Capsaicin: the fire every time...

'A great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains. You know why? 'Cause it's only food...' Thus pontificates Richard Roma, philosophically-minded top-dog salesman in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that I once (rather haphazardly) co-directed while at college. Roma says so as part of a spiel to trap a prospective customer (in a Chinese restaurant...), so I don't know if he means it; but I do agree with him.
This Christmas I have enjoyed some exceptionally fine cooking courtesy of my Darling Wife's family. I even did some OK cooking myself - a braised rolled shoulder of lamb for nine people, weekend before last. In the act of food preparation I can see the point of any number of rigours, whether it's the honey and mustard for the parsnips or the goose fat/parboiling/shaking of the potatoes, or precisely what wine you use to break down the sinews of the meat while steeping in the pot. And this is only to speak of the strictly humdrum middle ground of cookery cares. If it's got right, the taste is the vouchsafe and validation. But on the whole I'm still with Roma, on the grounds that lesser cares can in theory lead to even happier results.
To whit, what little cooking I've done in the months since mine became a four-person household has been heavily 'influenced' by green chillies. I'm not proud, but I am a happy eater. God bless capsaicin, salve for the soul, (possible) reliever of umpteen ailments! I understand the stuff is addictive, but then so is cocaine, and as far as I've heard it that stuff never did no good for nobody, even as it siphoned all the money from their purses.
Tonight, pressed for time, we ordered in pizza and wine, the provider being the excellent Lupa, and my thin-crust pie loaded with fiery red chillies and shaved grana padano was, for me, the definition of culinary heaven - setting aside, just for the moment, certain curry houses dear to me, and the one London fish ship I know where the chips are still done in beef dripping... Cf. Roma, of course, even these simple/glorious meals fade in reflection too. But you can have a lot more of them in this life, for less expense of time and bother; and who thought happiness could be so cheaply bought, if not pursued in anything like moderation?

All I Want for Xmas is a Gritter

So Darling Wife and I got into the car at 3-ish today, bound for the nearest branch of Halford's for to pick up a Disney Princess bicycle on behalf of Old Saint Nick, intended for Dear Daughter #1. It was only while I was inside the shop, discussing self-assembly and spanner sizes, that the snow started falling spandule-like, thick and fast... Anyhow, upshot is, the whole journey added up to 3 hours we'll never get back. Mayhem on the Roads. Gridlock at Every Turn. People Getting Angry. Thank god ours was a non-essential trip of maybe 6 miles round. I pity the poor working men and women who've had to deal with this, and will continue to have to have to deal with this. Because I quit, frankly. Sightings of gritters within the M25 appear to be in short supply. I was just out on the pavements and it's all nice and darkly slushy underfoot out there, just in time for tonight's big freeze, and tomorrow morning's carnage...

Shearer-Berbatov: Football's Philosopher Kings

I always enjoy the experience of shifting my views about people and things, especially if the transformation is 180-degree: such changes of heart are what gives God hope for mankind. Initially I took something of a dislike to the Bulgarian Dimitar Berbatov as a footballing personality, perhaps in part because he's one of those guys who wears an alice-band in his hair on the pitch, but mainly because of his associations with Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, two 'problematic' clubs; and the unsavoury, protracted, big-money saga of his transfer from one to t'other.
Anyhow, what did I know? I was blind, prejudiced - I just never knew Berbatov's hero and role model was Alan Shearer, not until the two sat down for this Football Focus interview, in which Berbatov's quiet-spoken admiration of Al is incredibly and touchingly direct: 'I was a Blackburn fan when you become champions... I was only a fan of Newcastle because you were playing there.' Good lad, that Dimitar.
Shearer compares Berbatov to his old teammate Matt Le Tissier, a hugely gifted player of questionable work-rate. I've always liked players who walk until they absolutely have to run, so long as the eventual running ends up yielding something splendid. (Consider, for one, Zinedine Zidane.) So, in this light, I now rather like Berbatov's style. But I like even better the flabbergasting way he chooses to express his commitment to the aesthetics of the game, namely by quoting Saint Augustine at Shearer: 'Unless there were beauty and grace in them, they would be powerless to win our hearts.' Truly I have never heard the like of it, not even from Eric Cantona... I don't think Al picked up the theological reference, but I hope he made note of it for the future.

PBR preview, second annual...

O happy day: amid the nervy, opportunistic, end-of-days irreality of our current politics, as we slouch toward an election - it’s Pre-Budget Report time again. Is it already a year since Alistair Darling did this last? Most of the key stats turned out worse than he predicted then, but he will say that’s no great surprise, and I daresay most of us, wearily or sceptically, will agree.
So what punts into the darkness has he got this time? I'm first to admit I’m no augur, never adept at sifting the guts for omens. Still, sifting the bloody auguries of others, I assume the price of my beer is going up. That NHS IT project will take a slash, presumably. One expects some action on the much-discussed want of Chinook helicopters in Helmand. Me and my Mumsnet comrades can probably expect to witness the further waning unto death of the middle-class tax credit. And it’s mooted there could be some great clunking ‘super tax’ on bankers’ bonuses, or rather the ‘bonus pools’ of specific banks.
If the last is true, one can expect to hear cries of outrage on behalf of the financial services, Britain’s last surviving industry of global stature. This blog does feel that the rich bankers could afford to take a bullet or two for the team, so I wouldn’t cry for them, not least if further changes to personal allowance and national insurance widened the net of straitened households obliged to reckon themselves ‘rich.’
The biggest issues remain the deficit and the scale of borrowing, the sitting-target scale of the public sector, and the quest for a return to growth, all issues that Darling claims to be thinking about for the purpose of the next 3-4 years. This package won’t change any of that, indeed couldn’t, because Darling won’t be Chancellor anymore come next summer, by which time we can expect an emergency budget from the new mob. The other day John Rentoul observed with a dab of acid that ‘Cameron's average lead in the polls has slumped from 14 points to about 12.’ Last year while I was thinking aloud about the PBR I wrote that Cameron’s average poll lead had ‘taken a bashing’ in falling from something like 17 points to something like 11 – obviously a wild provocation, one that briefly got this blog some zealous attention from the sorts of Tory bloggers I’d hoped never to meet outside of Hell, where we're all headed. But presumably those lads are a bit more relaxed inside their skins this year, those poll numbers being so settled, and Labour still led by this Prime Minister, the only cause for fret being the obvious urgency to get on with the great task of transforming the country...

Esquire (January 2010) now on stands: Nowhere Boy(s)

Robert Downey Jr is Esquire's cover star this month; and approximately a million times better a cover star for a mens' magazine than, just for instance, Simon Cowell. Downey has had an incredible Hollywood comeback from a low, low ebb. Like Sean Penn he's an alumnus of Santa Monica High School, and the two men are friendly, as Penn tends to be with most of the really brilliant American actors. Back in that extended narcotic blue period Downey said of Sean, ‘I remember him saying three or four years ago, “You have two reputations. I think you know what both of them are, and I think you’d do well to get rid of one of those reputations. If you don’t, it will get rid of the other one . . .”’ Well, the other one turns out to have outlasted the first; Sean is one of those Friends of Robert who aided that process.
My film column this month is about Sam Taylor-Wood's absolutely glorious Nowhere Boy, of which I say it 'is probably a softer-edged piece than the facts of this case would suggest, for it offers us a certain closure; whereas the real Lennon (who, aged 30, wept through primal therapy with Arthur Janov, then wrote the anguished ‘Mother’) clearly took longer to find his peace. Movies, though, are more like myths than analyses, and they have a duty to get us to catharsis in a shorter time-span. Certainly I sobbed throughout the last reel of Nowhere Boy. Bouquets, then, to Taylor-Wood, her cast and crew (not least the brilliant cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) for a lovely, lyrical picture that flows – one should say ‘swings’ – just as bitter-sweetly as the rock ‘n’ roll that Lennon and friends invented.'

iToons!

My brother bought me an iPod for my last birthday, an amazingly great gift, and this after a few years of my doggedly saying I didn't fancy one (whenever asked by nearest and dearest.) Well, so much for all that Luddite nonsense, because iPods are, as it turns out, magic. (Did you know that? Why didn't you say?) Of course I am merely and belatedly joining the multitudes. I do remember that in the months after the iPod launch there was supposed to be a steep muggers' premium on those distinctive white ear-plugs and cord. Yesterday, waiting in a queue for a bus and plugged into the 'deluxe' edition of Blind Faith (specifically the bonus 'electric' version of 'Can't Find My Way Home', possibly my favourite song) I turned to see three people sat waiting beside me, all sporting the distinctive white ear-jacks and cord... Hey, we are the world. My only fear now is that I walk blithely in front of a bus while nodding keenly to Aerosmith playing 'Back in the Saddle' live...

Memo to RBS Board: Walk, if you so wish

On the subject of the RBS board's alleged threat to resign should the traditional annual bonus pot be denied them by the Government (on behalf of we the people), the Times hedges its bets in a leader this morning, describing the course of denial as 'tempting' while repeating the oft-heard assertion that banks bleed talent when they can't pay these hard-driving geniuses millions in bonuses. Thankfully, over on the Times' op-ed pages, Anatole Kaletsky doesn't mess about trying to graze his backside by sitting on the fence:

If these people threaten to resign, the Government should jump at the opportunity to clear them off the board, with no need for compensation payments of any kind... Who could run RBS if all these luminaries removed themselves? The answer is people with a sense of public service who have done well enough in other careers not to worry too much about the modest remuneration on offer — the sort of people who run public bodies such as the Royal Opera House or lead public inquiries into the reform of the health service...
The higher the salaries paid by RBS or any other bank, the more likely it is to fail, taking taxpayers’ money with it. The obvious and much discussed reason is that high salaries in finance generally reflect high-risk trading strategies… To maximise the chances of recouping its investment in RBS, therefore, the Government should ensure that the bank is run in the dullest, most risk-averse manner… the simplest banking operations should be quite profitable enough to recoup taxpayers’ money…
If limiting the size of the bonus pool encouraged the traders and investment bankers at RBS to move elsewhere, their departure should be a cause for celebration, not concern… What would then happen to the huge trading and investment banking businesses at RBS run by these highly paid and talented employees?... Now that global stock markets are on the road to recovery, selling off the higher-risk and more complex parts of RBS piecemeal would probably be more profitable than trying to keep the group together...
Which leads to the question of why bankers earn so much more than other similarly qualified workers. Is it really because they are so uniquely talented? Or is it because they have access to pools of capital, backed up by explicit or implied government guarantees? The answer is obvious… Rather than try to limit pay and bonuses directly, governments and regulators should simply insist that banks use all the revenues that they generate to increase their capital strength. In the case of RBS, a simple demand that the bank add a further £1.5 billion to its capital would drain the bonus pool and solve the problem.

Stately homes of England and me

The family and I passed last weekend in the country, don't you know - Essex Country, mate, a very nice stretch near to Saffron Walden. Our host was my esteemed editor Lee Brackstone (pictured, with me and wor bairns.) When it came to the sightseeing dimension of the sojourn, Lee was fairly sure that I would be wanting to tramp around the very turf where Cromwell made camp with the Roundheads; and ordinarily, of course, I would - but that's not really going to provide the requisite diversion for bairns, is it? In any case, it was classic turn-of-winter weather, hardly ideal for tramping.
Instead we had a fine late afternoon wander round the gardens of Audley End House, the former Walden Abbey, gifted by Henry VIII to Sir Thomas Audley - and the sort of magisterial estate that makes you marvel at the very thought that somebody once called it 'Home'. Late though we came to the tourist-oriented on-site proceedings, we made it at least to the kitchen shop and were able to enjoy a delightful jam-tasting, which was, obviously, just what the bairns had been after.