful about it, something pathetic. If Dante were alive now, he’d add another layer to hell: Deliveroo users. And I’m one of them. If using Deliveroo is a sin, call me Hester Prynne. I too have tasted the nectar. I too have dribbled over a box of tungsten nuggets and a semifluid dipping sauce. I’m not anti-technology. I’m anti-technology that makes us a worse version of ourselves We know it’s not a good idea.

What we put on our feet says a lot about a person. Shoes define our character. There are shoes that breathe, shoes for diving, shoes for driving, shoes that light up, shoes with wheels in them, shoes that look more like gloves than shoes, shoes by Kanye West, shoes for old people, shoes for the indoors, shoes for hunting, shoes for dancing. You get the point. Neither of them is aesthetically pleasing – at least not for the sane amongst us Then there are Birkenstocks and Crocs: two heinous additions to fashion and yet two very successful brands, albeit for different markets. They are at war. Battling it out for the nation’s feet on metropolitan high streets and in the gardens of our countryside dwellers; a great clog divide of injection-moulded polymer versus leather and cork.

A lonely microphone. A sound system that would have been impressive in the late 1990s. The smell of athlete’s foot and the contents of a Nobby’s Nuts packet. A deranged dog. Three privately educated members of a punk band call ‘SKiN FuK!’ arguing with the bartender. The stale atmosphere of regret and faded dreams mixed in with hope for a brighter tomorrow. It can only be one thing: Tuesday open mic night. ‘This is a scene I wrote a few weeks ago. It’s from the perspective of a baby being born I’ve been to more open mic nights than I’ve had pleasant dreams. They just seem to happen to me. And they can happen anywhere. I’ll be sitting in a knackered pub, minding my business, when the clipboard comes out.

It’s not crazy to worry about getting home. It’s not crazy to lock your doors at night and check that the alarm is set. It’s not crazy to avoid the man who keeps gurning at you on the bus every time you look his way. It’s not crazy to worry. But is spending £50,000 to £500,000 on a bespoke panic room a little… crazy? Probably. But who am I to judge? I still find it hard to answer the phone to a withheld number.    What if your poor cat sitter was feeding your tabby just as your panic room decided to spray chlorine gas all over the place? I could only find one advert from a panic room installation company in the UK. The video shared on the firm’s website is set in London and has a B-movie feel to it.