DIARY
QUENTIN CREWE
n Saturday mornings, I go to Apt market. In one of the side streets Jean-Luc Danneyrolles, an enthusiastic, youngish man with sharp-cut features, has a small vegetable stall. He grows all the produce himself and makes a living selling it to restaurants. He enjoys the stall because it gives him a chance to talk to people about plants. Jean-Luc has good ordinary things, but he is primarily interested in strange varieties. This week he produced some yellow beetroot. I bought a couple and found that they were delicious, tasting exactly like the ordinary purple ones. Their yellow is very vivid and they make a shrill-coloured soup. Mixed with normal beetroot, they combine to make a soup of a rather horrid brown colour. I now want to find some way of preventing the two from blending and thus to come up with a wonderful patterned bortsch, chequered perhaps, like Lady Harris's racing colours. Incidentally, my market friend grows Cape gooseberries. He and I agree that this is a misnomer. They came originally from Peru and are cousins to the tomato. Yet I found them growing wild in Uganda. When I was investigating what trees and plants were indigenous there, a Ugandan etymologist told me that the Luganda name for Cape gooseberries was a true word, not an adaptation of an Arab or a European name. This should mean that they have been in Uganda for at least 300 years. Can anyone explain how this could be?
Aneighbouring girl of 20 is suffering from bulimia nervosa. This is a disease or mental affliction, somehow akin to anorex- ia, that mostly affects young women. It amounts to an unreasoning fear of becom- ing fat. To avoid putting on weight they go on dangerous diets; they put their fingers down their throats to make themselves sick after meals; they take large quantities of laxatives. Being of an age when, as M. F. K. Fisher put it, you have a 'permanent hole in your stomach', they naturally feel terribly hungry. They give way to what they think is temptation and, in their phraseology, 'go on a binge'. They are then haunted by guilt and redouble the starving, the vomiting and the laxatives. One of the frightening aspects of the complaint is that its victims can know perfectly well that what they are doing is foolish, even that their picture of themselves as fat is false. My young neighbour won't go anywhere near the swimming pool if any other young people are around, but one day she swam when I was the only person there. As she was drying herself, a strange look came over her face. Her eyes glazed into unreal- ity. 'Look, look, how disgusting all this is. It's revolting.' She squeezed a handful of perfectly normal flesh. 'I'm so fat. Yuck.'
It took time to soothe her. Her eyes shone blue again, but I knew she was uncon- vinced. Bulimia is new. It was identified as a separate condition by Professor Russell of the Maudsley Hospital in 1979. Psychiat- rists now believe that one per cent of all young women suffer from it seriously, and that 15 per cent of all first-year, female college students have it. It is rare but not unknown among young men. It is plain to see that bulimia is a direct consequence of the absurd pressures put on people by fashion designers, fashion magazines and the advertising industry. Nobody in Africa or Asia has bulimia. I remember one exquisitely beautiful girl in a remote oasis in Mauretania bewailing her shape. We would class her as plump.' 'I am so thin,' she said. 'No one will marry me.' Fashion designers are predominantly homosexual. They want girls to look like boys. Their excuse is that cloth hangs better on a slim figure. It isn't true, as the sari proves. Cloth hangs splendidly on the majestic figures of Nigerian ladies. Designers should use some ingenuity to repair the damage they have done. They could study Rubens and Lely and Watteau and Gau- guin. Magazine editors who care genuinely for the health of their readers should stop all this nonsense about slimming. Girls might then be able to revert to the curves which have for centuries charmed most men.
There was some small incident at a school this week that was reported on television. Several of the children were 'Nuclear power? — No cash.' interviewed. I was struck once again by how articulate French children are. They did not um and ah, but spoke clearly and fluently. They expressed their opinions with conviction. An equivalent group of British (perhaps not Scottish) children would stammer and simper and have no very vigorous opinions. The French family life, with two meals a day at which the family all sit together and there is far less of the 'seen and not heard' attitude, is one factor. Another is that French children learn to read much later than English children. So it is that they do not have to end every sentence with that pathetic phrase — 'know what I mean?' I notice, moreover, that the French, who used to be so chauvinist, now speak foreign lan- guages. The mechanic in a garage, the girl at the supermarket check-out counter they nearly all speak a little English. How many British mechanics and cashiers speak French?
Iheard someone on the BBC World Service voicing wonder that so many peo- ple in East Germany should have sprung, seemingly from nowhere, saying the same things — things that a month ago were unsayable. I would attribute at any rate a part of this unanimity of thought to the work of the World Service itself. Whenev- er I hear that the Government wants to cut their budget, I feel almost ill with rage. In that same oasis in Mauretania, the prefer told me that everyone relied on the BBC for truthful news. I was in India when Mrs Gandhi was assassinated. The BBC broad- cast the news of her death hours before the Indian radio. The BBC correspondents are a remarkable lot. Mark Tully in Delhi, for example, is one of the world's finest broadcasters, reliable, informative and en- tertaining. The young correspondent in Uganda, Catherine Bond, drives herself alone into Karamoja for a weekend of research or to the border of Sudan places where I would not dare to go. The honesty and courage of those who work for the BBC do more good for Britain than anything else I can think of.
Blair Mackichan, a young friend who i leads a lively pop-funk group called 2 point 2, has a new job. He has signed a contract to be the teenage son of the family in Oxo's television advertisements. The man who has played the part for several years resigned on a matter of principle. He had become a vegetarian. Ironically Oxo are bringing out a meatless, organic, green cube.
A uberon Waugh will resume his column next week.
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