Here and There Read online

  ‘This must be the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,’ said a travelling companion as the waiter presented us with the turtle. We were in the middle of a paddy field outside Hanoi, in a restaurant that was no more than an agricultural, corrugated iron barn on a concrete floor with that ubiquitous light of Asia, neon. It specialised in what my Vietnamese guide euphemistically called ‘exotic food’. What he meant was stuff fished out of mud – frogs, rats and this turtle, which is what Americans call a turtle and I call a terrapin.

  They come, of course, with their own handy serving suggestion. We chose a live terrapin doing its impression of a dead terrapin in a plastic paddling pool. Why anyone wants to keep these things as a pet is beyond me. Anyway, half an hour later it’s back at the table, looking remarkably unfazed. Only the waiter goes voilà! and lifts its lid off with all the swagger of the Tour d’Argent. After half an hour of sucking the metatarsals out of gelatinous feet and fiddling about in its incredibly rudimentary digestive system with chopsticks, I realised that turtle on the half-shell is more of an event and an anecdote than a meal.

  I also had the hard-boiled fertilised duck egg. This is a 12-day-old Jemima Puddleduck abortion and, frankly, though edible, it’s not an improvement on the before or the after. We were offered scentweasel, a cat-sized animal wrapped in a straightjacket of bamboo, and whose furious eyes gleamed in the neon. I declined, not because I couldn’t have eaten it, but because I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

  All of these things weren’t served for sustenance or pleasure, but as mystical medicines. Medicinal food in the Third World usually promises one of two things: boy babies, or an erection you can open a packing case with. I’m continually astonished at the number of things that are supposed to be aphrodisiacs in the Far East in societies that, leaving aside Western sexual tourism, are generally rather prim and conservative.

  We left. The waiter gave me the gall and blood of the terrapin in rice spirit to take away. I gave it to my driver, a man of unsurpassed hideousness. The next day he told me he’d shared it with his 70-year-old father. Together they’d had a night of depraved Dionysian excess, he winked and leered. I strongly suspected he’d got dumpling-faced and did karaoke.

  The things people always imagine will be vomit-inducing usually aren’t. I’ve eaten white flying termites, salty ants, scorpions, jewelled beetles, locusts, armadillo in the shell, agouti, warm Masai cattle blood from a gourd rinsed in urine, and giant African frog. All of the insects were delicious. In fact, I’d stop for flying ants or jewel beetles. Armadillo was tough and metallic. The agouti, a large guinea pig, was really delicious, with a thick layer of fat. The frog was filthy, the size of a green meat pie, with devil eyes. I carried it in my pocket for a day. It made a lunge for my willy; frogs will eat anything. I’ve never been so pleased to see anything die. It tasted like pond slime and forgotten face-flannel.

  A food critic really only needs two things in order to do his job properly: no eating disorders and the gastric morals of a hooker with a mortgage. You gotta eat everything, and mostly more than once. I actively try to keep my prejudices down to a minimum. I got over my round-eye revulsion of durian fruit. It tastes of garlic, wine gums and rotting liver. I quite look forward to it now.

  I think in the First World we have the illusion of choice and sophistication, whereas in fact the range of flavours and textures we consume for pleasure is getting smaller and fewer: we’re down to dumbly bold and inoffensiveÌy bland. So many things have single polite flavours; we’re cutting out the complex and the strange.

  In Iceland, they eat what is probably the most difficult thing I have ever had to put in my mouth: year-old buried shark. The flavour of ammonia is so strong you can taste it behind your eyeballs. And seal hand preserved in whey. In Reykjavik these are dishes of identity – they link modern Icelanders with the astonishing hardships of their past. It’s edible heritage. They’re also ferociously drunk when they sit down to the table.

  There is the shock of the new, and then there is the shock of the familiar but hidden. The truth is that when you eat something threatening, disgusting, poisonous abroad, it’s sort of straight up in your face. When they offer you dog, they don’t call it low-fat, organic, hand-reared, street-smart meat, they call it dog. And you can go and see it out the back. They serve stuff with its teeth in and its fins on. A durian is a durian, and you can tell it’s coming three rooms away.

  But at home, food arrives by stealth. You never quite know – it’s cloaked in euphemism and simile, wrapped in advertising and association. You never can be really sure what this more-ish thing is actually made of. William Burroughs said that the naked lunch is when each of us realised, properly realised, what was actually on the end of our forks. The most shudderingly disgusting thing is food that’s pretended to be your close friend, but is really a sordid, child-molesting, gut-rotting sociopath. The naked lunch, the vilest thing you put in your mouth, is when you realise what mechanically recovered meat actually means.

  And the worst thing? Well, the worst I ever heard of was a friend who’d spent three months in Pakistan and craved chocolate beyond reasoning. At the airport, she found a stall selling Rolos. With nerveless fingers, she shoved four into her mouth. They were fakes, frauds, copies filled with gutter water. The glissando from expectation to fathomless disgust in that is pretty unbeatable. But my worst? Honestly? It was a hamburger from a caravan at an Eminem concert. Without doubt, by a country mile, the most disgusting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

  Bohemian rhapsody

  Paris of the imagination is as real as the city itself.

  I love Paris in the spring. Paris is where good Americans go when they die. How are we going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? We’ll always have Paris. No city has been anthologised, crooned at, soliloquised, rhymed and mooned over like Paris. My favourite quote is from Haussmann, the man who designed the place. He said Paris was a sinister Chicago. According to my atlas there are 10 Parises. One in Ontario, Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Kiritimati (Christmas Island) 155 degrees north by 157.3 degrees west in the Pacific Ocean and, of course, the one on the bend of the Seine in the flat plain of northern France.

  Paris is also a prefix for style. For coquetry, for sweetness, elegance, it’s a tease. In fact, there are far more than 10 Parises. Everybody who has ever been there carries Paris away in their head. It glitters in reverie. And, more than anywhere else in the world, Paris is also a place that lives in the minds of the people who’ve never seen it, a capital of the imagination, an international virtual city where finally we can all let go and perhaps be the person our present circumstances won’t allow. You could write that book in Paris, paint that screen, screw the tatin off the tart. You could wear velvet and wave your hands. You could sit in a café all afternoon. You could get drunk for breakfast. Paris is the get-out-of-responsibility-and-guilt Never Never Land for the put-upon, the buttoned-up and the guiltily diligent and obliged.

  No place in the world, with the possible exception of Hiroshima, has had such a comprehensive PR makeover as Paris, because it really wasn’t always like this. Before the French Revolution, Paris was famous for being filthy, dark, smelly, dangerous and pestilential. The medieval city huddled over its own disgusting mire, while its denizens slit each others’ throats and poxed whores passed on syphilis, widely known as the French disease. Paris was where you ended up if you were too deranged, feckless, dangerous or too disgusting to be allowed anywhere else.

  The revolution changed everything. What was a proper murderous horror show of random terror to live through was seen as a beacon of reason and hope in places where you could sleep peacefully at night. It is ever thus with liberals. The revolution became trendy. Everyone wanted one and, of course, no one actually wanted to go live in Paris. So the sort of people who did move in were artists, writers, misfits and ne’er-do-wells, and they in turn grew to be romantic, just as long as you didn’t hav
e to live next to or eat opposite them. Revolution had been so successful for Paris it just kept on having them all through the 19th century, becoming more and more romantic and ideal as more and more people got shot, locked up and died of cholera.

  The artists and writers got better at being ne’er-do-wells, who in the end did well, and the city got a makeover. Haussmann, the chap who thought it was a sinister Chicago, redesigned the city into the grid of reason, an ordered duty. That is the familiar map of today. It’s actually an open prison. It wasn’t done through order and beauty in long walks thinking lofty thoughts. It was done so that they could put down the annual revolution quickly and efficiently – the boulevards are for moving troops, the wide vistas are fields of fire, the great roundabouts artillery positions. Paris was the only modern city specifically designed to facilitate the economical massacre of its own citizens. Who says the French have no sense of humour?

  I first went to Paris in 1969, six months after the last abortive revolution when the students, Peugeot factory workers and couturiers’ zip stitchers had taken to the streets and the theatres. And de Gaulle had lost his nerve and gone to check on the loyalty of the Foreign Legion in Marseilles. It’s so typically French that every other revolutionary in the world takes over power and the radio station, but in Paris they storm the theatres. Six months later when the car workers and seamstresses and the police had all gone home, the students were still there on stage having 24-hour philosophy-athons and passing motions of solidarity with the anti-aircraft gunners of Hanoi. The paving stones were still ripped up and there were piles of loose cobbles at the side of the streets on the Left Bank. Gangs of CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) riot police lurked in malevolent huddles sucking on gitanes. Paris still had public pissoires and existentialists in cafés. I remember seeing Jean-Paul Sartre in the Deux Magots. I’m not sure this isn’t communist editing of memory but I do certainly remember it. At the age of 16, Paris hit me with a sucker punch: Sartre and beautiful women with boyish haircuts carrying poodles, policemen in capes, booksellers on the Seine, Courbet and Gèricault in the galleries. I’d just read The Outsider and Down and Out in Paris and London and I was a pushover for Paris and have remained hopelessly besotted ever since.

  What actually did it for me was breakfast. My father had installed us in a pension in the Rue St André des Arts. Every room looked as if it had been decorated by Colette and cleaned by Edith Piaf. Breakfast in the morning was a baguette with butter and jam and milky coffee. Unexceptional, just like breakfast at home. Except that it was utterly exceptional. The bread had an eggshell crust and a soft white centre that smelled of comfort. It wasn’t the white steamed ready-sliced stuff of home. The butter was as pale as death and had a creamy sweetness that was a thousand tastebuds from the sputum-yellow over-salted Anchor stuff I was used to. The jam was thin and formed pools in the butter and tasted intensely of strawberries, not the thick, livid red anonymous fruit of England. The coffee came in pottery bowls and tasted of that particular French combination: hot, with milk and chicory. The apparent familiarity was what made the reality so astonishing. If the French had eaten herons’ tongues and can-can dancers’ sequins for breakfast, I would have been excited but not shocked. I realised that all my life I’d been eating a pale, sad shadow and that the food in England was a horrid charade compared to this. This was perhaps the most important breakfast of my life. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and adoration for food.

  It also taught me that the things that surprise you and move you are most often those that are closest to the familiar. And that Paris’s great trick was quality. It did the same as everyone else – it just did it in silk and by hand. It was a city that had invented proletarian revolt, yet made its living out of exclusivity – from frocks to soup to whores.

  The Paris I saw in 1969 was already disappearing and when I go now it’s almost completely vanished. The cobbles are gone and the pissoires. The art’s all been moved and Les Halles – where I ate onion soup at five in the morning with a restorative eau-de-vie and at lunchtime a dish of chicken stewed with crayfish – has been taken over by pizza, cappuccinos and public mimes.

  But there is enough Paris in my head to shroud the reality with a purple existentialism until I die. I will continue to see what I want to, which has always been another of Paris’s great tricks. She was an ugly old dame who convinced everyone she was really a beautiful young ingénue. She smelled of sewers and sweat and we sniffed pastis and violets. She talked ineffable bollocks and we heard charming romance.

  Paris is a confidence trick that was invented in the 19th and early 20th century by a collective act of wishful thinking. An act of auto-hypnotism made by writers, artists, musicians, poets and plain girls in good hats, who levitated the city to be a demi-utopia of brilliance, an arty afternoon humping. Paris was and still is not exactly a lie, but a fantasy, and very little of it has anything to do with the Parisians, who, despite history, culture and cuisine have managed to remain an earth-bound grasping, bad-tempered lot of scowling les misérables. As Hemingway said, Paris is a moveable feast: you take it with you as a picnic in your head. And it’s a city that’s often best visited from the comfort of your own home.

  The end of the world

  An island of serenity and awe, Iceland is experiencing its economic woes as a footnote in a history shaped by contrary forces.

  Iceland is a singular place, stuck up there, halfway between Europe and a fairytale. A patch of land that wasn’t there in a geological yesterday. It’s still hot from the oven, bubbling and spitting, lavarous and sulphurous with the fumes of Hades. It has vast glaciers and winter winds that could flay your face, but also ponds that could boil you alive. It’s bathed in green Nordic light and eggy gas and is one of the most contrarily rewarding places on earth.

  It was only discovered almost a thousand-and-a-half years ago by a lost Viking, and when the first settlers landed in 870, they set up their ridge-poles for their halls, which they had to bring with them, because there weren’t any trees. They found, in the rocks, a couple of Irish monks already there. Hermits, who had made what must be one of the most hopeless and hopeful journeys ever, at least until Laika, the Soviet cosmodog.

  The Dark Age monks set out in coracles, which are simply buckets made of woven twigs and tarred leather, without maps, trusting only in God, searching for solitude. They travelled up the Hebrides, past Orkney and Shetland, already into some of the most dreadful and difficult seas in the world, then on to the Faroes and, from there, into nothing. A frozen, grey, howling nothing. These were people who believed the earth was flat and the sea full of monsters, but they believed in God more, and either His guiding hand or the most blessed luck brought them to Iceland.

  Without wood to build or burn, without any land animals to eat or dress in, just fish and seals and puffins, they had found the mother lode of solitude. If you’re in the awe business – and we must assume that monks are – then this is the Tiffany of awe. The Ringlings’ four-ring circus of awe. There is enough solitary awe in Iceland to keep a mildly righteous fellow struck dumb for a lifetime. But just to show that God also has a raw and wry sense of humour (or perhaps it was just the damnable luck of the Irish, who can’t resist a punchline), having got through this one-way journey of unsurpassable dread, and finally having found this beatific, chilly loneliness of eternal meditation, a package tour of heathen Vikings turns up and, you’ve got to admit, that’s funny. It is the coldest and wettest shaggy dog story in all of the Dark Ages.

  From here, Leif Ericson discovered America. The Icelanders invented the first real parliament in Europe, the Althing. And then, after a millennium of hardship and hysterical subjugation by first the Norwegians and then the Danes, they fished for cod and whales and husbanded sheep and rode horses the size of kelpies, drank like plugholes, ate sheep’s heads smoked over their own dried excrement, wrote epic poetry, played chess, knitted, believed in fairies and grew to be the most enlightened and liberal people
in the world.

  What we’re talking about here is an island bigger than Portugal, larger than Hungary, but with a population about the same size as Wollongong, Australia. Iceland, the most unpromising piece of new development in the northern hemisphere, has produced a mythic combination of characteristics that are the most enviable oxymoron available to people: poet fishermen. They have also given the world three Miss Worlds and a Nobel Laureate in literature. Plus Björk and Sigur Rós. And no army. And that’s not bad for a country where it’s dark half the year and that would lose a fight with Canberra.

  Iceland also managed to amass a per capita income that made it the richest country on the planet. It did this by … well, actually, no one’s quite sure how they did it, but the Iceland bubble makes the Dutch tulip mania seem reasonable and subprime mortgages positively cautious. And then it all went puffin-shaped. The island went from being one of the richest countries to falling back into the Dark Ages, without an intervening period of Enlightenment. The fall wasn’t precipitous, it defied quantum physics.

  All of which is why I went back. What does a country look like, what does a country feel like, when it can’t afford a banana? No, really, they can’t afford a banana. Exotic fruit are off the menu. And seeing as there are no trees here and the mean winter temperature is below zero, anything that doesn’t grow on a seal is an exotic fruit.

  I don’t know what I expected, which is rather what the Icelanders feel; they don’t know what to expect, either. But they do expect that it will be cold and wet and tough, which is what life is supposed to be like if you’re an Icelander. This brief interlude where, for a season, the country became an Ireland of the north, is deeply un-Nordic. They are facing a future without kiwifruit, without Mexican beer, without the updates for Guitar Hero and the box set of 30 Rock. They’re facing it with a phlegmatic thirst. They are drinking and reciting poetry and singing, in dirge-like choirs, the old songs, and riding their little stoical horses. And quite looking forward to it all.