Here and There Read online

  Galling the Gauls

  France’s allure may have faded for some but it will always be the model of worldly sophistication.

  Every year I go to France, to the same place in Provence. I do the same things. I go to Saint-Rémy and drink café crème, pick at a croissant, and read two-day-old English papers, trying to ignore all the other Englishmen doing the same things around me. I buy another pair of rope-soled espadrilles that will grow sticky and uncomfortable and join the other 48 pairs in the basement cupboard. I buy lavender oil, though actually the finest lavender comes from the south of England. I go to the fromager and get three sorts of chèvre and wait for an age as the assistant wraps them as if they were a present for an ancient aunt. I go to a market in my new shoes that slip and chafe and I’ll buy five sorts of olives and some figs and little packets of sausage and some pâté and a jar of confiture de fraise des bois and probably a new crew-necked, long-sleeved stripy T-shirt, unwearable unless you’re going to a fancy dress party as Picasso. I will listen to passing accordionists, resist a beret, and watch women walk small dogs.

  Oscar Wilde said that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Well, when liberal intellectual insecure Englishmen die they go to a queue for a cheese stall in a Provençal market. It is where everything we associate with la bonne vie, the déjeuner without end, exists, and I for one wilfully ignore the truth. That the cheese is made in Holland, the saucisson comes from Poland, that the shoes are from Croatia, the T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, the figs are from North Africa, as is the girl who sold them to me, and everyone else is probably Albanian or a Gypsy or an Englishman like me, pretending to be French. Everybody’s pretending to be French.

  Like other Englishmen, I manage to have selective partial vision. We only see what we need to see to maintain the fantasy of old France. But I must admit it’s getting harder. France is becoming a virtual country, like an old computer game you play on the back of your eyelids. For 200 years France and the French have been the arbiter if not of culture then of the cultured life. It was always a bit of a fraud, a self-delusion, but it was based on some very solid, civilised foundations. Post-war France was the world centre for almost everything that made you feel sedately superior. Films, novels, art, fashion, design. And the food.

  Now, one after the other, like insouciant dominoes, they’ve fallen. French films have withered into dire, horrible self-reverential bores or desperate, unfunny comedies. (A sense of humour was never a terribly French thing.) French books: do they still write French books about anything other than politics and gossip? French fashion doesn’t exist. The French names are all run by Italian and English and German designers. Art, it must be admitted, was mostly done by foreigners living in Paris or the south of France, but that was fine because they wanted to live in Paris or the south of France, and the art seemed to come from the place that offered them licence and light, a certain je ne sais quoi. French art today has flatlined. French design is a pretentious joke. And worst of all, saddest, is French food.

  In many ways it has remained the same, only in far fewer places. As in England, where there is a congenital disease which is killing off pubs, so across the channel it’s the bistros which are withering. The prix-fixe menu of a few francs for a mound of rillettes and a steak frites or a plate of tripe, a small tranche of fish in beurre blanc, followed by some brie or poached prunes or tarte fine, all going, turned into pizza or kebabs. French food has remained, but everyone else has changed. Attitudes and diets have changed, and the chefs’ attempts to mutate bourgeois cuisine, to lighten it and slim it, have made it ridiculous. The ingredients that French food comes from, that astonishing obsession with the finest things that could be grown or plucked or bottled, the most labour-intensive manufacture for the smallest possible production by a peasant society, are all dead. The infinitely fine filigree of artisanal markets is threadbare and cynically manipulated and bought up by brands hiding behind folksy labels.

  What has France left in its cultural waistcoat pockets? Well, French philosophy is still as screamingly risible and portentous and irrelevant as it always was. And French pop songs remain the most awesomely naff and brilliantly crap musical moments ever conceived, every one of them some mayonnaise-voiced doggerel attempt to squeeze one more syllable into a line than it can comfortably or rhythmically accept. The French still think pop songs are essentially poems stuffed into tunes, and they still imagine that the words matter. And stoically and absurdly, like a man who always carries a condom and a red rose because he knows that one day the right girl is going to fall off her bicycle at his feet, the French wait for the Charles Trénet, Edith Piaf-zeitgeist thing to come around and bathe them again in rightness. In the meantime there is French rap to be avoided.

  Being from the gauche side of the channel, I should of course spend a moment in sniggering glee at the precipitous decline in French culture. What is left is now a rootless and meritless French arrogance, which simply makes them funnier and more pathetic, like paunchy men standing in Europe’s drawing room, dressed only in their Speedos. I should giggle, drain my cup of schadenfreude, but really I can’t.

  France was always our idea of heaven. Paris was the city I yearned to be transported to as an art student. My lust still remains caught on the sulky, petite, smokewreathed women of the New Wave. I will ever be drawn to French art and French style. I hope to go out in a surfeit of foie gras and cassoulet. It’s my age. France has always been the model of sophistication for men like me, and I’m too old to find some new fantasy.

  But not my children. They will only read Camus if they have to sit him for some exam. They want to eat burgers and curry. They think that Angelina Jolie is the sexiest thing on celluloid. Fashion is an international scrum of strange, exotic branding. Art is Brit and Jap. Their cultural world doesn’t even have a hole in it where France used to be. France has the same cultural standing for the young as Finland does. (Possibly less than Finland; Finland has Nokia.)

  France is now a museum for the old. It is a great open-plan retirement home for the Englishmen who can’t wear shorts and are still meaning to read Proust under a peach tree. The rather glorious truth about France’s extinct culture is that it died out for good Darwinian principles. It had reached a point of almost perfect equilibrium, and a change in the balance of suavity, manners and impetuosity, intellect and flirtation would’ve been to diminish the whole, so they waited for the world to regret its bad taste and come back to le vie Française. But they didn’t, of course. Except us portly Englishmen, and a handful of aesthetically fine-tuned American gays, which is rather galling for the French. But they’re right. Better to die an unmodified, unrepentant, ridiculous Frenchman than to live on as some Eurotrash ersatz mongrel.

  Song sung blue

  We’ve got an inane ditty for birthdays, so why not bless other noteworthy occasions with a similarly discordant sentiment?

  I walked across a beach, and in 30 seconds, I knew it was the worst beach in Minorca. The sea was fine, the sand was okay, the view was lovely, it was clean and sheltered. I got off it as soon as I could. People occasionally ask, where are the best beaches in the world? And I always reply, it depends on who you’re with. But I can tell you how to tell the worst beaches in the world: they’re the ones with the bare-naked people on them. Not bare naked because they don’t own clothes, though if you do find yourself on a beach with committed lifetime 24-hour naked chaps, it’s probably in the Nicobar Islands and they’re about to kill you with barbed spears. No, I mean people who live and work all wrapped up and who come to the beach specifically to get utterly and butterly naked. In short, Germans. Proto-spiritual Germans.

  There is a seaside global truth that says the worst bodies wear the smallest trunks, and the very worst wear none at all. It’s the aesthetic horror of people who think that being nude will show the rest of the world what beautiful people they are on the inside. Their nakedness is a billboard not for nubility or sensuality, but for rigorous ethical housekeeping and mor
al mountaineering. And if that were all, we could just laugh at them. But the fact is that naturist beaches are the most bad-tempered radiantly sociophobic stretches on the planet. You know the dream where you find yourself naked in a public place and you wake up in a sweat and wonder what it would feel like if it happened for real? Well, all you have to do is walk down a nudist beach wearing clothes and feel the glares of scorn and the ugly muttering anger of naked intolerance. Nudist beaches are the only places I’m tempted to moon people.

  I’m also often asked for insiders’ tips on being able to tell a good restaurant from the other sort. My advice is to enter, ask for a menu, order some food, and when it arrives, eat it. Generally the inquirers are not satisfied with this. We could have thought of that, they say, implying that if that was all there is to being a restaurant critic, then I’m taking my pay cheque at best under false pretences and at worst under pretend pretences. What they want is a tip, a secret inside sign. Okay. Well, don’t eat in a restaurant that has ankle-deep pools of vomit outside or a chef who’s picking his nose or is being picketed by slaughterhouse workers.

  Granted these are unlikely-to-rare sightings, but here are two things that never, ever happen in good restaurants. Never eat anywhere that sets fire to things on purpose in front of you. Not pancakes, not Italian digestive. And never return to an establishment where the waiters sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Nothing is so indicative of desperate sycophancy than the barbershop quartet of service staff warbling over a terminally horrified woman just coming to terms with being 50, who now knows she’s got to eat a vile ice-cream cake with blue candle wax on it and then walk through a room full of people all thinking, thank God I’m a Sagittarius, remind me not to come here in December.

  I heard somewhere that ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is the most pirated artist work in history. We’ve all stolen it. It belongs to the estate of some American woman. We should be paying royalties. What I want to know, though, is what on earth made her write it in the first place? What possesses someone to sit down at a piano and go, I know: what we really, really need is a song to sing at people on their birthdays. Had she always felt there was a song-shaped hole in the anniversaries of her birth every year? Whoever said: this would have been just a perfect day – if only there was a song you could all sing at me, preferably all starting at different times and in different keys and then halting at the personalised bit, like horses preparing to refuse a fence, while some of you call me by my given name, some of you use a pet name, a couple of you call me mummy, and those three at the back just mumble uh-uh because you’ve come as someone else’s date and don’t know who I am at all. Why isn’t there a song for that?

  So, Mrs Whoever-it-was sat down and said, what sort of song should this anniversary song be? Perhaps lyrical and romantic. Or maybe a dance, samba or waltz. It could be histrionic and hopeful. The words could be full of poetry and fondness. It might be amusing. Perhaps the whole thing would be best as a sort of Tyrolean drinking song? No, she thought. No, let’s make it a blessed nursery rhyme, with words so crapulously bland and functional that even five-year-olds who’ve only heard it three times before make up pithier versions. Yes, that’s what birthdays need – a nursery rhyme that will follow you around during your hopeless, gauche teens, your mate-hungry 20s, your sophisticated middle-age, your wise old-age and sage-like dotage, every year treating you like a stupid toddler.

  After the invention of a birthday song, the most inexplicable thing is that anyone sang it twice. Not anyone, but everyone. How did we all know? Were there hymn sheets? Did they have a practice run-through? Were they all humming the tune in the kitchen before coming out with the cake? Now I think about it, I can’t ever remember a time before I knew the tune for ‘Happy Birthday’. Maybe it’s hard-wired into our cerebellums. Perhaps we learn it, like whale song, through the amniotic murk, along with the theme for Neighbours.

  I resent ‘Happy Birthday’. I mind its cheery imbecility. I mind its predictable repetitive ersatz jollity. I object to the implicit invitation to strangers to lean over and sing at me as if I’m remedial, and to remind me that my mortal coil is unravelling. Mostly I hate it for not doing what it says on the tin. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, has never, in all the countless times it’s been sung, brought an extra watt of happiness to anyone.

  And anyway, if you’re going to mark small milestones of a life’s course with song, why stop at birthdays? We already mark Christmas and national events, sport and death and marriage with specific songs. Why not a coming-out-to-your-parents song? Why don’t we have a song and a cake for sleeping with a new partner for the first time? The waiters could come out with cake and a candle, and sing, Happy rumpy to you, happy pumpy to you, get your knickers off, easy Sheila, rumpy-pumpy for you. That would give you a warm glow on a first date. And what about a song for exam results, or for getting fired, or moving house? So raise your glasses, and all together, Happy …

  Catwalk cool

  In Svalbard, the most northerly inhabited place on earth, function takes priority over fashion.

  Short is the new sweet, bum the new breast, tea the new lunch, poor the new rich, vintage is the new new. It seems that contrarianism is the new conformity. The ‘new black’ is a catchphrase that espouses and exposes the relentless search for innovation and the circular sameness of fashion.

  It has always been attributed to Diana Vreeland, the ridiculous and venerable editor of Vogue, who actually once said pink was India’s navy blue, which is funny, observant and anthropologically worth a student’s dissertation. It was some other fashionista, I think Gianfranco Ferré, who actually said grey was the new black, which is gnomically dim, but then the ’80s were the gnomically dim decade and the new black encapsulated the common garden-gnomishness of it all. By the turn of the 21st century, calling anything the new black had exhausted its frail profundity and worn out its nickel-plated irony. And then along came Obama and suddenly black was the new black and it had jumped from fashion and style to politics and civil rights.

  This wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I wanted to write about fashion and the cold because (I may have mentioned this before) I strongly believe that cold is the new hot and fashion is a vanity of temperate climates. You can draw the Tropics of Fashion on a map. The northern line starts about five miles above London and the southern just off the tip of Sicily. If you continue those two orbits latitudinally around the world, between the two points you’ve pretty much encapsulated the Tropics of Fashion. Of course, there are clothes and choices and fashionable people either side of that but this is where fashion gets indented and arbitrated. This is where the new blacks are posited. This is the zone where the weather allows you the greatest variation in clothes and you can dress with an airy disregard for the sky. Go further south or north and the climate becomes your stylist. There are stylish people above and below the meridian but they tend to wear things that have been made not by designers but by experience and necessity.

  When I found out I was going to go to Svalbard, a huddle of islands overseen by Norway that are the most northerly inhabited place on earth, I knew I’d need some advice on what to wear and I wasn’t going to get it in the fashion department, from some editor who’d tell me that alpaca was the new cashmere and Dolce were doing some really butch biker boots that look warm.

  Svalbard is 78 degrees north; the pole is 90 degrees. After Svalbard, there are only a few hunters, some climatologists, and adventurous nutters pulling sledges. It’s cold. Really, really murderously cold. It was too cold for the Eskimos to ever bother living here. It’s a place that is made up only and solely of weather. Big, white, mad, bad, bullying weather. But the Norwegians have a saying; they say that white is the new black. They also say there’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.

  So I asked a Norwegian what I needed and he gave me a list that was longer than the one for my boarding school uniform. There was not a single thing on it that I already owned. All the stuff I thought m
ight transfer from Scottish autumn walking holidays was damned as being suicidal.

  It wasn’t just the amount of kit; it was the size and the volume. It started to arrive in my office and colonised a corner and then spread across the room like a glacier of goose-down, merino-wool waffle, wickable, breathable, impenetrable waterproof gear. I regarded it with an unbeliever’s scepticism. Nothing here was constructed remotely by aesthetics. Not a single stitch or button was added to make the wearer look svelte, or handsome, or taller or sexier or better proportioned. I come from a place that would rather be wet and chilblained than ugly but chilblains aren’t the price for getting stuff wrong up in Svalbard. Still disbelieving, I dragged a vast, waterproof North Face bag big enough to smuggle a gravid sow in up to the roof of the world. I stepped off the plane at Longyearbyen in my London tweed and the climate grabbed me by the lapels like a furious drunk. The scale of the weather here bore no relation to anything I’d waded through before.

  My local guide said that if I wore gloves with fingers, I’d lose the fingers. You wear mittens. You wear boots with huge detachable inner boots of insulation that look like they’ve fallen off the space shuttle. If your feet get cold, you lose toes. You wear two balaclavas. The wind catches your nose or your cheek, it’ll cut them right off. I put on everything I’d brought with me, layer after layer. Everything you wear has an understudy: socks have other socks, pants have bigger pants, jerseys come in pairs, so do jackets and trousers. My gloves had mittens. This is not clothing for comfort. The Norwegians dress for life. Get it wrong and you could lose a finger or your sight or the whole mortal coil. What you have to do, in effect, is turn yourself into a self-regulating ecosystem. You become a purpose-built micro-climate. And as cold as it got, which was bloody cold, 30 degrees below with a 40-knot wind shoving down the temperature, so cold that our smart modern technology ran out of figures to measure it with, wherever I stuck my face out or took off a mitten, it burned like frozen venom, like all-over toothache.