im y son returned home from school last Friday in something
of a mood because there had been a supply teacher for the day who had given him a written warning for farting in a Deliberately Loud Manner. I put these last words in capital letters in an attempt to convey his incredulity and outrage. 'It was not deliberate,' he cried. 'If it had been, it would have been Much Louder!' A warning, it seems, is no small matter, as it means a reduced playtime, and he would like me to go to school to plead on his behalf. 'And how,' I asked, 'should I do that, darling? Shall I record the various noises you are capable of to prove that, on the scale of things, Friday's was but a pitiful squeak?' He was much taken with this idea. 'Where's your little tape-recorder, Mum?' I had to explain that I was only joking. He looked most crestfallen, God knows why. I admit I have deceived my son much over the years, but I don't think that I've ever duped him into thinking that I might be a fearless campaigner for miscarriages of justice.
The following day, alas, his outrage had not diminished. His friend Otis came over in the morning. 'It wasn't loud, was it, Otis?' Otis confirmed that it was not. 'You've done much louder,' he said admiringly. He played five-aside football with some classmates in the afternoon. 'Do you think the warning was fair?' he asked them all in turn. The answers varied, according to how close they were to him at the time. [believe the closest one was the boy who, instead of a reply, simply pulled his jumper up over his nose. By late Saturday afternoon, he was still going on and on about it, so, to distract him, and before he suggested we get on to the European Court of Human Rights, I decided we would go out to dinner to a place called S&M, which specialises in sausage and mash. My son loves sausage and mash. When I rang to invite another couple along, I got the husband on the phone. 'Fancy S&M?' I said. 'Rather,' he said. 'It's a sausage-and-mash caff in Islington,' I continued. 'Pity,' he said. However, en route to the aforementioned I did notice a place on the Holloway Road called Fettered Pleasures, which seemed to be doing a very good deal on leg-irons and handcuffs. It's at number 90. I throw that in because the Holloway Road is very long and, Spectator readers being what they are, I'm not convinced that they are quite sprightly enough logo from one end to the other in search of it.
Now, S&M is on the Essex Road and on the site which, until a couple of years ago, had been the exquisitely greasy caff Alfredo's for nigh on 50 years. Alfredo's featured in the film Quadrophenia, which starred, among others,
the young Leslie Ash in the days she had lips for lips instead of a child's rubber ring. S&M have certainly done a good job on the building. The 1947, listed, deco-style interior has been magnificently restored: gleaming steel, vitolite ceilings throughout, an original 'Ices 3d, 4d, bd' sign, lashings of blue Formica laid with I-1P sauce, ketchup and four types of mustard, including one made with wild honey that was so delicious I wanted to eat the whole pot. (Wild honey? Does it go out and not come back all night?) The clientele seemed, largely, to be other middle-class families. (It was still only 7 p.m., and things might well change later on.) However, the thought that first occurred to me was that this place might be providing a greasy-spoon experience for people who do not wish to go to the real thing where they might have to mix with Sun readers. Indeed, S&M might be to greasy spoons what, say, Centre Pares is to Butlins: a way for the middle classes to enjoy what are traditionally workingclass pursuits without exposing themselves to the danger of being talked into going down the bingo. Fabulous idea. Have you seen how much it costs to go to Centre Pares? And it's always booked solid. I wish I'd thought of it. (As for Butlins, for some reason they sent me a brochure recently. I was, I must say, particularly impressed by the photograph of their on-site Londis shop, which featured a mother and daughter standing at a chest freezer and looking longingly at a bag of Ross — no relation — frozen chips.) S&M, by the way, is licensed and has a small wine list.
The deal there is: first, you choose what sort of sausage you want. London traditional rich pork? Stilton and celery? Gourmet duck and orange? Spiced Italian? Cumberland ring? Then it's the mash: regular, bubble-andsqueak, dairy-free? Then the gravy: red onion, wild mushroom, wholegrain mustard, and so on. Two sausages with mash and gravy is £5.95, three is £6.95. There are other things on the menu — calves' liver, smoked-duck-breast
salad — but it seems to me that if you come to a sausage-and-mash place you might as well have sausage and mash. I ordered three sausages (traditional rich pork, spiced Italian and leek and Caerphilly) with bubble-andsqueak mash and red-onion gravy. It came in the most delightful Beano-ish way, with the sausages vertically sticking out of the mash; very Desperate Dan. I was hopeful. However, looks can be deceptive, as we all know. You can't tell a book by its cover, unless it's acid green and pink and has a high-heeled shoe on it, in which case you know it's chick-lit and total crap. Whatever, I do like a sausage. In particular, I like one that is crisp on the outside (the casing should put up a little fight) and moist in the middle. These sausages, though, were. . . well. . just so disappointingly bland. Bland in texture — had they been parboiled before they were grilled? I wondered — and bland in taste. There was no way I could tell the difference between the traditional London and spiced Italian. As for the leek and Caerphilly, I'd only ordered it out of curiosity. I knew it would be a mistake, and it was. A vegetarian sausage, to my mind, is not really a sausage at all. A sausage has to be meaty. That is the point. A vegetarian sausage is, in fact, that most pointless of foods: a rissole.
The mash and gravy? Well, there was no sign of any bubble or of any squeak in my mash (just one pea, for some reason), plus it was thinnish and watery. The gravy was tasty enough, but tepid. I complain only because if a restaurant specialises in something, it would be nice if it did that something really, really well. Oh, and we also ordered a couple of portions of peas that came as baked beans, which we really didn't need, for obvious reasons.
Pudding? Apple crumbles all round, some with custard, and some cream. However, the jugs were hot (just out of the dishwasher?) and the cream had curdled horribly. We sent it back. More appeared. We poured it and then realised that the hot jug had not been at the root of the problem. The problem was disgustingly rank cream. The friendly waitress apologised like mad and promised to knock all our puddings off the bill, which would have been fine if they had, but they didn't, so we had to send back the bill. Look, I don't have it in for S&M. It's cosy and modest and off cream can happen to anyone. But I'm not sure that it's anything particularly special. As for my son, he has yet to be distracted, but is more philosophical. As he announced in the car on our way home, 'What is a fart, after all? It's only a burp that's gone downwards.'
S&M, 4 Essex Road, London Ni. Tel: 020 7359 5361.
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