The Questing Vole
o infinity and beyond? Certainly not. To reality, with a bump. That's much more the experience of the Gordon Ramsay household. (Mr Ramsay, regular television watchers will recall, is one of our most admired and exacting Michelin-starred chefs de cuisine.) The Ramsays have just had a kitchen fitted, whose piece de resistance was a cooker costing 167,000 and weighing two and a half tons, which had to be lowered in by a crane. With all that kit, Mr Ramsay is determined to give his kids proper nosh. Instead of ketchup, for example, to accompany his 'home-made cod fingers and thick chips', Mr Ramsay boasts to the Obsetver that he'll be serving his children a reduction of cheny tomatoes sweetened with caramelised icing sugar and deglazed with vinegar. 'The children,' the Observer's writer reports, 'dutifully taste it all and then politely request "the other ketchup".'
Incidentally, Mr Ramsay missed out on the sort of bargain that would have enhanced his kitchen no end: the world's poshest fridge, for only £200. The Duchess of Kent, I gather, has been advertising a barely used refrigerator for only ten of those pretty purple portraits of her still grander relative through a classified ad in the pages of Loot. To her very great credit, the Duchess has demurely declined to make hay with her title, preferring for the purposes of the transaction to be known as plain 'Mrs Kent'. We salute her.
As the adage has it, you cut your cloth according to your measure. A special award for sharp tailoring, then, must surely go to the veteran Hollywood reporter John Hiscock. Mr Hiscock first got the measure of the Daily Telegraph, and then of the Daily Mirror, before adapting with a few deft stitches his review of Mel Gibson's new film The Passion, about the death of Christ on the cross. In the Daily Telegraph, he was carefully judicious, noting that 'many adults are likely to have problems with the vivid descriptions of pain and violence' yet acknowledging that it was a 'worthy and serious' piece of cinema. The following day a rejigged version of the article appeared in the Mirror: 'Mel Gibson's controversial story of the last hours of Jesus Christ is a sickening bloodbath,' he wrote, 'and, in my opinion, suitable viewing only for sadists.'
Mr Hiscock does, however, raise an anxious-making point. The orthodox view of the moral majority at which Mr Gibson's film is pitched is that the depiction of violence and immorality in Hollywood
films is responsible for most of the 'copycat' examples of violence and immorality we observe among our brutal and vicious offspring. How, then, are we to respond when a spate of schoolyard crucifixions across middle America leads to calls for a ban on The Greatest Story Ever Told?
The telephone rings. It is my homophobia correspondent, Butch, with a fresh theory as to the true forces moving behind the sinister special-interest groups that have led the creeping charge in favour of making gay marriage a de facto institution worldwide. 'As we know,' he observes, 'the world is run by lawyers. And when gay marriage becomes a reality, who benefits? Why, lawyers. Think of the lucrative opportunities, as all those relationships break up! Who gets the curtains? Who gets to keep the poodle?' Odd fellow. As soon as the sedatives take action, we'll be investigating further.
And speaking of passing things on, I'm tickled by a story from the latest instalment of Popbitch, the questionably reliable email gossip circular, Robin Cook, according to Pop bitch spies, was recently apprehended in the act of buying some reduced-price Brussels sprouts and an 'enormous' pizza in an Edinburgh branch of Sainsbury's. When asked for an autograph, the former foreign secretary is said to have asked, 'Is it for a lovely lady?' Popbitch also reports that the West Indian cricketers Richie Richardson and Curtly Ambrose are currently playing in a reggae band called Big Bad Dread and the Baldhead.
Qne of the less visible anniversaries, but 1,--/ most deserving of commemoration, takes place next week. February 26 marks the 10th anniversary of the death, aged 32, of the comedian Bill Hicks, a tireless campaigner
against cant, humbug and political correctness, a proud and unabashed smoker of cigarettes, and a victim of pancreatic cancer. 'A war,' Mr Hicks once remarked, is when two armies are fighting. . . People said, "Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world." Yeah, . . maybe, but you know what? After the first three largest armies, there's a real big fuckin' drop off, all right? The Hare Krishnas are the fifth biggest army in the world and they've already got our airports,' That was about the first Gulf war. Tribute parties are planned for both sides of the Atlantic. London's will be in the Cobden Club; Belfast's in the Pavilion Bar.
Well, I never. Fergal Keane, the TV news reporter who rose to fame as the bonniest shedder of tears that ever Ireland saw, is determining to stiffen his upper lip. Interviewed, parenthetically, by the author of a scalding profile of Martin Bell in Prospect magazine, Mr Keane said, 'I'm weary of heart-on-the-sleeve journalism.' He added, 'The work I'm now most proud of are programmes which attempt to find out the facts and lay them out carefully.'
After careful consideration of the field of .electoral battle, this column has made a resolution. The Vole will henceforth determine to name and shame even brother columnists — yea, especially brother columnists — who insist on belabouring the public with lumberingly humorous pseudoconfusions between Senator John Kerry, the American presidential hopeful, and Kerry offa I'm A Celebrity, the TV garneshow cutie. Additional penalties will be levied on offenders who introduce their punchline with the phrase 'I refer, of course, to. . . 'or variants thereof. This practice must be stamped out, and stamped out now.
Honoured for services to corporate cant, this week: Coca-Cola. Note the plague of pseudo-hippyish new posters, with slogans like 'Hug', and the brass-necked suggestion that these represent the 'real' values of Coke. Feel the gorge rise as you learn from one Esther Lee (Chief Creative Officer, Coca-Cola North America') that 'creatively, the upbeat tone of the campaign reflects the heart, fun and desire that are core characteristics of Coca-Cola', Then consider. Is it a canful of heart, fun and desire? Or is it a nasty brown fizzy drink? The Vole recommends Humphrey McQueen's excellent book on the subject, The Essence of Capitalism, as a corrective to Coca-Cola 'reality',
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