The Digested Twenty-first Century (34 page)

As I get older, March has become my favourite month as there is a real sense of vibrant growth in the air. The stigmata on the trees are beginning to heal from their annual pruning – a necessary task that causes me far more pain than them – and I can start planting my cheerful bedding in the greenhouse. It’s also the time of year when my favourite flower of all appears: the gentle primrose, a plant as common and as humble as myself.

On reflection, April is my favourite month. It is a time of intense activity, and I feel possessed by the garden. The longer evenings,
warmed by the first genuine heat of the sun, are an ideal time to get my Jewel Garden, Coppice, Courtyard, Soft Fruit Garden, Walled Garden, Vegetable Garden and Writing Garden in order. Not to mention give the cricket pitch its first mow of the year. I guess some of you won’t be quite so busy.

There can be no more jubilant time in the calendar than May. Everything is bursting with life. Alliums, aquilegias ... I could go on through the plant alphabet. So I will. June and July are also months of intense joy, months that answer the questions that the rest of the year poses. Not least: ‘What shall I do with all the creepy-crawlies that are eating all my plants?’ I cannot condone killing aphids. They have as much right to life as any of us. Much better to join them in group therapy and work out a way we can share all the bounties nature has to offer.

I have come to appreciate August and September for their subtlety. Many gardeners think there is not much going on at these times, but a closer relationship with your lawn and a chance to smell the wild comfrey can be far more rewarding than a fortnight in your villa in Tuscany. Which is why I haven’t taken a summer holiday for years.

October, November and December used to fill me with dread. I could physically feel the closing-in of winter, a sense of impending horticultural anti-matter, but since I’ve been on
Gardeners’ World
, I’ve realised that things aren’t so bleak and that it’s never quite as dark outside as you think it is if you get the garden lighting right. And there’s lots to do, like picking the rotten apples off the ground and sweeping up leaves. Best of all, it’s a time to think ahead, to plan what I’m going to do with all the cash I’ve made from people buying this book as a Christmas present.

Digested read, digested:
Quietly flows the Don.

It’s time to take Paul Hollywood off the side-plate and put him back where he belongs: in the centre of the table. My book has two aims. First of all, I want to teach you how to groom the perfect ‘Lady Pleaser’ beard. It’s no coincidence I’m called ‘Hollywood’. Or ‘LA’ for short to my ‘Brazilian’ friends, if you get my drift. Feel free to lick the breadcrumbs from my Fifty Shades of Grey tache as I knead your shoulders ...

And then I want to teach you that Mary Berry is just so over. For far too long, I’ve had to work in her simpering, smiling shadow, looking on as she reassures some useless Middle Englander that their lemon meringue pie is acceptable. Well, let me tell you right now: there’s nothing safe or cosy about baking. Baking is dangerous. Baking is sexy. And it doesn’t come any more dangerous or sexy than when you’re baking bread with me.

OK. So we’re ready. We’ll start with something gentle. The bloomer. Take 500g of strong – and I mean strong – white flour. Add 10g of salt, 40ml of olive oil, 240ml water and then thrust your hands deeply into the mix. Manipulate till firm (you, not me) and the dough begins to ooze between my strong, manly fingers. Nice. Then leave to prove – baby, I can prove it all night – before taking a sharp knife and slashing some cuts into the top. Put in the oven for a bit and you have a loaf fit for Greggs.

Let’s move on to something a little harder. Rye, ale and oat bread. I first made this during a weekend voyage of discovery at the Totnes Bread and Fairy Cake Summer Solstice Festival. It went down well. As do I. The look of this loaf is important, so make sure you are wearing something appropriately artisan. A T-shirt made of organic cotton and some faded denim should do it. Then do much the same as you did for the bloomer, only add some rye, ale and oats.

Nothing oozes pheromones quite like a continental loaf. I know it’s hard not to associate a ciabatta with the spindly fingers of a metrosexual Italian. But, take it from me, in the right hands – mine – it is a bread that can be both powerfully manly and erotic. Just stretch out the dough to a magnificent 12 inches and then lie back on your banneton and close your eyes as I whisper ‘fougasse’ into your ear. Play your cards right and I might even add a raspberry before I focaccia. Mmm.

And that’s about it. There really doesn’t seem to be a lot more to say about baking bread, because it’s all pretty much the same. Flour, water, yeast, salt and anything else you care to throw in to spice it up. Have I mentioned spelt flour? I love the word ‘spelt’. It’s so sensuously exotic. It reminds me of intense orgasms on a lazy Sunday morning in bed.

Um ... I’ve been told we haven’t got quite enough material for a book, so I’ve been asked to pad it out a bit. So let me remind you that bread need not be the ‘missionary position’ of food. It can also be a French toast. Used creatively, bread can be used in countless other recipes. Here are a few of my favourites. The Ploughman’s: take a lump of cheddar, a pickled onion, some Branston pickle and a freshly baked sourdough loaf and you have a meal for a stud.

Then, for when you’re right out there on the sexual wire, there’s the Doner Kebab. Cut yourself a thick slice of mechanically recovered meat, wrap in a bit of pitta bread, and let the horse juices drip down your chin. Always be inventive. Dangerously inventive. Let your imagination go wild. Make a jelly. Wobbly, but not too wobbly. Place a cherry on top. And when your desire is irresistible and your senses are at near overload, cut yourself a slice of Mother’s Pride.

Digested read, digested:
Feel the knead in me.

Gee. Australia is a very, very big country and no one knows much about it. Especially Americans. Which makes it the ideal spot for another of my homey little travelogues.

So what else can I tell you by way of background? Well, it’s very, very big, there are loads of deadly creepy crawlies (yuck!!), it was colonised by convicts (imagine!!) and the present inhabitants can be fairly chippy. But let me say, right here, right now, that I love Australians.

So where shall I start my trip? A colour magazine is paying me to turn around a quick piece on the Sydney-to-Perth Express so that seems as good a place as any. The train stops at Broken Hill. Pause, while I read up the history books and repeat some amusing anecdotes. We go for a day’s driving out in the bush and when I get back I look at the map and see we’ve hardly moved out of Broken Hill.

Gee, it’s a big country. The next leg of the train ride goes smoothly. I go in the cab for a bit and then I slum it in third class for a couple of hours. Scar-ry. And this is Perth, but I can’t stick around as I’ve got another job to do in the Middle East.

Hi. I’m back. But not for long as I’ve only got a month and I’m hoping to cover the whole of the south-east corner, so we’d better get going.

Hey, look, there’s a pet food shop that sells porno out the back. That’s really neat. And, wow, the cricket on the car radio really cracks me up. ‘I wonder if he’ll chance an offside drop scone here or go for the quick legover.’ Crazy. Why can’t all these guys play exactly the same games as the rest of us? Such as American football.

Here’s Adelaide (pause for some historical anecdotes) and
there’s the fascinating museum. Unfortunately it’s closed for the day and my schedule’s too tight to hang on.

Oh, and that might have been Melbourne and, wow, I must be back in Sydney and I’m outta here.

Right, I’m back for a few days so we’re going up north. Ah, it’s the rainy season. I hadn’t thought of that. So Cairns is as far as I get. Let’s take the plane to Darwin (not very nice) and drive to Alice Springs. Now, I’ll just nip to Ayers Rock for a couple of hours as I’ve forgotten to book a hotel, then it’s over to Perth for a suntan and Bob’s your uncle. My cheque’s in the bank.

Digested read, digested:
Bill goes walkabout and sees everything and nothing.

I was so nearly an American. I was that close. In the 1950s my father went on holiday to the USA and had quite a nice time. If he had stayed, and if my mother had been stupid enough to join him, I might have been christened Steve, not Stephen. So who better than me to have a six-month holiday at the BBC’s expense?

‘Don’t worry,’ I told the producers. ‘It won’t be yet another documentary series presented by some clever clogs that tells us next to nothing we didn’t already know about the USA through a series of choreographed set pieces.’ ‘Oh yes it will,’ they said, ‘but we don’t care because you’re a national treasure.’ Mirabile dictu.

So it was with a light heart that I began my journey in Maine to travel through all 50 states in a London taxi and went in search of my first spontaneously pre-arranged encounter. Ouch! I’ve
been bitten by a lobster. What a silly arse I am! This fishing business is hard work and I’m completely won over by the uncomplaining heroism of the men who risk their lives on the sea.

I drive through the eastern states meeting the ordinary people who have shaped the character of this great country; people like presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and Oatsie Charles, grande dame of Rhode Island society. Eventually, I make my way to upstate New York to go hunting deer.

‘This hat is rather a sudden orange,’ I complain.

‘Hunting orange, they call it,’ says Tom. ‘Other huntsmen know not to shoot you.’

‘Please take it off then,’ the film crew beg me.

New Jersey is very working-class, so that won’t detain me long and I drive to Pennsylvania for a cup of Twinings and to listen to my own recording of the Gettysburg Address that never fails to move me to tears. In Tennessee and Kentucky, I meet more fascinating rich people with horses before I find my first black person in South Carolina. What a pleasure for her.

Florida restored a sense of bien-être as I blew the budget swimming with dolphins and taking an airboat on the Everglades. But then I had to take a short break in Amazonia to allow me to earn a few quid making another documentary and the team to organise some more adventures on my behalf and, silly billy that I am, I broke my arm, so I entered Louisiana in a sling.

Apparently you have to look as though you care about Hurricane Katrina when you get to New Orleans, but after a few sensitive pieces to camera, I’m soon on my way again and chatting to Morgan Freeman in Mississippi. It really is amazing all the different people you meet on your travels.

The middle of America is really very dull but I stay awake for the sake of appearances and eventually I find my way up north
in Illinois where, to my great surprise, I found myself doing live improv on stage in Chicago. As you do. Many of these northern states are very cold and I couldn’t understand some of the local accents as they sounded Danish, but I did fit in some down time in Montana with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.

I pose briefly in a cowboy hat in somewhere called Nebraska and chunter merrily on my way through Oklahoma and Texas, before heading north again to ride on a speedboat in Utah and thence to San Francisco to dine with Jony Ive, the inventor of the iPod, and stock up with 30 of all the latest models to help me pass the time on the pointless, but comedically necessary, sasquatch hunt in Orgeon. There’s just time for a quick tour of Alaska, where I fail to bump into my old friend Michael Palin, and to hum the theme tune to Hawaii Five-0 on Waikiki beach and then I’m done.

So what have I learned? That Americans have very rum pronunciations and that they are all different but are quite nice if you say you are Stephen Fry and are making a television show. But someone’s got to do it – and it did give me some respite from Alan Davies crawling up my botty on QI.

Digested read, digested:
Stephen in Fryland.

At night I would be woken by unearthly groans from outside my window, inchoate monologues imperceptible to less sensitive souls. We were living in Bristol at the time and I was increasingly feeling the pain of the city’s history of slavery, a subject on which
I would frequently digress to my Bulgarian cleaner. I needed to escape the disenchantment.

I was also stuck for anything to write about, so a prolonged summer holiday in Italy seemed an ideal prescription.

Our friends are sorry to see us go, for their lives will be so much less fulfilled without us, but I have a higher duty to my restless mind. The children are aghast to find there is no organic muesli on board the ferry, but I wave their concerns aside as I wonder at the pastel shades of the leatherette banquettes that would not have been out of place in a Tintoretto masterpiece.

We motor slowly through France at a steady 8mph, yet still I feel as if the world is escaping me as I seek to write down every inconsequential detail while the children draw Old Masters in the back. We stop for the night at a decaying chateau and the Monsieur asks whether the children would like to eat pizza. For a while I am annoyed, but then decide, after much agonising reflection, that he is right. Now is not the moment to induct minors into the specialités du terroir.

I throw the Italian phrase book to the floor in disgust. Some of the words are not as I imagined they would be and it feels as if my sensibilities have been brutally desecrated, but I manage to compose myself by the time we arrive at our palazzo near Arezzo. At last I feel alone in the process of liberation.

There is a knock and a Scottish man called Jim announces himself. I am perturbed to find I am not the only foreigner in Tuscany but contain my ire and wave him in. He invites us to dinner and I do not want to go for I fear the other guests will not be worthy of me. Yet the children point out he has a face like a Giotto painting so I reluctantly acquiesce.