Here's a sentence I
read last night which struck me as having the ring of truth:-Political
accountability in matters of corruption in Spain is extremely rare.
Drawing blood from a stone is an easier task.
To Liverpool again this
morning and to a Catalan tapas bar for lunch with my sister and
brother-in-law. I was drawn to the
place by the menu item 'Catalan Scouse', which rather intrigued me.
The place - with its attached deli - was pleasant and our Barcelona
waitress, Monica, was charming, but the Catalan Scouse was a bit of a
disappointment. For it was essentially 'blind'(meatless) Scouse with
a bit of spicey chorizo added. 'Fusion' at its simplest, I suppose.
An even more intriguing item - not tried - was Mackerel Semen with
Eggs on Toast. I thought 'Semen' might be a mistake for 'Roe' but
Monica assured me it wasn't. Catalan readers, if any, are free to
comment. Failing that, Trevor the Baldie.
Needless to say, Monica
was a university graduate who'd come to the UK, in the absence of
work back home, to improve her English, so that she could then returne and apply for
one of the better jobs. Or even any job in Spain these days. But, naturally, this might not happen as Liverpool was had its appeal for her.
Request for help: Can
anybody erstwhile pilgrim tell me how much the the Camino stage
between Salamanca and El Cubo de la Tierra del Vino involves walking
alongside the N-630? If it's most of it, is it boring and noisy? I'm
taking a group of friends along the Vía de la Plata in May and we're
undecided about this leg.
For those who missed
this goal of the season - or possibly a lifetime - here's the fine
effort of Charlie Adams at the weekend.
Finally . . . Here's
one of my favourite commentators - A A Gill - on something I've
touched on twice in the last 3 weeks - the conversion of British pubs
into gastro-pubs. As it's behind a paywall, I can't just give you the
citation:-
I was in Dublin the
day the banks collapsed and the Irish were looking at a long walk
uphill with the fiscal wind in their faces. I got a taxi back to the
airport and a loquacious northside driver kept up a soft drizzle of
complaint. And then, with a ragged philanthropy, exclaimed it was the
publicans he felt sorry for, sitting all alone in their bars while
the penniless feckers went home, drowning the moaning of their women
with supermarket lager. (Cheaper but more efficacious than holy
water.) It is the cross and curse of cabbies the world over to know
all the facts and draw exactly the wrong conclusion.
Pubs are one of the
handful of businesses that were stuffed by prosperity. The better off
we got, the less we needed or wanted pubs. In 1917, the price of a
pint was about 7d, and a labourer’s wage approximately £1/10s/6d
for a 54-hour week. It would have taken more than an hour to earn
your pint. Today, on a minimum wage for a 40-hour week, a pint takes
less than half an hour to earn.
The first half of the
20th century was the golden age of pubs. They were the working man’s
front room, his gentlemen’s club, citizens’ advice, labour
exchange and mate reserve. Pubs looked like a collective drawing room
fit for the manufacturers of empire. Flickering cut glass, glistening
brass, gilt, plush and mahogany: the triumph of success, and plenty
of coal in the grate. The pub had its own class system, with snugs,
saloons, ladies’ bars and lock-ins. It was a fulcrum of our leisure
and culture, the mine of jokes, the set for novels, plays and films.
There were pubs for
everyone: for dockers and for miners, for closet gays, for actors and
aristos and journalists, and pubs just for hopeless, garrulous,
spoofing drunks like me.
The pub never judged or
criticised; pubs were us. Now they’re slipping away, they’re not
the heart of the nation any more. Everything about affluence empties
them: central heating, television, computers, phones, cheap sofas,
ready meals, smoking bans, diet fads, slabs of loss-leader beer and
drugs.
The pubs served, loved
and nurtured a nation that grew up to never leave home. Breweries
discovered they were running failing hostelry businesses, but booming
property ones. So, over the past three decades, hundreds of boozers
have been gussied up into gastropubs, the hybrid that was supposed to
remake their fortunes and improve the nature of our tippling,
introducing napkins, blackboards and the Sunday papers to encourage
us to sip like Frenchmen.
In much of the country,
the gastropub is the only alternative to generic fast food or
international chains. They are the new Labour, third way, third
place, and most of them are third rate. Pubs make unsatisfactory
restaurants: their kitchens are never big enough, the division of
space is awkward, diners and drinkers want very different things in
terms of atmosphere and licence. The apartheid of tables is fraught
with complaint and they never have enough ventilation; the carpets
and curtains stink of frying oil and customers don’t want to spend
restaurant money in a boozer, so we are offered the nastiness of the
five-quid Sunday lunch with all the trite trimmings. That’s not to
say there haven’t been some exceptional successes, but they are
rare and usually turn out to be restaurants with a bit of a bar; and
they don’t do well in London, where they have to compete with lots
of drinking establishments and lots of restaurants.
The Cross Keys was an
old Chelsea pub in the prettiest corner of the royal borough. It was
closed a couple of years back by a developer who wanted to turn it
into a £10m house. But the council refused and now another property
company has permission to make a couple of flats and has leased the
ground floor to a gobble-and-gargle company with form. The old pub
served pints to the Rolling Stones, Turner, Whistler, Sargent, Dylan
Thomas, Bob Marley and Agatha Christie, though not all on the same
quiz night. That may sound like heritage, but you’d be hard-pressed
to find any central London pub that hasn’t propped up a clutch of
literary, artistic, musical and celebrity enlarged livers. The
makeover is, frankly, dispiriting. The ghosts will have dashed for
the exit at yet another Williamsburg hipster joint with exposed
bricks, reclaimed wood, mismatched tables and chairs, a bit of
taxidermy and a lot of irony. This is as over as pork belly and
sticky toffee pudding. But it is light. They have liquor in the front
and hot sausage rolls at the rear.
The menu makes up for
the soulless decor: it’s as smart and appetising as I can remember
in a pub. There are excellent scotch eggs and sausage rolls; a baked
haddock and cheese omelette; a smoked-salmon and cream-cheese
sandwich with white garlic soup; ham-hock salad with fried potatoes;
pork chops; cumberland sausages and mash. Or there’s foie gras and
chicken parfait, and a roast breast of guinea fowl.
Altogether, this is a
very good example of the push-me-pull-you breed. A better use of a
venerable old hostelry than some oligarch’s mistress’s empty
investment nest, and it suits the expensively rakish locals. This
isn’t an area that has supported fine dining, but it does like
something unpretentious that knows its business and how to be
discreet.
On this afternoon, I
didn’t miss pubs because their associations are all grim for me,
and I don’t miss drinking. And anyway, they’re all done up with
nostalgia and despair now. The Cross Keys did feel like the way we
are today; well, the way the comfortably upholstered and generously
remunerated are, who designed, built and invested in all the things
that made pubs obsolete in the first place.
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