WHY I TRAMP THE STREETS IN SEARCH OF RUBBER BANDS

The kind men and women who in all weathers deliver our daily post, wrap it in bundles with pink rubber bands. They probably do this elsewhere as well. Twenty or thirty letters and brochures held together ready to drop through the letterboxes of this or that cluster of houses. Maybe it’s even done by postcode, I don’t know.

What I do know is that these are very fine rubber bands, and of a durability and elasticity reminiscent of the days when windows of railway carriages were opened with a leather strap. I imagine a little factory, somewhere like Leeds or Dumbarton, deep anyway in the British hinterland, where son has followed father in this traditional manufacture - supported by the same, government contract, rolled over year by year.

The postal folk rushing around on their deliveries, on foot or bicycle, at the regulation so many miles-per-hour, remove the bands before delivering the mail, placing them carefully on a handlebar or in a pocket so that they may be used again. Inevitably a few bands are dropped.

Now I value these rubber bands. They come in two sizes. The larger ones are exactly the right size for closing a roll of labels wound on a three inch diameter core. The smaller ones are exactly the right size for a one inch core. So when I find one lying on the pavement - as I did this morning - I pick it up eagerly. This gives me a double pleasure: I believe I am tidying the streets and the atavistic instincts of my hunter-gatherer nature are satisfied. Rarely a day goes by when I do not manage to pick up at least one and bear it proudly home. It’s a sort of Sarah Palin feeling, I suppose, without the need for gunfire.

I mentioned this the other day to Delphine, our ultra-efficient and helpful assistant in the Post Office where I go each afternoon carrying a Marks and Spencer shopping bag containing packets of labels to be despatched urgently hither and thither.

Unfortunately, she said, she had no rubber bands to give me. However, if some came her way she would, set them aside. At that point Sam, who was pursuing some post office business of his own at the next window, intervened. “I’ve got a bucketful” he said. “I’d be glad to get rid of them.”

Sam runs a superior travel agency in town. Not only that but he has a habit of collecting honorary consulships like other people collect stamps. An impressively royal coat of arms outside his office proclaims that it is here that distressed Norwegians in search of a friendly hand should repair. Assuming, that is, that the place isn’t full of distressed Tunisians seeking the same thing.

I know Sam not so much through our occasional coincidental encounters at the Post Office but from the bi-annual receptions that the European Commission hold in Cardiff for those involved in some way with European affairs. When I am not selling labels I write articles about Europe and for a short time last year was the part-time UK representative on a sadly terminated European communications project. I think, anyway, that is why they invite me.

Labels and Europe are two activities just about as distant in the occupational spectrum as it is possible to get. I arrive at the Post Office, tired and dishevelled, frequently in jeans and sweater, with a bulging and inelegant bag of parcels, my conversation limited to rubber bands and recorded deliveries, only subsequently to reappear groomed and talking with something that could passably be taken for erudition about the threats and opportunities to Britain of joining the euro. This perplexes Sam. Me too, sometimes, when people ask innocently, “what do you do?”

Never mind! I am still, if you remember, looking for those robust and elastic pink Post Office rubber bands. So Sam invites me to drop into his agency the next day and collect his small surplus, the postmen clearly delivering several each day with the agency’s mail. This, in great expectation, I do, only to find that the fabled ‘bucketful’ is nowhere to be found. The staff confirmed that although once such a bucketful did indeed exist, sadly someone must have ‘tidied up.’ My disappointment was palpable.

So I am back tramping the streets again, looking for these little circles of pink rubber. Meanwhile I have to put up with the inferior products of stationery suppliers who trade only in products made in some Asian fastness. Never the correct size, nor very elastic, they break with a twang at the slightest provocation, zapping your fingers in the process. Oh! If only I could find that factory in Leeds or Dumbarton that made the rubber bands which held the Empire together!

MANDALAY AGAIN

My email box pinged and there, under the capitalised title ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR,’ was an email from my eldest half-sister, the one who has nine children and lives somewhere deep in the South of France. She is an erratic correspondent but surfaces at odd moments with some breathless message, hammered out in capitals. This time it was “JUST THOUGHT YOU WOULD LOVE TO KNOW AS YOU LOVED THE HOUSE SO MUCH THAT BARNARDS CLOSE IS UP FOR SALE.”

‘Barnards’, as we called it - the ‘Close’ only being added when formality demanded - was the house in which we both grew up, she seven years behind me. We all left for a short lived life in Jersey in the winter of 1965, the last of my childhood world piled into the back of an old Commer van that bounced and rumbled away for ever down Barnards’ long, dark, potholed drive.

She mentioned an estate agent which I looked up and there, in a sort of ‘last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again’ moment, was the proud bow-windowed house looking smart and well-kept, its lawns suspiciously verdant: seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, an acre of land, asking price £1,150,000, which is about a hundred times what we sold it for.

It is true I did love the house, which always seemed to be a mitigation of my unhappy childhood. I thought we should have kept it despite our impecuniosity: the roof that leaked copiously, the rotten window frames, the draughts and the precarious heating.

I loved the space most of all. Outside there were then seven acres of gardens and fields and paddocks that ran all the way down to the Thames. Next the house a walled kitchen garden, a stable block, a triple garage, an apple store, a heated greenhouse - even a non-conformist chapel built for the village by a previous owner - provided ample opportunity for a shy child to run and hide and fantasise.

You reached the house via a drive, eighty yards long and flanked on each side with mature horse chestnuts under which a flood of aconites bloomed each spring. This opened on a lawn, the shape of a tear drop, on which stood a mighty lime tree. Around this lawn we raced on bicycles, or sometimes horses. It was one of four lawns all of which it fell to me to cut with a small two-stroke Atco mower. Up and down, up and down.

At various times we accommodated in these grounds an eclectic mixture of animals. We started with a small pig farm and some poultry, the chapel being converted to deep litter. We sold eggs to Thames Valley, the only ecclesiastically raised eggs in Britain probably.

I also remember goats, ducks, geese, dogs, cats and horses on which untaught (except by falling off) I learned to ride. Sadly the pigs all contracted swine fever and had to be slaughtered; some other disaster put paid to the chickens. My father turned to teaching, while step-mother embarked on the more profitable enterprise of farming students.

Barnards was one of those houses in which you could never quite manage to count all the rooms. Someone had begun the construction deep in the mists of time and each succeeding generation had added something to it. Parts of the house were undoubtedly Tudor, but other parts were Victorian, the most recent additions being made in the thirties. This gave it a higgledy-piggledy feel, compounded by its deliciously having two staircases. Upstairs you could count six separate levels of floor and downstairs three. It did contain, however, at least ten rooms that at a pinch could be called bedrooms and most of these were large enough for multiple occupation.

So the house was always full of young people: birds of passage from as young as a tearful six year old. Mostly they came from abroad, many from Africa, sent to us by some species of agency. We fed and housed them, taught them English, sent them to boarding school in term time and arranged sightseeing trips and parties in the holidays.

One of the first was a young French water-skiing champion called Jacqueline who came to attend a language course at Oxford, a short hop away on the railway line. To my pale Cinderella-like personage she seemed impossibly glamorous and exotic, all tailored blazers and silk scarves. Jaqueline lent her name to the most Tudor of Barnards’ Tudor bedrooms, a name it retained long after her departure.

She was with us for her twenty-second birthday and my father, more than a little enamoured by her looks, placed candles in the gathering twilight all around the back lawn, while we consumed cake and, I believe, a bottle of champagne; which seemed, in those dim days of the 1950s, almost as exotic as a French water skier.

All these memories of my childhood Mandalay flooded back as I looked at the pictures. The rooms, not surprisingly, seem smaller than I remembered, the hall narrower, the sitting room inglenook only a half inglenook. Outside the lawns appear mostly the same, though the great lime tree seems to have gone.

But seven acres have become one acre. The fields have been sold and all around the house land has been sold for building. The weeping ash beside the chapel under whose green summer canopy I crammed for my physics ‘A’ Level, has long since been flattened beneath a bevy of executive homes built in the Rose Garden. More new houses cover the front field where the piggeries stood. I doubt that the great triple garage has survived either.

Time has moved on. Like Mandalay, the old Barnards has gone, just as much as if it, too had, been burned to the ground.

TWELFTH NIGHT CALCULATIONS

This morning I was listening idly to the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 while munching away on my buttered toast, when someone, whose name I didn’t catch, came on to say that he had written a new batch of Winnie-the-Pooh stories that would be published in the autumn under the title of ‘Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.’

He then read a charming extract with Pooh saying though he had been absent for 80 years, ‘years’ were only a unit of time and it might just as well have been 80 weeks or even 80 minutes, in which later case it might just be time for a little smackerel of something in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I know shall look forward to the publication but I fear I shall be disappointed. These sequels, even if the characters are revived by the original author, never quite seem to hit the mark. Time moves on, whatever Pooh may say, in the enchanted - as well as enchanting - Hundred Acre Wood. All of which made me ask myself how big anyway was 100 acres? And spent some minutes working this out to be about a mile by 300 yards.

In idle moments I am always essaying these kinds of calculations. Last week I wrote about Jane Shilling’s memoir of learning to ride, buying a horse and then joining the local hunt - ‘A Fox in the Cupboard.’ Walking through our own very much less than 100 acre wood the next day I found myself reckoning what it all must have cost and why, as a single mum she should have incurred such great expense while still (I assume) a relatively lowly paid sub-editor. Even when she became a regular columnist and reviewer the charge of this equestrian activity on the Shilling household must have been a heavy one.

She says her horse cost £3,200. But then there’s the livery, the vet’s and farrier’s bills, hunt subscriptions, transport, both for the horse to meets, and for herself to and fro from London to deepest Kent. There is proper clothing to be bought, and riding boots, and general impedimenta; there is insurance (sure to be crippling when you think of what a horse can do with a well-aimed kick). Why when a frequent theme of her articles used to be the frugality of her existence did she embark on such a financially threatening course?

This is indeed a more interesting question and I think the answer has something to do with tribe. We all have an atavistic urge to belong to and to be accepted by a wider group of people, not necessarily that we like, but with whom we have a common purpose and who will support us if need be. Jane’s book ends like this:

“I turned and looked back on them all - the Ashford Valley, eating and drinking and flirting on Midsummer’s eve. It was dark on the road where the trees hung down and I couldn’t see their faces, only their silhouettes, but as I paused there for a moment, poised just outside the circle of light and celebration, someone waved. They’d noticed that I had gone.”

This seems her acknowledgment that at last she felt accepted into the Ashford Valley tribe, whereas before she felt an outsider.

Our tribes are distinguished by traditions, by modes of dress, by colours and by purpose. The activity that the tribes engage in, sport, riding, party politics, acting, is often incidental to the real purpose: the satisfaction that we get from belonging, from knowing the jargon and the in-jokes, the history, the anecdotes, the common language and the chance to live in a smaller, friendlier world. Though in reality a tribe’s internal politics rarely run smooth.



My own tribe is acting and we are often at cross-purposes. We cannot even agree when to hold our traditional Twelfth Night revels. Should it be the 5th or the 6th of January? It is our version of Lilliput’s Big and Little Enders.

I suppose it all depends when you start counting. Night one ought to be Christmas Eve - when, one presumes, the shepherds came down from the hills. By the time the Magi arrived on Christmas morning the messy bits were safely over and the Babe, all washed and wrapped lay smiling happily in His manger.

Incidentally, this is always depicted as a kind of trough on legs which any self-respecting ungulate would kick over before you could say Santa Claus. Real mangers are fixed to the wall at the height of a horse’s head, which would be a more sensible place to put a baby in an occupied stable. Twelfth Night would then become the 4 January. Oh dear!

Still, if like Pooh Bear you are not a slave to literalism and think the quantum of time units immaterial to a good story, then it really matters not. Besides 6 January is the feast of St Stephen (when the snow lay round about) and St Stephen has traditionally been as much a part of the end of Christmas as St Nicholas has been a part of the beginning.

So, pace modernists everywhere, I stuck to the traditional night. A great party ensued. Before midnight we commenced removing the Christmas decor, ready for the barren abstinence that stretches out deep, cold and boringly even towards Lent. Which, in these ever more troubled times, looks as though it will well live up to its name as the season of borrowing.

A FOX IN THE CUPBOARD

I don’t know about you but for me the Christmas and New Year holidays have a hologram quality, taking on a radically different manifestation according to the perspective from which you happen to view them.

Before the event, everything appears in a sort of Nigella Lawson-esque glitter, a soft-focus world of roaring fires and delighted family smiling benignly amidst oceans of discarded wrapping; sipping your best champagne and nibbling those cute little chocolate dainties whose confection will be - to quote Nigella herself - ‘the work of moments’.

You picture a time of celebration, of festive meals, parties, occasionally perhaps eating and drinking more than strictly wise, but forgivable in the circumstances. You imagine long walks in a frosty countryside, interspersed perhaps with a successful visit to the sales to recover some object of desire, long coveted but never hitherto affordable.

But above all my pre-Christmas perception is that the hours will slow down and that I will be left with acres of golden empty time to call my own. Freed from the insistent telephone I shall have time not only to clean, tidy, mend, shop, bake, decorate, wrap presents, entertain, and visit, but also to rest with long lie-ins and vacant evenings tucked up in front of the television with a suitably seasonal and warming beverage.

Of course the idea of empty time is just as much of a delusion as the idea that one can make a tasty plate of Nigella’s Christmas pudding truffles in ‘moments.’ The reality is morbidly different. First, the adrenalin thoughtfully provided by work deadlines and which hauls you out of bed on cold winter mornings and propels you urgently in the direction of the office, simply evaporates. In a few days, while not retiring noticeably later to bed, your getting-up time advances rapidly from 6.30 to 7.30 and then to 8.30, losing you a good two hours before you even begin.

Without adrenalin’s whip-cracking brother, the ‘to-do list,’ starred and underlined with the day’s über-priorities, I have the most appalling tendency to faff about. In consequence everything I undertake has the feeling of dragging feathers through treacle. The result is that I stagger through Christmas wondering where it all went and making guilty resolutions to do it better next time.

At least this was what I thought as I sat by the chuntering printing machine on New Year’s Day finishing off a labelling order that I should have had done by Christmas Eve, but which, missing the adrenalin which switched off promptly at 5pm on 19 December, of course I didn’t.

If this sounds like an invitation for sympathy then please put away your hankies, for in fact, once you have gulped down a good lungful of New Year air first thing on 1 January and with an agreeable little apéritif with friends to look forward to at five o’clock, then sitting by the printer, reeling and occasional changing stock or ribbon with a good book in front of you, is actually rather a pleasant way of spending the day, particularly as the book I was reading was rather special.

I am rather a fan of Jane Shilling who used to write for ‘The Times’ but who departed earlier in the year when the paper took yet another lurch downmarket. I had dropped hints that one of her books might not be unwelcome in my Christmas stocking but evidently the hints were not sufficiently heavy or well-directed for I ended up with Alan Bennett instead.

Nevertheless there is a certain guilty pleasure in buying yourself desired but unreceived presents. Santa cannot be considered infallible, I argue. You are allowed to correct his mistakes. It was in this spirit that I ordered ‘A Fox in the Cupboard’ from Amazon. It arrived two days later.

The book is basically a most wonderful if meandering account of how one thing can so easily lead to another if you are not paying attention. In Jane’s case, how to fill time one holiday, lead to riding lessons and then to the purchase of suitable clothing and then to buying a horse and then to taking-up hunting, only to find that the timing collided unhappily first with foot and mouth and later with its Parliamentary ban.

Despite being raised in the country, field sports and their adherents have always made me feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I have been sufficiently close at various times of my life to horses, dogs, guns and so on to be able to have a nuanced appreciation of what she is describing, even if my riding was self-taught and bareback and my knowledge of hunting obtained from the stories of my namesake Somerville and Ross.

Part of the fun of the book lies in its magnificent use of language. The style flows freely but only the precise word will do, even if that means you have to keep a dictionary by your side. I counted 24 words, which either I did not know at all, or of which I was dubious of giving an accurate definition...words like ‘solipsism,’ ‘adamant’ (as a noun), ‘knout,’ ‘semiotics,’ ‘shirring,’ ‘bimbling,’ ‘gravid,’ ‘scuts.’ If Jane is ever honoured it will be for services to the nation’s word power.

Still, the holiday is almost over; I ate the last of the bon-bons yesterday. Soon I shall be looking back and seeing Christmas from an altogether different perspective. In retrospect Christmas will look rose-tinted again, the horrors and excesses forgotten. It will be seen as a time of good rest, fellowship, family, feasting; a time of wonderful confections (though I say so myself) and even better reading. By 2009 the limiting resolutions will have been forgotten. It was ever thus. And I have already started dropping hints about needing a new dictionary for next Christmas.

Geese

My parents used to keep geese on the farm and later, when the children were small, we raised a family of goslings on our suburban lawn. They have always been one of my favourites. Both to look at and to eat, though I nevertheless feel guilty at the thought of killing such beautiful and soulful animals.

I’m even more guilty when I think of Foie Gras - fat liver - eaten by the bucketful in France at this time of year and in other places too. To make this, geese are force fed until their poor livers have expanded to twice their normal size. That eighteenth century cleric, Sidney Smith, said that his idea of heaven would be eating Foie Gras to the sound of trumpets. He didn’t say anything about Chateau Yquem - that lovely silky Sauternes made from grapes already rotting on the vine - which is held to be the very best accompaniment. Better than trumpets, certainly.

These days there is no need for cruelty. You can just take an ordinary goose liver and mix it with goose fat and there you go. Not quite the genuine article but sufficiently close to be an acceptable compromise.

Geese are intelligent creatures and one of very few that combine the ability to fly with the ability to swim, as well as to walk, of course. Like dogs, they also have tails that wag when they are happy. What they lack is any sense of humour. Yes, geese are the strait-laced brethren of the animal kingdom. And perhaps that is why they mate for life.

Such pairings are sometimes rough and ready - a tough gander seizing on a reluctant goose whether she likes him or not and guarding her jealously (and viciously) lest anyone try any funny business. But they can also show quite human tenderness.

On the farm we kept a family of ornamental Chinese geese. All geese carry their heads very high but Chinese geese are taller than most with long elegant necks. They are black (or dark brown) with white breasts and black beaks. Not all that unlike Canada geese in fact.

Emden geese, though, are what we think of as domestic geese. Presumably they originated in Emden in Germany. They are stumpy things, all white, with short thick necks and bright orange beaks. They were bred for their meat and because they are heavy I suspect they cannot fly once they are past the gosling stage. We kept a flock of Emden geese as well.

The Chinese geese didn’t fare well and eventually only one gander remained. The Emdens fared better. But the Chinese gander took a wife from among the Emdens and thereafter the couple were inseparable. They used to promenade together, side by side and he would always wait for her and be attentive. When they were fed, despite the competitive nature of feeding a rabble of miscellaneous poultry, household scraps mostly from a bucket with maybe a few handfuls of barley meal thrown in, he would always stand back and let her eat first and only then join the feeding fray. Never have I witnessed such altruism in the animal kingdom. Though maybe it was just self-preservation for how could we ever eat a Darby and Joan, never more than a couple of feet from each other day or night.

Having no sense of humour makes them vigourous complainers at the slightest provocation. This is why they make excellent guards. The Romans used them in this way around their camps. Better than dogs at warning of an enemy’s advance. People seem even more scared of geese than they do of dogs, though what a goose can do beyond giving you a nasty nip I don’t know. Our three half-grown geese, loose in our suburban garden, once saw off a policeman who came to call and who beat a hasty retreat in front of their lowered beaks.

As a child I was warned that a goose could break a man’s arm. But this is surely nonsense. Human arm bones are made for fighting, whereas a goose wing is made for flying, the bones, though strong, are light and hollow - there are even air sacs inside the bones. In any contest these must surely break first.

All you need do is to stand your ground and laugh at them (geese really don’t like this! and then when they are six feet away say ‘boo’ in a loud voice. They will cackle dreadfully and give you most hideous looks as if to say that they won’t do anything this time but let it be a lesson to you and then, still cackling, they will retreat, stiff-necked, and stiff-legged, with as much dignity as they can muster.

LAST DAY OF TERM

It’s odd, isn’t it, how many of us still think of our lives in school terms. In my case, forty-four years after leaving school - to the day almost - I am sitting here thinking this is the last day of proper work before the Christmas holiday. Except that it’s not a day of proper work otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog, nor later, going out to lunch. I am demob happy already.

What a term it has been! Never it seems have I been so busy. We have had a record autumn with our labels by some margin. Order after order has come in. Profitable orders from big companies too. Don’t they know that there’s a recession on? And even as we plan to put the dust sheets over the business for a week or two we know we have to find seventeen hours of time to number 150,000 tags for 5 January. I keep asking myself whether this is the storm before the calm.

That’s the labels - but to keep the grey cells alive - I still do a bit of Europe-based writing and consultancy. I became the UK co-ordinator for a communications project this autumn, was briefly on the management team even and paid in euros. There’s nothing more calculated to make you feel as though you are going up in the world than to be paid in euros with the pound falling in value every month.

But sadly on top of my weekly writing commitment and my voluntary work with UNESCO, the project was a step too far. Enjoyable it may have been but my blood pressure ws taking a hammering. Luckily for me the project was unexpectedly cancelled. I was sad to lose the income, but the extra work had been just too much.

There’s another consequence of being overly tied to a desk: I have bulged, shamefully. I am now three pounds over my ‘alarm-emergency’ weight which itself is a stone over what I consider my desirable weight which again is ten pounds or so over what those strict matronly books with their height to weight ratios, say that I should, primly and thinly, be.

In the rush I stupidly sacrificed my Canadian Airforce exercises - ten minutes of mixed aerobics involving a lot of running up and down the main corridor of the house, trying to compensate with a short-lived attempt to tackle the forty-five minute hill-climb up to the top of the Primrose Hill tump and back again every day before breakfast. It’s a wonderful walk in the early morning sunshine. But in the chilling wet darkness of a November morning it is purgatory.

Still from this evening I shall switch into Christmas mode: the house needs cleaning (and how) and decorating. We have to unblock the chimney and look out the logs, spray the fir cones, make confections (Nigella’s Christmas chocolate puddings look nicely adventurous), fetch the goose, ice the cake, build the little village (IKEA c. 1995) that consists of elves and snowmen and houses and snow laden trees with a little church and all of which lights up (hopefully) very agreeably as it nestles round, over and on top of the great snowdrifts of Royal icing I shall mount on the cake.

All these things have to be done. And the presents wrapped and piled around the tree. As a family we rather overdo presents. Forget the quality, our emphasis is on keeping the manufacturers of wrapping paper in business. A litter of glistening shapes and sizes, grows daily around the tree. Each of us will have half a dozen presents or so, including presents from and to any pets that may be lurking. When he was still alive, our Newfie, Sampson, would have been amazed at his perspicacity for buying useful snippets. A hussef, perhaps, or a pepper grinder. In return his present would be a splendid Savoy Cabbage, wrapped loosely in layers of newspaper and tied with a ribbon. This he would lie with, patiently tearing off the paper with his teeth, and then munching his way through the leaves. We would have given him champagne, too, had he shown any liking for it.

I myself am difficult to buy presents for. My Scottish ancestry makes me guilty about any significant largesse pointed in my direction. ‘Something from a charity shop will do nicely,’ I say in an attempt to head them off. This is not mere parsimony. For in truth charity shops always strike me as a modern day treasure trove. The concept of recycling appeals - as does the lack of choice. If we are talking about clothes that fit, there is one example, in one size and one colour - take it or leave it. I have never like decisions.

Last Christmas Younger Daughter bought me a padded plum-coloured gilet for £5. I have worn it almost every day since. It is an admirable garment, if not an admirable colour. Yet I would have never gone into a shop and bought a gilet new for the simple reason that I would have felt my arms would be cold. Only when one is presented to me do I find that by some mysterious process they aren’t. Surely that is something they could have taught me in school those 44 years ago?

More Restaurants

We were, I think, talking about restaurants. Leastways the Borscht ‘n’ Tears title of my last attendance in this spot was also the name of a Russian restaurant which I learn to my surprise is still going, despite various changes of regime in the Motherland, having been favoured with the custom of several Purple Cooers over the years. Maybe we can organise a grand reunion, should anyone fancy it.

Still the very survival of restaurants in these straightened times surprises me. Of course it is very agreeable to be taken out if someone else is footing the bill, especially when the atmosphere and the company is good. But if you are having to pay for yourself - worse, if you are having to pay for a string of random family - then I can’t help thinking to myself (at least in Britain) whether I really couldn’t have provided better food, better cooking, better wine and certainly a better atmosphere at home and still have enough dosh in hand at the end to buy something totally luxurious and unnecessary.

Of course there’s the washing up and clearing away, never to be underestimated, but even that can be rendered fun given a minimum of imagination. At a charity school I visited once in Norway, washing up for sixty people was accompanied by guitar playing and songs. As a visiting parent I was assigned to the drying up detail, as I recall. It made me feel that songs had a purpose beyond the iPod, not only to be listened to, but actually sung as well.

I suppose in truth I am a restaurateur manqué, which is why I feel mildly annoyed in most restaurants. It’s not only the cost: it’s all the missed opportunities to give people a memorable time. To go to a restaurant, certainly in the evening, should be to go (at least to have the chance of going) to a party. With the host providing a focus of mild entertainment that induces people to make contact with each other and for everybody to be warmed in the ambiance.

British practice is to ignore the folk around you even though the dining salon is so crowded that you are practically rubbing elbows. You keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself, concentrating on your food if, that is, it is worth concentrating upon, which sadly it rarely is. We, as a nation, to not ‘do’ food. We lack appreciation of it. We value it only for the sustenance it brings and the opportunities it offers for snobbery - ‘sun-dried tomatoes! whee!’ or ‘My cookbook’s Marks and Spencer!’

I am not suggesting we go as far as that restaurant in Berlin known for the telephones on its tables; where you could dial up table 17 and make a secret proposition - though quite what proposition you might make I could never quite fathom. “Vould you like to eat a kipper vith me, Sweetie?” perhaps.

I believe that to be enjoyed a restaurant meal should be a party between like-minded friends and the restaurateur should hold the same relation to his guests as an attentive host at a party, smiling and encouraging all to relax.

Sadly attentiveness is these days interpreted as appearing in a rush out of nowhere every ten minutes to demand peremptorily and without any real interest whatsoever whether ‘everything is all right?’ That always seems to me to be an unforgivable sin simply for the lack of imagination that it betrays.

How can you possibly expand on variations in the subtle delights of dining to such an enquirer? In my restaurant the waiter would need only to lift a quizzical eyebrow to engage the diner in a conversation about the ageing of the beef, the digging of the potatoes or the
whether a coulis might or might not be appropriate. As indeed happens elsewhere.

I remember another little Russian restaurant in London - not a public restaurant at all. You were taken there as a guest. The salon was the front room of a house in a little terrace somewhere in the outer reaches of Kensington. It was run, if that you can apply that word in this case, by a little, white-haired emigrée from the Russian revolution.

You sat at tables. She came and talked to you in a strong Russian accent, sitting down at one of the chairs, moving candlesticks to see you better. There was no menu and no prices, but she told you what she had found in the market that morning and what was now cooking in her kitchen.

In singles and couples her diners drifted in until there were perhaps a dozen, she moved from table to table, a boy bustled round after her, placing breadsticks and cutlery on the table - glasses, napkins, bringing an occasional aperitif, usually vodka. Many talked in Russian.

Then the meal arrived. There was no choice. This was the meal she had cooked. You were her guest. She made you a present of this food. She was matriach, you were her children.

You ate and you drank and you talked and laughed. Most diners knew each other. It was like a family reunion. And after the meal, there were no bills. I never knew how it all worked. Money changed hands, certainly, but how much and when, seemed to be arbitrary. ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need,’ sprang to mind.