A VISIT TO LONDON

The Cherry Orchard

 Last weekend we went to London to stay with our friends who live in Dulwich - a part of London quite impossible to reach without enjoying long spells trapped in the purgatory of the South Circular Road.  In the  habit of these things the road is neither really south, nor circular nor even a road, being bits and pieces of roads tacked together on that familiar British pattern of ‘make-do and mend.’  Apart from the M25, I asked, when was the last time that a major road was built in London? The 1950’s I should imagine.  Boris, get weaving.

    But I shouldn’t commence one of these increasingly rare blogs with a rant when I spent a good part of the weekend surrounded by great beauty. I ate breakfast in a cherry orchard. No, really, I did, in the heart of Surbiton and only a stone’s throw from the River Thames.  Admittedly all the cherry trees had been felled and the land used to build the Surbiton equivalent of dachas - just as Chekhov predicted in his play - except that is for a single ancient specimen that was still producing knicker pink blossoms with Japanese extravagance left in the middle of our friends' garden where we admired it from the comfy furnished warmth of a conservatory while eating a type of meal known only to Londoners (they say London is a foreign country) which started with almond croissants, fresh rhubarb and yoghurt and progressed via black pudding, baked tomatoes, fried egg and sausages made from wild boar to ordinary butter croissants and jam.  And all this while contemplating the cherry blossom like Madame Ranevskaya herself.  Sublime would not be an excessive adjective with which to describe this gastronomic experience.
    But I mustn’t confuse you or you’ll be thinking that Surbiton is in Dulwich.  It isn’t.  We came home via Surbiton which lies on the river Thames to the South West of London, whereas Dulwich lies in the South or South East.  From Dulwich we went to Greenwich, which is on the river, and which claims to lie at the centre of the earth and has the Meridian line to prove it. (In passing you might think that Boris might have named a Tube line ‘Meridian,’ especially if one ran out to Greenwich, but I understand from my friend Angus who joined us on the Greenwich trip and whom I have known since University days, that the reason there are no tubes in South London is because the ground is sand, whereas north of the river it is clay. When you tunnel into sand it collapses, apparently, thus foiling your idea of a tube train.  So that is why the overground railway predominates south of the river but makes up for the land stolen for the tracks by providing a rich harvest of railway arches underneath which a good part of the commerce of London started, apparently).

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum. Canary Wharf Beyond

    Where were we? Greenwich.  Yes.  Home of Elizabeth, the unlikely heroine of Boraya, my Russian novel which just yesterday I finished or at least have done with for the time being.  One of the last things I altered was to put Elizabeth in the Trafalgar pub when she returns on a visit to Greenwich, where she used to live before she became sucked into her Russian maelstrom.  She had a flat somewhere near the park and the station, but she also visited the pub and last weekend I did the same and drank beer watching the river in full flood lapping at the pub windows.  It almost felt dangerous. We could almost have been in St Petersburg.

The River Lapping at the Gates

    Greenwich is just so beautiful that one wonders why the world ever again should need architects.  Sir Christopher Wren and Indigo Jones (and perhaps we could throw in John Nash and Capability Brown) have done all the work needed; they have produced the designs and the proportions and the perspectives.  Now our computers could just produce endless variations of their work. Modern buildings it seems are just shallow impersonations of architecture and ugly to boot.  The Shard, which towers above you when you stand on London Bridge station, may be profitable and clever but it is uncivilised and soulless. Give me Greenwich and St Pauls any day.

The Shard

  So we walked past the Observatory on the hill and eschewed the chance to stand on the Meridian line and headed for the Maritime Museum, to view our glorious ocean going heritage. Nelson is there of course, or rather parts of him, to wit his frock coat, which looks made for a twelve year old boy brought up on a poor diet.  How the musketeer in Redoubtable ever managed to hit such a small target is quite amazing. It can’t have been an aimed shot - just a lucky, or if you were Nelson, unlucky, chance. 

Queen Anne's House

    Still there was no getting away from Nelson, even in the Queen Anne House, built ingeniously for the wife of James I (or VI) by Inigo Jones over a species of the Old Kent Road.  It’s a lovely white box of a house that contrives to look both plain and beautiful, and a home, too.   Tardis like, it is bigger inside than out but sadly has been stripped of its furniture and now houses all the Maritime Museum’s pictures including the stonking great canvas - the size of Victory’s mainsail I shouldn’t wonder - that is Turner’s depiction of the battle of Trafalgar.  It is so large that Turner must have bought his paint by the gallon and I remember it with awe.

JMW Turner: The Battle of Tralgar

    All rather surreal, but then just in case visitors got carried away,  the students from nearby Greenwich University decided to stage a production of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale.’  We kept running into the cast as we wandered about looking at the pictures.  I asked one of them who was holding a bloody rag where the bear was and she told me that it was in my imagination.  I offered to play the bear, but as we were then half way through the play she thought my performance might be a trifle under rehearsed. It wouldn’t have mattered; the performance was anyway quite inaudible given the vast echoing chambers of the unfurnished Queen Anne’s house while the audience’s attention kept being diverted by the superb proportions of Mr Jones’ halls and galleries and the geometric patterns of his marble floors.  ‘Bear with me,’ I said  and turned regretfully away.

The Cutty Sark Tea Clipper

    Finally we looked at the Cutty Sark, magnificent against a grey sky.  But why, I asked, did people ever bother to race the tea home from China?  Surely it would have been cheaper to build a bigger, uglier ship that might have taken a fortnight longer to make the voyage but would have delivered the tea more cheaply?  No sooner had I asked the question than I knew that I was speaking with the spirit of the Shard, and not with the civilising souls of Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.  

Pictures are mine apart from those of Turner, of The Shard, and of the Cherry Blossom which are courtesy of Wikipedia.

BORAYA

On their blog  The Lazuli Portals,  Joanna and Ron are soliciting responses to a questionnaire about writing works in progress.  I had fun in filling this in (I am a glutton for questionnaires) and so thought you might like to see the responses.  Thank you Joanna and Ron. 

What is the working title of your book or project?

Boraya

Where did the idea come from for the book or project?
 
I was once at a New Year Party and met a Russian who, at 9 o’clock, said he was going to bed as it was midnight in Russia.  The whole novel grew from that premise.

What genre does it fall under, if any?

This is hard.  I hope, above all, people will find it a good story.  I weave together three broad genres: romance; thriller and historical - at the same time the book isn’t an historical romantic thriller.

If applicable, who would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
 
There are 23 characters, who would require casting if ever the book became a film plus various historical characters.   I have been wrestling with who might play the younger characters but no-one quite seems suitable.  I’d have Dame Judi Dench, though, playing Ludmila, the matriarch, and, were he up to it, Peter O’Toole, playing the elderly Loic, the nearly eighty year old gardener cum groom at the Casa Malinka dacha.    But I’d also need a younger 1940’s version of Peter and perhaps someone to play Loic's father.  

There are two horses as well: Borodino and Tantsovshitsa.
 
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your manuscript or project?
 
In Russia love, war and chocolate inspire ordinary people to do most extraordinary things.

Will your book or story be self-published or represented by an agency?
 
Have to see first whether anyone wants to take it up.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
 
I began in August and was finished by mid December - so four and a half months.  It’s about 120,000 words.  I'm on the final edit at the moment.

What other book or stories would you compare this story to within the genre?
 
I can’t think of an easy comparison.  I have definitely been influenced by Rose Tremain and William Boyd.

Who or what inspired you to write this book or story?
 
I met Rose Tremain at the Hay Literary Festival some years ago.  I didn’t know who she was.  She didn’t know who I was.  Rashly, she told me to write.   Boraya, I suppose, is the result.

What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?
 
Well, there’s some good sex in it! And a lot of snow!  I’d like to think there’s a fair amount of human interest, too, given that it’s a book about four principal characters: one Scots, two Russian and one French, compelled by love, war and chocolate (Boraya is the name of a chocolate company in St Petersburg whose uneasy privatisation forms the backbone of the novel) to do extraordinary things.  It’s a story of people a long way out of their comfort zone and also a city moving between grandeur, terrible affliction during the wartime siege, and rebirth.

Although the story is set mainly in the late 1990’s there are excursions into the 1940’s and although it is set mainly in and around St Petersburg, we drift to London, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Zurich, Brittany even.  On the way we meet various historical figures, including  Elizabeth the Great, the illegitimate, cross-dressing, washerwoman’s daughter who becomes Empress of Russia, (who proves yet again that fact is always stranger than fiction);  Rodolphe Lindt, who accidentally revolutionised chocolate making in the nineteenth century, and Flora MacDonald, whose eventful life on two continents is reflected in that of her descendant - the Elizabeth MacDonald of Boraya - whose unknown Russian leaves her at nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve. 

Oh, there’s a ruined wooden church in it as well.

DOG DAYS

Life this Easter is disrupted: we are dog-sitting Elder Daughter’s Labradoodle puppy and the experience has served to remind me why I decided not to have another dog when Samson, the second of our two Newfies, died fourteen years ago.

    She’s not a puppy puppy this Daisy, more an obstreperous teenager, foisted on unsuspecting grandparents.  Her weapon of choice is the bark and her preferred game is ‘can’t catch me.’  She also refuses to mount the stairs.  Now I know plenty of people who would think this an excellent quality in a dog if it stopped them parading through the bedrooms and bathrooms and so it would be in Daisy, but the trouble is she doesn’t like being left and so when you go upstairs she stands at the foot of the staircase and barks until you come down again.  As a result I am writing this on the kitchen table where Daisy can keep an eye on me rather than in my study upstairs. Peace is anyway reigning, but I suspect she will come and nuzzle me soon enough demanding a game of chase in the garden where she has found that I don’t like her chewing the young Medlar tree; she knows this will make me chase her away, which is why she does it. No doubt she will grow up into something sage and docile as most teenagers do, but such maturity cannot come soon enough.  At half-past six on a cold morning with an icy wind lifting the corners of your dressing gown, the dog undoubtedly gets rather more pleasure from the game than you do.

Apart from the dog Easter otherwise threatens to be peaceful, and as a bonus the sun is shining. That means I shall give the grass both here and at the theatre its first cut of the year.  I went yesterday to buy petrol which cost me almost £6.  I reflected that when I learned to drive petrol in France was 7/6 a gallon - 37.5p in new money - and that that had seemed outrageous.  In Britain the cost was still only five shillings a gallon (25p) and everyone then thought that prohibitive.  I can’t remember the price of oil but it would be served by a garageman from a little pump into a sort of jug labelled 'Castrol' and then he would pour a pint or a quart of it into the engine - an elaborate business now lost in the mists of time.


Yesterday I went to two parties: a children’s Easter Egg hunt in a neighbour's garden took place in the afternoon.  Usually when my kind neighbour puts on a children’s event I am accompanied by Theo, my grandson, who is four, but while Elder Daughter is living the high life in Amsterdam this Easter (and we are living the low life with the dog) Younger Daughter has whisked the grandchildren off to West Wales.  Most inconsiderate!  It feels quite odd to be attending a children’s party sans child, though there are always plenty of adults and suitably adult refreshments to while away the afternoon.  With a glass of cold Cava I heard an explanation - something else from the mists of time - of why Easter should be populated by Rabbits and Eggs, rabbits not laying eggs ,obviously.  My fellow guest said that the origin lay in the hares that disputed their territories by boxing around Easter time.  These territories tended to be fields in which plovers had laid their eggs.  By some process of zoological metamorphosis the hares became rabbits and the plovers’ eggs, the exorbitantly priced chocolate confections we know so well.  

The second party was a friend's 70th and was a most jolly affair marred only by our wondering continually in what state our home might be after two or three hours of depredation by the dog.  This didn't prevent us meeting some old and some new friends and from eating what must be the best birthday cake I have ever tasted.  It was a fruit cake, rich and moist and baked to perfection, wonderfully marzipanned - which triggered an incidental conversation with an Indian doctor about almond trees in central India - and with a plaster-perfect thick layer of white icing.  For adornment the cake boasted not candles but a marzipan blackboard on which had been written e = mc2, along with a figure wearing long shorts (Ilian had been a physics teacher, in Bermuda).

Sadly there has been no word from Ken whose rest I shall have to disturb again after the break.  We shall shortly be having an Estonian visitor who is coming to improve her English.  The idea is that in return for such instruction and her board, lodging and modest entertainment she will help us paint the house.  I do feel that to keep our end up with the Estonians we shall need a bath with working taps.  It isn't just something to keep the coal in.

TAPS AND SERVICE

I rang Ken our builder on his mobile.  It rang and rang and eventually the answerphone kicked in.
I should have insisted that he fixed the taps in the bathroom when he was here last autumn but he was anxious to move on to another job and by mutual consent we agreed the bathroom taps could wait.  But now the taps can wait no longer:  they have expired.  You turn the handle but water flows there none, if you see what I mean. The plastic widget that holds the metal splines of the tap has worn smooth rendering the tap useless.  The only thing we can be thankful for is that the tap expired in the off position rather than the on.

Now I don't know whether you've ever had anything to do with taps, but they are a conspiracy on humankind.  Not only do the manufacturers contrive continually to change their designs, thus making it quite impossible to replace like with like, but they are hideously expensive to buy.  Nor is that all, for you cannot buy the little plastic widget, worth about 3p without buying a whole new tap.  I don't call it a conspiracy for nothing.

 There are goods that you buy - mobile phones for instance - which make you wonder how anything so complex can be made so cheaply.  With taps it is the reverse.  We have had taps since Roman times and though they are simple devices involving no complicated technology they still lag behind in the value for money stakes by a mile.  Which might be understandable if taps were rare, but most people have at the very least half a dozen in their houses and some many more.  Why then are taps so expensive?  It's a question to put to the government; it might take their minds off the deficit. Think of all the taps there must be in government offices!

Anyway, there we are, or rather there Ken isn't, so I set off down to the Post Office through the rain and sleet to post a parcel consoling myself that I would pop into Waitrose afterwards for a free regular cappuccino to which my little green loyalty card entitles me daily.  Though I have my laptop with me I find - or in this case fail to find - my reading glasses.  Luckily I can go over the road to our newly refurbished and ultra-efficient local library and pick up a most excellent pair of reading glasses, gold rimmed, half moon, in a cigar type metal holder for only £4.99, which seems to me to be another piece of incredible value, besides which the purveyors of taps should bow their heads in shame. 

So there I am sitting in Waitrose, with my coffee and new reading glasses, and tapping away at the front end of Boraya - which, in case you were wondering, isn't a car but a novel with an overly long introduction from which I have to remove at least 10,000 words of carefully crafted and much sweated over prose.  This makes me weep almost as much as the taps.  Still it has to be done, but it makes me worried and anxious.

Now Waitrose staff (or Partners as they prefer to be called) are programmed to respond to worried and anxious looking customers and so, before long, Julia makes her smiling appearance beside me.  I reassure her that my troubled brow has nothing to do with my inability to choose the right brand of olive oil or a possible absence from the store of Duchy Originals, and that on the contrary I am exceeding content with everything apart from the problem of the front end of my book.  Not to waste a conversation with a customer Julia then produces a card and invites me to email a cordial sentence to Waitrose encapsulating my experience in the store that day, for which, she implies, there is a prize of £500. 

Now £500 for one sentence isn't bad going.  It's about £20 a word. Exeter Writers are running a short story competition with a £500 prize, but for that you have to write 3,000 words, or thereabouts,  a mere 20p a word.  I intend to enter it.  I have a story written.  But £500 for one sentence beats this hollow and so when I got home I thought I would compose a particularly soupy paeon of praise to Waitrose customer service in general, and Julia in particular, and I duly ventured into the website to post it.  I may have had to wade through a number of survey questions about my grocery shopping, but hopefully my telling observations about customers and staff being one happy partnership have been properly recorded.

In the middle of this I see the answerphone blinking.  It is Ken, asking me to ring him back.  I do and we make contact. 'I'm in Cornwall,' he says.  'On holiday.  I'll ring you next week.'  If he's in Cornwall, I think, it will be a bit of a busman's holiday for him what with landslips and houses collapsing.  I hope he has taken his tools with him.  So, our taps will have to wait.   The grandchildren who look forward to splashing in the bath will be seriously put out and we ourselves will have to make do with showers.  Meanwhile I live in hope that Ken's bill for installing new taps in the bathroom will be matched by a timely voucher from Waitrose or a cheque from Exeter, but I am not holding my breath.

A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.

A LAST LOOK AT THE MILL

It is quite amazing, isn’t it, how many conditions you can believe yourself to be suffering from if once you start clicking on those myriad websites that deal with health.  In fact someone might well organise a hypochondriacs’ conference at which there could be a competition to do just that.  Prizes could be awarded both for the severity and the rarity of the condition at the root of your malady.  Anything would do from an allergy to a rare insect bite through to some less romantic condition, gallstones, say, or alcoholism.  I could imagine a quiz: hypochondriacs versus the doctors and we could all place bets on the outcome.
   
Recently I have become convinced in this way that I suffer from ADHD - that is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - and, for good measure, Hypothyroidism.  I suspect I actually suffer from neither of these as you can’t be hyperactive with an underactive thyroid, can you? Though in the small print they do say that even if you are not hyperactive you may still have an attention deficit and that is, I fear the case with me.  My attention wanders all too easily. After about ten years I become bored and need to move on to something else.

    I am now totally bored by politics, for instance, despite in my heyday having been a Parliamentary Candidate and having written umpteen policy papers, the contents of at least some of which my fellow politicians have inflicted on us, though naturally enough without acknowledgement.  Well, there are many others in the same game; one can’t be proprietorial.  But the business of politics, though clearly as important as ever, seems now to me to have become ever more shabby and worthless.  We know only too clearly what the outcome will be of their efforts to improve our lives, which is that the mess will get worse and we shall be left to clear it up ourselves with less money than we had before they started. Look at the latest scandals; indeed, at the latest legislation on gay marriage which, while I have nothing against it, does make me think that the Government, like Nero is fiddling mightily while Rome burns.  I rather identify with the sign that allegedly greets you at the Canadian Border: ‘We don’t care who you marry so long as you both watch hockey.’

    But we shall muddle through, I suppose, until one day the system collapses. My grandchildren I fear will have a harder life than mine has been. I still get emails from my former political friends, flattering me and soliciting money and help, but the spirit is no longer willing and neither is the flesh. My attention deficit disorder has moved me on and my hypothyroidism means I can’t be bothered anyway.  Though maybe of course I’m not suffering from these at all but something else that I haven’t discovered as yet.  It’s the one good thing about being a hypochondriac: you can always find something else that is wrong with you.

    If I appear in a sombre mood it is because the Mill down in the Auvergne belonging to Rosie and Jim’s son, where we have passed so many happy days in recent years, is sold.  They are down there even at this moment collecting up bits and pieces ready for the new owner to move in.   I doubt I shall see it again, which is really most sad for, with the sun shining, it presented with its trees and meadows and river and hills, the most perfect combination of atmosphere and environment that a human could wish for.  On sunny days busy insects buzzed endlessly and you could almost hear the wildflowers growing, and the apples, peaches and walnuts swelling further with each shower of rain.  The river and millrace chuckled endlessly, the swish and clatter of water, while deep in the woods the wild boar rooted, the deer skipped and martens went about their deadly hunt. Nearer the house, the great walnut trees provided shade under which flourished a whole encyclopaedia of minor wildlife.  And beyond the boundaries, in all the many villages round about, flourished the most beautiful stone architecture in the whole of France.

    On my last day there last summer I took a deckchair and a book and some chilled white wine and sat at the bottom of the lawn under the walnut trees where the forested hillside begins its steep climb to the village, looking back at the house and imagining that I was Logan Mountstuart, the protagonist of William Boyd’s great book ‘Any Human Heart.’  Logan does something very similar in a not very distant though fictional part of France at the age of 85 and unfortunately suffers a heart attack while leaving his book to investigate a bunch of thistles.  I didn’t have any thistles to investigate at the Mill, nor am I 85; maybe that is why I am still here, but next time I am on a health website I shall read up about heart attacks. You never know.  

JE NE SAIS QUOI

La Brasserie du Nord and Chicken and Chips

My great Indian doctor friend, Behjat, sadly no longer with us, was a man of great compassion and understanding and he used to make the best gin and tonics in the world. He used the same four ingredients that everybody uses - gin, tonic, lemon and ice - but his gins and tonic were incomparably better than those of anyone else and certainly were better than mine, even when I adopted his method of mixing, which was to add the lemon juice to the gin before you added the tonic. I think this was because he also added a secret fifth ingredient and that was ‘je ne sais quoi.’

'Je ne sais quoi' is French for ‘I don’t know what’ and it is the phrase best used to describe what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.  It is applicable to anything that is made through the agency of human hand or human brain. By turns ‘je ne sais quoi’ may comprise love, imagination, flair, enthusiasm, art - or any such adjective.  'Je ne sais quoi' is particularly applicable in the kitchen.  A meal cooked with ‘je ne sais quoi’ is magical; a meal cooked without it may look identical, but will taste flat.

I was thinking of this yesterday coming back from a family party.  We had gathered in a large pub and restaurant near Bath to celebrate three noteworthy events: my elder daughter’s 40th birthday, the engagement of her sister-in-law,  and her father-in-law’s 80th birthday,  all of which occasions took place in sufficient proximity to one another to induce us to push the boat out. We were fourteen altogether, ranging in age from eight months to nine hundred and sixty months, (work it out!) and a very happy party was had by one and all.

Such parties bind the nation together.  It is difficult to imagine anyone in that group being thrown out or disowned by the other members.  In fact rather the reverse for I suggested that if we all sold our respective houses - we had six between us - we could afford to buy something so large that we would never ever get on each other’s nerves.  We would meet perhaps once a month like ships passing in the night in great corridors and by pooling our resources we might be able to employ people to do the ironing.

I have always fancied living in such a house though no-one else unfortunately shares my enthusiasm.  I think you could call it 'je ne sais quoi' applied to living.  It is, after all, what the musicians do in ‘Quartet’ that marvellous directorial debut film by Dustin Hoffman that I saw earlier in the week and which is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It is not only Mr Hoffman's acting that boasts 'je ne sais quoi,' which, now that I come to think of it seems applicable to acting and theatre at least as much as it does to cooking. 

The only slightly disappointing thing about our day out was the food for which we paid an average British price of around £25 a head for something that sadly lacked this 'je ne sais quoi.'  (In France we should have paid a great deal less, despite their VAT and high social charges and the food might well - though not alas certainly - have been better.)  Still, it isn’t easy to say what this food actually lacked. It would have passed any culinary inspection but you had the feeling that the chef wouldn’t really have chosen to eat it himself. It looked pretty, but was devoid of sparkle, the ordinary rather than extraordinary.  The 'je ne sais quoi' wasn't there.

Note, this doesn’t mean exotic. A piece of dry toast can taste extraordinary, so can simple mashed potato and so can chicken and chips, which is what I chose for my main course on the grounds that I ought to be on fairly safe ground.  But chicken and chips is a dish that cries out for 'je ne sais quoi.'  I can remember from thirty-five years ago a chicken and chips in the basket served in the bar of the old Hand Hotel in Llangollen (Wales) and another chicken and chips eaten in ‘La Brasserie du Nord’ in Paris twenty years ago.  In this large busy restaurant they must have been serving one hundred portions of chicken an hour and yet the birds were succulent and truly magical.  More recently, down at the Mill, I can remember sitting on the sunny terrace of a little restaurant in Conques eating chicken and chips, so beautiful cooked and tasty and so carefully presented, that washed down with a splendid bottle of Gaillac rosé I thought that maybe I had already died and gone to Paradise.

My expectations were excessively raised perhaps by such memories.   The appearance of yesterday's chicken couldn’t be faulted; neither could the taste in any absolute sense it was just that somehow a vital ingredient was missing: the ingredient of 'je ne sais quoi.'

I flip through the paper at breakfast this morning. A headline says ‘Eight Easy Dishes. Restaurant Food at Home,’   but nowhere in the notes and instructions does the article mention ‘je ne sais quoi.’
In fact now that I come to think about it this ingredient is missing from a very great part of British life.  This wasn't always the case, but today we seem to have lost the ability to inject a little magic into what we do, preferring to settle for the ordinary, the conventional, the simply dull.  On this depressing thought I had better end.  Still the sun is shining, the cold weather has departed and spring will be here in a month or two.