Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (41 page)

It's all over now. There is not a human being left at the nation's switchboards, save the handful required to press the buttons which activate BT's androids. Any enquiry is answered by a computerized thing. The thing says ‘sorry, the number you want is ex-directory', or ‘sorry, the number you want is unobtainable', or ‘the cellphone subscriber you have dialled is away from his instrument at this time'. Last evening, after a thing gave me a number, I dialled it, and another thing said: ‘You have been answered by a fax-link. Please fax now, or hold for a telephone connection.' It then played most of
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
before putting me through to a third thing which said: ‘Sorry, the number has been changed to . . .'

This is a bad business. In the Next Lot, when I am limping home with the tailplane shot away and my chute in tatters, what shall I hear when I punch the plaintive button? ‘Sorry, this number has been changed to a fax-link and the subscriber is away from the instrument at this time, but if you would care to leave your name and code and number after the
Toccata
and Fugue
, we shall try to get back to you as soon as . . .'

70
Eight Legs Worse

T
he other evening, I found myself looking at what appeared to be a tiny broken bagpipe. It was leaking. It was, furthermore, leaking something black, and, furthermost, lying in what it was leaking. None of this would have mattered much had I found myself looking at it in, say, a gutter or hospital pedal-bin. I should merely have shuddered and walked on, but what I found myself looking at it in was a dish. The dish was on a table in front of me, flanked by knives, forks, and spoons; in short, all the accoutrements required if what you were going to do with a tiny broken bagpipe was not shudder and walk on, but eat it. Not that there was any if about it. I was a guest. The tiny bagpipe had been cooked by my hostess.

All the other guests had one, too, and they were uniformly thrilled by them.

‘Oh, wow,' they cried, ‘squid!'

‘
Stuffed
squid,' they elaborated, ‘oh, wow!'

‘In its own ink!'

‘Oh, wow!'

I looked at mine. I gave it a little prod with my fork. Ink ran out of it. Though not a household name where marine biologists foregather, I know why the squid has ink in it. It is so that it can squirt it out to put off predators attempting to eat it.

It works.

Not, mind, that it seemed to bother the others. They could not wait to tuck in. They sliced off the tentacles, they sectioned the body, they spooned up the ink, to choral yumming and oohing punctuated by brief autobiographical solos about how they'd always wanted to cook squid, it looked so
wonderfully
marbled, but they'd never dared, were they alive when you bought them, how did you kill them, how did you clean them, how did you stuff them, how did you find out how to . . .

My points exactly, as a matter of fact; though not, with me, uttered ecstatically, just brooded on internally. As, indeed, they had been with the first course,
shorba
, when everyone had shrilled, oh wow, isn't this that fantastic Yemeni marrowbone soup, yes it is, oh what's it called . . .

But I had managed to get that down all right. I had succeeded in persuading myself that wherever the marrow had been extruded, it was unlikely to have been from camel bones. I didn't think you could buy camel bones in Barnes. I would have heard. There were little fibrous lumps floating about in it, mind, that could have been goat, possibly hare (I looked up the recipe when I got home), but I managed to corral them under my reversed spoon, and I don't think anyone noticed.

Now, do not misinterpret all this gustatory whingeing: I am no culinary philistine, I have tied on the bib at many an ethnic bistro and not shrunk from having a cockshy at the arcane, even when I have not had the slightest idea what
yukyuk
or
bugatti
were and the patron lacked the bilingualism to convey. I have probably eaten wild toad in a wart sauce and held up my plate for more. I may even have been asked on the drive home whether I liked the stuffed nostril and not stopped the car to throw up. It is not a question of squeamishness over this exotic dish or that, only one of suspicion and unease when faced with the ambitions of the amateur. For while it is one thing to order tiger stew from an Ulan Bator restaurateur with three rosettes in the Mongolian Michelin, it is quite another to have it ladled out before you in Stoke Newington by an English ophthalmologist whose hobby is deciphering oriental cookbooks.

And there is a lot of that about, these days. The British – released from esculent restraint by both the Elizabeth David watershed and the immigration of countless entrepreneurs carrying woks, pasta-makers, clay ovens,
bains marie
, fondue sets, spice-mills, and all the rest, and bent under sacks of enigmatic herbs, vats of curious oils and liquors and yoghurts, and unfathomable lengths of dried animal – have become the acolytes of a hundred different cuisines, eager not merely to patronise the myriad professional establishments but, God help us, to emulate them to the best of their domestic ability.

A best which is not always good enough. While I applaud the ambition to cobble a
yasaino nimono
or a
cocida madrileno
, I have to say that admiration has too often wilted at the first forkful to leave me with anything but doubt concerning the frenzied competitiveness which currently holds the middle-class dinner-party circuit in thrall. I used to motor forth of a Saturday night thinking, good-oh, she's bound to kick off with that terrific salmon mousse of hers, hit us with a roast saddle of lamb to follow, and bring up the rear with a bread-and-butter pudding that would have Anton Mosimann putting the Sabatier to the wrist, but I do not think that any longer; these days I think, oh hell, she was talking abut Uzbek cooking when we met at that dinner party where I had to spit the bits of birds' nest into my napkin, I bet she's going to give us stuffed head of something after the larch-leaf purée, and he never stops going on about being something of a fromoisseur, ha-ha-ha, he's probably found this amazing dog's cheese which you have to wash down with emulsified arak, I shall no doubt be on my back in Bart's tomorrow with a ‘nothing by mouth' placard gummed to my drip.

It isn't just the cooking, either; it is the trust one is required to have in what went on before they got to the cooking, which is why, when that other evening someone asked how you cleaned a squid, I had a long pull of the Meursault and tried to think about something else. God knows what there is inside a squid. I remembered once watching
poulpeurs
preparing to market their catch on the Marseilles waterfront: they killed the squid by sticking their thumbs in the beaks and turning the bodies inside out, whereupon they chucked the entrails back in the sea, because there were poison sacs inside. Had my Barnes hostess known enough to do that?

I wasn't sure. So I just ate the tentacles. ‘Phew,' I said, when the plates came to be collected and an eyebrow raised itself over my little legless bagpipe, ‘That was one big squid! Do you know, I couldn't manage another bite.'

71
Do Dilly-Dally on the Way

Y
ou will groan (and who could blame you?) to recall my obsessive search,
passim
, for a Cricklewood hero. So let me lift your spirits: the search is over. After today, you will hear no more of it. Even if other local prodigies turn up as unexpectedly as this one, they shall not test your patience. I am satisfied, now, to let the matter rest, along with the blessed remains of a paragon whose ineffable
rightness
for me and Cricklewood sets her immovably above any putative contender.

Heroine, then. And those remains lie not 200 yards from my very gate, though I didn't know this until yesterday, despite having passed them umpteen times on as many short cuts through the cemetery at the top of the road. But yesterday's was a long cut: as I negotiated the wonky crosses, February suddenly did what February suddenly does, so, lacking an umbrella, I shot under a maple tree to wait for it to stop doing it. I was not alone, for that is the way it is in graveyards, but I did not immediately spot who was beside me, because the moss lay thick in the chisellings. It was only when I thought I saw what I subsequently knew I had that I ran my finger down the grooves to ream them out, and read: ‘In loving memory of Marie Lloyd, born February 12, 1870, died October 7, 1922.' Even then, and even as the fingers trembled, I couldn't be sure it was her –
that
her, I mean. And then I read the mottled verse beneath.

Tired she was, and she wouldn't show it.

Suffering she was, and hoped we didn't know it.

But He who loved her knew, and, understanding all.

Prescribed long rest, and gave the final call.

Who else could it be? You could hear her singing that first couplet, and anyone who knew anything about Marie Lloyd knew the significance of the second, because she died in the middle of her act at the Edmonton Empire, in the middle, indeed, of ‘One of the Ruins that Cromwell Knocked About a Bit'. Furthermore, she died because she had been knocked about more than a bit by her swine of a third husband, jockey Bernard Dillon, and (since, even with all that, irony remained unsatisfied) she died staggering as if drunk, but because the song required her to stagger as if drunk, the audience laughed and cheered while she terminally tottered. I do not know if He, understanding all, fixed it so that the last sound she heard was of an enraptured music hall, you would have to ask a believer, but there have been worse ways to go.

When the shower eased, I walked across to the cemetery office, and Cliff Green, who runs it, took down the book for 1922, and showed me an entry no less apt in its macabre comedy than the final call itself, in that Matilda Alice Victoria Dillon, known as Marie Lloyd, had been interred 12 ft down, for £52 2s 0d, and that her mother Matilda Wood had been interred above her (9 ft) in 1931, and her father above
her
(7 ft) in 1940, and her sister above
him
(4 ft) in 1968, and just as I had seemed to hear her sing before, now I seemed to hear her laugh, and I knew that laugh, I had heard it countless times on the wheezy old 78 I replay whenever I need a little of what I fancy to do me good, and Mr Green said there was one more thing I might like to know, which is that both gates of Fortune Green Cemetery had been opened only once, and that was on October 12, 1922.

It was the biggest funeral they had ever had, and they had been compelled to close those same gates an hour before the burial, because all three local police stations couldn't provide enough constables to control the weeping mob, and it was no good drafting in volunteers because, as you know, you can't trust a special like the old-time coppers.

Marie Lloyd, however, despite the dilly-dallying of the cortège from her house in Woodstock Road as the result of so many wreaths being flung at the cars by grieving bystanders that the half-mile journey took almost an hour, did, at last, find her way home, and I rejoice that it's just a step across the road from mine. Tonight I shall put on ‘A Little of What You Fancy', turn up the volume, and open the windows for her to hear.

And if you remind me I'm not a believer, I shall, like Marie, just wink the other eye.

72
On a Wing and a Prayer

W
e were just leaving Westley Waterless when it happened. We were just leaving Westley Waterless for the third time in an hour. But, lest a picture may have come into your mind of a man and a woman unable to get Westley Waterless out of their system, tearing themselves away from it only to hear it calling them back, it should quickly be said that what we were in fact attempting to do was get our system out of Westley Waterless.

The system had been carefully worked out, last Sunday afternoon, in a little orchard in the mid-Suffolk village of Stansfield, which is six miles from Westley Waterless as the crow flies, or 27 if the crow's wife is using the
Collins Road
Atlas
. Let us, however, not rush to blame either the crow's wife or the
Collins Road Atlas
, partly because those who have tried this will know that it does not get them anywhere, but also because the Suffolk signposts have their own ideas about where anything is, and these only occasionally correspond with
Collins
's opinion.

It may, of course, be that mid-Suffolk's mid-folk belong to the Ridleyite Tendency, and creep out at night to turn their signposts round to confuse Waffenbundesbank paratroops landing in Stansfield with a view to striking at the soft underbelly of Westley Waterless. Indeed, the hereinabove-mentioned system had not a little to do with such thoughts: Sunday was not only a hot afternoon, it was the fiftieth anniversary of another hot afternoon, and, lying on one's back in an East Anglian orchard, you did not have to be a former secretary for trade and industry to imagine the cerulean welkin embroidered, once again, with vapour trails. In such a mood, and in, moreover, an open tourer, what more apt a homeward system than via the meandering network of unchanged Suffolk back roads which thread redly across the
Collins
pages like the veins on a drunkard's conk?

So that is why we were here, nostalgically belting between the high hedgerows, when it happened. It, too, was belting between the high hedgerows, but it was belting transversely, from one hedgerow to another. A susceptible cove, your Johnny synapse, especially if its brain has been thinking about the Last Lot: in the nanosecond before the thing struck, I could have sworn it was an Me109. Then it hit the offside wing and somersaulted over our heads, and I saw, after I had braked and looked back, that it was a pheasant. I got out, slowly, with that grisly admixture of chagrin and dread one cannot but feel at the hurt of a fellow creature, but it was all right, there wasn't a mark on her, the no-claims bonus was safe. The bird, however, was stone dead.