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By Root 695 0

most out-of-step high-street retailer. Because I stood in this cafe for a full ten minutes and decided that the tastiest things in there were the tables and chairs. Maybe, if you were a budgerigar, you might have been excited by some of the offerings. But even then, you wouldn’t know whether to put them in your mouth or use them as a lavatory. Finally I asked a pretty young waitress if there was anything on the shelves that, by even the loosest dictionary definition, might qualify as food. She looked perplexed. Is there anything in here that once had a face? Or anything with chocolate on it? Bewildered, she reached down and presented me with a plastic bowl full of lettuce. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am not a rabbit. I am a fully grown man. I am hungry and I want a kebab.’

Eventually she led me away from the Cellophane trays full of weeds to a rack selling what can only be described as Trill. I mean it. They were selling seeds to human beings. How insane do you have to be to think that’ll work? And how certifiable do you have to be to think: ‘Mmmm. Yes. Those’ll keep me going for the afternoon.’

I would eat seeds, of course, but only if my harvest had failed and the soldiers had confiscated my goat. Why anyone would want to eat them in Britain, where we have pylons and plasma, I have no idea. So to find out I spent 50p on a small packet, opened it and made the catastrophic mistake of putting the contents in my mouth.

It turns out that these seeds are rich in magnesium, iron, phosphorus, calcium, selenium and zinc. In other words, you would get precisely the same nutritional benefit from eating a car. Taste-wise? Well, I’m no expert on these matters, but I’d say it was exactly like sucking on a box of matches.

Eager to make the nausea go away, I headed for the drinks counter – hoping for a Fanta or a Red Bull. But there is no place for these symbols of capitalist excess in a modern-day, west London media village, so I was offered a choice of elderberry juice, which is the first resort of the hippie and the druid, or something called wheatgrass.

It’s hard to encapsulate the flavour in a sentence. Fans describe it as ‘unusual’ or ‘strong’, but I’d go further if only I could think of the right word. ‘Vile’ doesn’t begin to get close. ‘Horrendous’ is wrong, too. A cancerous lung is horrendous. Wheatgrass is way beyond that. Combined with the phosphorus from the seeds, it felt like my mouth was hosting a bomb-makers’ convention. Acid, metal, fertilizer, plastic, hate: all of these flavours swarmed round my head until, genuinely, I thought I might have to vomit all over the waitress.

I must therefore finish with a warning. You must never put this stuff in your mouth. If you are hungry, eat your ironing board.

Sunday 29 June 2008

Look, Mr McChap – you’re part of Britain, so just get over it

If you were part of the Wimbledon centre court crowd on Monday, when Andy Murray came back from two sets down to beat Richard Gasquet, I hope you are thinking seriously this morning about doing the decent thing and committing suicide.

As I sat watching the revolting spectacle on television, I was – and this doesn’t happen often – ashamed to be middle-class and English. Because there they were, 15,000 phlebitis-ridden Surrey women in their size 16 summer frocks, furiously banging their bingo wings together every time that poor Frenchie made a mistake. And raising what’s left of the roof every time Murray, who looks like a piece of string with a knot in it, got a point.

This was not Britain versus France. It was two individuals who have worked hard to become their country’s number ones, bashing it out at the world’s premier tennis tournament for a chance to be flattened by Nadal. And because of that noise, and the whooping and the idiotic bias, the best man lost.

Sport is as much about mental attitude as talent, and it’s hard to get your head in gear when you are faced with a sea of highlighted raspberry-ripple women waving their Daily Mails at you and applauding every time you do a double fault. Rabble-rousing does not happen in other countries