Loose Living (8 page)

The canned spaghetti was the real spaghetti, as canned asparagus was the real asparagus and fresh asparagus,
not tasted by me until my twenties, seemed to be some other thing barely related to what I called asparagus. The canned asparagus was sweeter, deliciously without ‘vegetable' texture or stringiness, and much more zesty than fresh asparagus.

The aberrance of it is that I still love canned spaghetti, canned asparagus and canned sweet corn (and most canned fruit as opposed to fresh fruit), but for many adult years I have had to pretend to a sophisticated disdain for all factory-made and canned foods so as to keep my world wide reputation for sophistication.

Hence, I said to the Duc, no one can cancan a can as I can cancan a can.

I have to modestly report that the Duc thoroughly enjoyed my gag (for those who have no French, a
cancan
is not only a dance but also means malicious gossip, hence the appreciative chuckles from the Duc which continued to erupt long after I had finished my anecdote, and which I attribute to the intricacy of my gag more than the malfunctioning of his gastric system following his stroke).

I am prepared to argue now that canned food may not be so inferior and that to be able to enjoy both—the fresh and the canned—may be a gastronomic versatility for which I should be grateful.

The Duc then managed to blurt out a question which I had seen building up inside his cheeks like gas filling a balloon.

‘What,' he asked, ‘is “canned” food?'

However, I caught his wink at the butler (or what I took to be a wink) as he said this. We both knew that Napoleon's army, during the Egyptian campaign, was the first army to use canned food.

B
ECAUSE THE
Duc has been showing me so much forgiveness and at the same time giving me so much guidance on Refinement in Life, I thought it only fair that I give something to him in return.

I decided that he should learn of the cuisines of other cultures and not be so parochially French and that, having been a cultural delegate to China, I could, in that cuisine, be his guide.

He was at first disbelieving and then pleasantly surprised to learn that other cultures ate differently to the French.

When I say the Duc was pleasantly surprised, I think that I should describe this further. Since his stroke I have had to learn to understand his gestures and signals. Sometimes, I feel like Oliver Sacks.

His way of expressing pleasant surprise is something like a Fred Astaire dance from a forties movie, only that it is a Fred Astaire suffering from middle ear disorientation and there is no Ginger Rogers, unless I am Ginger Rogers (but that is
definitely another story
).

I thought I would begin the Duc's culinary education with yum cha at a Chinese restaurant and I hoped also that the Chinese herbs would assist his recovery from the stroke, although only as cuisine, not as
medicine. I do not share the fashionable faith in Chinese medicine.

I thought it might work for the Duc. He has nothing to lose.

We travelled to the Chinese lunch by taxi because the chauffeur had been given the afternoon off to attend his son's wedding.

I remarked to the Duc, who had never been in a taxi, that in Australia it was customary for a lone passenger, even the Prime Minister, to sit in the front with the driver, and that any passenger who sat in the back was considered to be snobbish.

The Duc, while ever-interested in Australian mores, was bemused by the meaning of snobbish and after I explained it to him I realised that what we call ‘snobbish' was what he called ‘his family character'.

I said that in Australia it was obligatory to listen to the taxi driver's comments on world affairs and their opinions of the other drivers on the road, their views on traffic engineering, and that one should never disagree with a taxi driver because they were not accustomed to being corrected and it could make for a tedious trip.

Because everyone is forced to sit beside the taxi driver and talk to them, they assume that there truly is an egalitarian ethos. This false world of taxi drivers is the reverse of that of royalty, who think that all streets everywhere are always bedecked with flags.

‘There you go using that word “egalitarian” again,' the Duc said. ‘And using the word “royalty” rather contemptuously.'

I apologised but we did the rest of the journey in sullen silence while the Duc fumed over the French Revolution and the rise of
égalité
and the sad fate of his ancestors.

When I say fumed, I mean that fumes literally came from his nose and ears. I suspect that they were Cognac fumes.

At yum cha he was bemused that there seemed to be no order to the way the dishes arrived at the table—no beginning and no end to the offerings.

I said that unless you were having morning tea, the original form of yum cha (that is, taking tea and cakes), you did not begin with the cakes (in the west the yum cha has become early lunch).

However, I reminded him of the Chinese philosophy that the body is a microcosm of the universe and that in eating one sought to balance those foods which represented cold, warm, hot, windy, dry and wet (this does not relate to the temperature of the food but to its alleged cosmic properties).

I did not get very deeply into the opposing forces of Yin and Yang and how some of us have too much of one or the other.

I told him that the chicken feet which always feature at yum cha were an erotic symbol—that when eating the chicken's feet you were sucking the toes of the Empress.

The Duc, perhaps recalling some event from his younger days, went straight for the chicken's feet.

I myself have another problem with yum cha in that, as with most things in life, I cannot say no. When I am
eating yum cha, an auxiliary table has to be brought to hold the dishes as they pile up.

I told the Duc that part of my inability to say no was that I felt that I should take one dish from every one of the Yum Cha Maids because if they returned to the kitchen with leftover food they were beaten by the Kitchen God for not being sufficiently persuasive and hospitable.

He displayed some excitation about this revelation. When I say excitation I mean excitation of the most demonstrative male kind. I threw some chilled Moselle into his lap and the agitation passed, temporarily.

Much to my shame the Duc then began refusing dishes from the prettiest of the Yum Cha Maids, saying in rather coarse French, ‘Another lash to her beautiful round buttocks.'

I said to him that I had always believed that it was the French Marquis who enjoyed cruelty and that ducs were by tradition more kind.

He said that ducs also enjoyed cruelty and suggested we visit the kitchen to witness this strange Chinese practice of the Yum Cha Maids being beaten by the Kitchen God.

I said maybe we should leave this until after lunch.

Grumpily, he acquiesced.

I continued to explain Australia's culinary history to the Duc and how I had single-handedly transformed it.

This time I told him how I found out about chives and, while this was momentous, it was also another hugely mistaken direction on my part.

As a child football prodigy, I was selected from 300,000 other lock forwards to go to Sydney to try out for the World Schoolboy Rugby League football team, probably the six stone seven pound team.

I was billeted with a Lebanese family in the Eastern Suburbs. It was a gastronomic revelation. There is a story called ‘Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn' by Anatole Broyard which tells how, after having a meal at an Automat on Grand Central Station, a young man realised how badly his mother cooked.

When I tasted chives at this Lebanese home where I was billeted, I realised that our family meals lacked something.

The Lebanese family had chives sprinkled on their salad and they had ‘salad dressing', not mayonnaise.

It was a revelation about the gastronomic boundaries of my family life.

I realised that there was more and maybe infinitely more to eating and that either my family did not know about eating or did not care.

At home for a ‘salad' we had a sliced tomato, a lettuce leaf and Kraft cheddar cheese (more of this later), some times, on special occasions, saved by factory-made mayonnaise. We also had pepper and salt. That was it.

As a football prodigy and child poet, I tried to enhance the salad in my mind's eye by seeing the lettuce as the leaf of the forest, the slab of yellow cheese as a sand-filled desert of Arabia, and the tomato as the bleeding heart of a world in pain. The mayonnaise was a healing balm which one day I would bring to the world in pain.

But I made an error of judgement from the experience with the Lebanese family. I thought that the trick of the vibrant salad was solely in the chives which the family had identified to me. I missed observing the salad dressing of oil and vinegar and garlic and wasn't to learn about that until much later in life. I focused on the chives as the Spice of Life.

When I returned home I announced to my family that things were to be upgraded (I was never an easy child).

I planted chives—my first experience of gardening (although later I was to become the youngest prizewinning gardener in Australia)—and when the chives grew to maturity I suggested to the family that they begin using chives on their salads.

They fell about laughing.

The Duc interrupted at this point to ask about ‘falling about laughing' and why I chose to use this particular expression.

With some embarrassment I explained that I had used the expression unthinkingly and apologised. The Duc does tend to literally ‘fall about laughing' like a horse on a slippery ballroom floor. However, sometimes the Duc's sensitivity is a little tiresome.

I demonstrated how my brothers ‘fell about laughing' using the style of that unpalatable American comedian Jerry Lewis. The Duc said that I certainly came from a strange world.

To continue. No one in my family joined me in the chives. When salads were served I would leave the table,
take a pair of scissors, cut some chives and, returning to the table, I would ceremoniously sprinkle them on my salad.

Every time I did this I was mocked and chivvied by my Evil Older Brothers.

I explained to the Duc that there was a rather clever pun in the use of the word ‘chivvied'.

However, one day there were no chives left in the garden. Perhaps they were finished, the season may have been over.

I do remember that I kept up the pretence of the chives by cutting a little grass and sprinkling it on the salad and defiantly continued with this, making noises of appreciation, until my brothers grew tired of mocking and chivvying me.

When they grew tired of mocking me, I gave up eating grass. I felt I had done my bit for Good Living and had begun a gastronomic journey which was to take me some distance from my family and which, strangely, seemed related to other deviations which presented themselves to me during the course of a rich and busy life.

Strangely, chives played no part whatsoever in my gastronomic journey after that attempt at family betterment.

The only other time chives came back into my life was once when I made chicken sandwiches for a midnight supper, and I melted the butter and mixed in chopped chives before buttering the bread, which is, of course, the only way to make chicken sandwiches.

At the conclusion of my reminiscence about chives the Duc managed to ask again, in his twisted, salivated way, about the whipping of the Yum Cha Maids. Obviously, he had not been paying full attention to my chives story.

Reluctantly I took him to the kitchen to meet the Kitchen God.

He was, after all, an old man from a decadent aristocratic tradition who had suffered a grievous loss of health through my bad conduct and I owed it to him to provide him with whatever small pleasures would ease his condition.

I
AM
sick to death of partridge, quail, wild boar,
foie gras
, oysters and
biche.

Life can be a
biche.

Around here they eat nothing else at this time of the year. Sometimes I secretly eat cornflakes in my wing of the
château
(cornflakes are something the French and Italians do not understand).

Only one in five Italians eat breakfast. Most have a coffee and a shot of grappa. Which I, too, find suffices.

Kellogg's are running a campaign at present to get the Italians to eat breakfast.

By the way, Kellogg's have overcome the threat of unbranded rivals last year to lift their fourth-quarter earnings by seventeen per cent. Given the unprecedented competitive activity and the recessionary conditions it is not a bad effort. Well done, Kellogg's.

Looking at Italy, maybe there is a connection between corruption in high places and breakfast customs.

On the other hand, looking at the US, maybe there is a connection between eating cornflakes and becoming a flaky culture (that's a rather cheap shot).

Perhaps a corny culture (that is an irresistible shot).

Controlling the flakes of a croissant is also a table art.

Kellogg's invented the so-called popular wisdom about breakfast being the most important meal of the day.

For me
all
meals are the important meal of the day.

I mentioned to the Duc that in Australia I had learned to read from the cornflakes' packet.

I was trying to win from him some sympathetic letup from his incessant finishing school approach.

The Duc was interested. He said that he knew of no French person who'd learned to read from a croissant. The Duc likes to think that his sense of humour is very Gallic. I encourage every nationality to think it has a distinctive sense of humour. So, dutifully, I laughed.

The Duc's facial tic has become calmer as good reports are received about the repair work on the old
château
, but when I say facial tic, I mean the tick, the tock and the peal of the chime. Believe me, the pulsation of the Duc's tic is stronger than the town hall clock.

When the Duc ticks the wine glasses rattle.

I have done what I can to get into his favour, never missing a chance to mention his beheaded ancestors, showing exaggerated interest in his screwy ideas and displaying fawning gratitude for his efforts to improve me.

Sometimes all this French sophistication gets me down. I mean, the art of life is all very fine but one has also to
live
, as it were, to live with the bumbling and less than elegant.

I have those zen-less days.

I also have a taste for what the French call
la vie de la boue.
The seaminess of life as well as the seemliness of life.

‘
I know I am one of nature's little kings
,

Yet to the least and vilest things am in thrall
.' Etc.

As a matter of interest, around Normandy we have road signs warning us of the
boue.

‘
(!) Boue
,' the signs say, and I always say out aloud, ‘And boo to you too,' which I notice has begun to grate.

Following my mention of having learned to read from a Kellogg's cornflakes packet, the Duc questioned me closely about Australian reading conduct.

I had taken down one of his precious first editions and he saw that I pulled the book out by the spine. He first hit me across the face with his leather glove and then hit the roof, literally, because he has uncertain control of his muscle spasms and anything approaching rage or fury can actually cause him to ‘hit the roof'.

He landed back down on his three-wheeled bath-chair, bouncing a little, but unharmed, thankfully.

He told me never to pull a book from a bookcase by its spine. He ordered me to cut my fingernails because nails could damage a fine binding. I sulked about this. Because of the Decadence of the life at the
château
, I had been growing my nails and I was becoming rather proud of them.

He asked me in his supercilious French way whether I had not been taught the Etiquette of the Book?

It occurred to me that I had been taught some of the rules and practices of books but as usual my education
was deficient, especially when it came to precious old editions.

I snivelled, telling him that I knew about Perseverance and the Book. Sniff. That once reading of a book had begun, you should give the author a full hearing by reading it right to the end (I read on for fifty pages after I feel like giving up).

I told him that I had been taught about the Purity of the Page—never to leave a mark on a page of a book. There were those dirty rats who pencilled notes in the margins which proper readers erased.

I said that a Proper Reader avoided leaving wine and coffee rings on the page unless they were Great People and then centuries later people exclaimed with awe over a wine glass ring saying, ‘Imagine that, Shakespeare actually put his wine glass on this page.'

I knew that I should not turn down corners as a way of Marking Your Place, although I seemed to recall being told that turning a half page did not do as much harm but the Proper Reader used finely worked leather or brass page markers.

He snorted at my mention of half-page turning down, and when I say snorted, I mean snorted—discharging the full contents of his nostrils across the room in my direction like a double-barrelled canon, although I politely pretended not to notice.

Of turning the Page, I said that I knew that as one read a book, one should turn the page by the top right-hand corner of the page.

I told him that I was taught about books as Compan
ions of Self-Betterment. This meant always looking in the dictionary for any word that I did not know.

Sometimes I can't be bothered.

Sometimes I don't give a stuff about the meaning of a word.

I was taught to Always Carry a Book with me at all times so as not to waste a reading opportunity, and to make notes of what I was reading.

I did not always make notes of what I was reading. Sometimes I felt that the magic momentum of the book was too strong for me to take notes.

I was taught that to destroy a book was a kind of murder because a book was the Life Blood of a Master Spirit.

That it was a sacred act to always return a Borrowed Book and that only dirty rats stole books from a library.

Proper readers did not break the spine by bending the book covers too far back or by leaving a book open face down on a table.

The so-called dust cover is a problem. If you are a collector of first editions you carefully remove the dust cover and preserve it in mint condition to be replaced on the book after you have finished reading it. Yet it was, I presume, designed to protect the binding while reading.

Books have to be designed so that they lie open on a table when you are reading without closing back on them selves and without having to put a fork on the book or a lead page-weight.

We were taught that you Cannot Judge a Book by its Cover. However, we find that we can learn much from the cover design, which the publisher and, to a degree, the author has chosen.

I said that Stephen Murray-Smith had kept a list of every book he'd read since childhood. I wished I had. It might make me feel better on days when I felt under-read and my memory seemed empty.

I said I was taught the Hierarchy of Literature, that there were serious books, light reading and trash, although for a time when we were of the Left and were ideologues of popular culture, we had to pretend this was simply an elitist ‘social construct'.

It was a relief to return to the position that yes, there were serious books, light reading and trash.

As a child I did not have a category called ‘holiday reading' and I was impatient of ‘teenage' books.

I was always trying to ‘break into' adult books.

I was shown how to enjoy the smell and feel of a book and to examine the physicality of a book, its paper, its typeface, its design by Norma Crinion. She showed me that books, like clothes, were voluptuous.

I was taught to see that an open pair of pages was a complete design in itself, as well as the single page.

Erasmus decreed that the margin should be twice as wide at the top of the page as on the inside, twice as wide at the outside of the page as at the top, twice as wide as the side of the page at the bottom. But maybe Erasmus was being too pernickety.

I was also told that too much reading was not healthy and I should ‘go out to play'. (And go out to play in life I have!)

Throughout my life I have yearned to belong to a wonderful reading circle. At this point in my retailing of my Rules of Reading, I noticed that the Duc had dozed off.

When I say dozed off, I understate it. His dozing off has more of the nature of a coma from which it is some times difficult to wake him.

We often have to use buckets of ice water and an electric thump stimulator to bring him around.

However, for now I left him in his coma, with his snores resounding from the old stone walls of the
château
, echoing along the stone corridors, out into the fields and into the stables, making the horses restless.

One of the ways I have of waking the Duc is to smear Tabasco sauce on his lolling tongue.

Still, there is a risk. A sudden retraction of the tongue and a snap of those aristocratic jaws and wham, there goes the end of your index finger.

Ask the chamber maid who I first induced to smear Tabasco sauce on the Duc's tongue.

No more rude insolent finger gestures from her. Saucy
salope.
She mopes about with her bandaged hand giving me sullen sideways looks.

Which reminds me of the time in 1974 when I first tasted this remarkable Louisiana hot chilli sauce of which there is only one brand, Tabasco.

It was in the Cattleman's Club bar in San Antonio, Texas, with my dear, dear friend and brilliant film producer, Sandra Levy (my own club at the time had reciprocal arrangements with the Cattleman's).

Tabasco sauce has been made from vinegar and red peppers by the McIlhenny family for 116 years.

It was there in the Cattleman's Club that I drank my first genuine Bloody Mary, made, of course, with Tabasco sauce. After the first taste, I exclaimed loudly and admiringly.

In Australia at that time, the Bloody Mary was understood to be vodka and canned tomato juice dumped into a ten-ounce glass—no lemon, no Tabasco, no Worcestershire, no pepper, no salt, no horseradish, no celery stick. No kick.

But here in the Land of the Bloody Mary and the Multiple-Choice Life, I was asked how I liked it—mild, hot, very hot and so on. Did I want horseradish etc.? Lime or lemon? Salted tomato juice or unsalted, or did I want the house recipe or Mr and Mrs T Bloody Mary mix (which I hold to be very good, although perhaps too sweet)? A stick of celery came with the drink and about that you were not asked. The glass was rimmed with salt.

The barman then showed me that beguiling little bottle containing the magical potion.

As it happens, it gave rise to a strange misconception on my part.

Sometimes I worry that everything I believe rests on a strange misconception from early life. For instance,
I was nearly sixteen before I realised that the traffic did not go over the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In the bar of the Cattleman's Club Sandra and I were dressed, appropriately, as a cowboy and cowgirl.

Everyone was dressed as cowboys and girls because that is normal dress in the San Antonio Cattleman's Club.

On this night I went on to drink eight or ten Bloody Marys and to sing a few songs.

Next morning I awoke in fine fettle although still with my Mexican cowboy boots and spurs on. But that is another story.

‘What a remarkable substance is that Tabasco,' I remarked to Sandra. ‘It controls the effect of alcohol and means that you do not have hangovers. Look at me, I drank eight or ten Bloody Marys and I do not have a hangover.'

She went on ordering her breakfast and then, putting down the telephone, said, ‘Perhaps they stopped putting vodka in your drink after the second or third. Because of the strong Tabasco and your yahooing and hat waving, and riding the mechanical bull, you would never have known.'

I frowned and went to swim in the hotel pool.