How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [22]
I have similar thoughts whenever I visit the lavatories at large public events. How do they all miss the bowl by such an enormous margin? Are they doing it deliberately or is it a congenital fault with their bomb-aiming equipment? In which case, what on earth must their bathrooms look like at home?
After a short wait, during which time I never felt inclined to throw any of the chairs through a window, we were shown to our table – where I remembered Clarkson’s first law of eating in the provinces: ‘The chef is from Coventry. He was not trained in Paris.’ This means I always select something that can’t be mucked up. Celery, usually.
On this occasion, however, I went for a burger, which, according to the manager, could not be served ‘rare’ because meat, unless cooked properly, would kill us all. Of course, this isn’t true if you buy decent meat from a decent butcher or if you are a dog, but no matter. My nuked beef arrived between two pieces of what, I suppose, you could describe as bread. But only if you were mad. Let me put it this way: if I threw it at you in a food fight, I feel fairly sure that it would take your head clean off.
Plainly, then, this is a place you go to not because you are hungry or because you want to treat your family to a tasty meal. No. You go there to get heavier. As lunches go, it was right up there with an experience I had at a restaurant in Saigon. The menu said, ‘Rather burnt rice land slug’ and I ordered it because it sounded intriguing, but sadly it wasn’t. It turned out to be as described – a rather burnt slug.
I can understand why the Vietnamese serve burnt slugs. I can understand why a chicken I was once given in Mali was skin and bone separated by nothing but warmed air. And I know why in Havana I was once given a spaghetti bolognese that came whole. Like a Frisbee. Here in Britain there is no excuse for eating rubbish. We are bombarded with cookery programmes – and every Christmas the shelves in WH Smith groan under the weight of all the recipe books. Most people could name half a dozen footballers and maybe a handful of royals, but if you asked someone to list all the famous chefs in Britain we’d be here till Doomsday. They’re all so famous that we know them now by their Christian names: Gordon, Delia, Jamie, Marco, Heston, Gary, One Fat, the Hairy and so on and so on.
So why is it impossible to eat properly in Britain unless either you are in the middle of London or you are prepared to book six months in advance for a plate of vertical leaves drizzled with something odd? Why can’t someone open a restaurant in the provinces that serves bread, cheese, Branston pickle and some onions? Good, honest food for people who know how to use a lavatory and won’t slash all the seats.
Sunday 11 May 2008
A vicious Japanese loo ruined my ah so
Superficially Japan is the most foreign, odd and complicated place this side of Jupiter’s third moon. Yet, strangely, every time I go there it’s like I’m being reunited with a long-lost twin brother.
Think about it. It’s an overcrowded island nation that in recent history has enjoyed great power. What’s more, the Japanese have a fondness for good manners, bureaucracy and – when the chips are down – great cruelty. They drive on the correct side of the road. They have a royal family. And because they have built a society over thousands of years, they can tell where someone went to school, where they live and what their dreams and hopes are for the future simply by watching them hold a chopstick. In the same way, we know everything about a person if we discover they have a set of serviette rings.
There’s more. We used to laugh when Clive James showed us those Japanese game shows in which contestants were made to eat slugs and go to work with their underpants full of stick insects. ‘How weird,’ we thought. But then, just a few years later, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was sitting up to her neck in a vat of maggots.
I’ve been terrified recently that we in Britain have been sliding towards the American system, with our malls and our enormous bottoms. I’d much