'Low life
Missing out
Jeffrey Bernard •
Ineed a face-lift and, until I get one, the only woman who is likely to pleasure me is Martha Argerich. I am not quite sure as to why it took me so long to discover her since she has been around for some time, and neither, for that matter, am I sure why it has taken me so long to be introduced to Sebastian Faulks, especially Birdsong, but thank God there are new things for me to hear and read other than Beethoven's Pas- toral Symphony and anything nominated for the Booker Prize.
Even Patricia Cornwell's detailed foren- sic post mortems are light relief but, to get back to a good plot before the likes of Dickens, I have had to resort to Heywood Hill to get me the Greek myths, which were sadly missed out at all the schools that I went to. It could take years to catch up with all that I missed, but there is quite a lot that I intend to miss from now on, and I'm seriously thinking of cancelling the Times, not that it will worry them in the slightest, and I only hesitate to do that because of the cricket and racing coverage and the obituaries to which I am addicted.
But recently there has been a lot of stuff in the Times which is a combination of advice to and information about the Princess of Wales and the horrors of a con- ventional Christmas. I am, however, grate- ful to the Times for printing the photo- graph of Nick Leeson which confirmed my suspicion that the City is full of champagne louts and most of them non-vintage cham- pagne louts at that. Leeson's wearing of a baseball cap back to front plus a Manch- ester City Football Club sweatshirt entitles him to be sentenced to two five-year sen- tences in the nick to run consecutively, apart from what he might get for fraud. Would you trust a man with your last £50 million who wears a baseball cap back to front?
There is one thing, though, about one of the Times columnists I like and that is the fact that, whatever or wherever Jonathan Meades eats, he does it with his tongue in his cheek and writes about it dutifully and not as though it is a scrumptious dormitory feast. I could just about take it when chefs and recipe plagiarists became the new elite, but for restaurant writers to become so is a little sickening. A good write-up from Fay Maschler or Michael Parkinson used to be the kiss of death for any restaurant, and now it is the cult of the personality of the restaurant writer that seems to matter more than the food he or she eats, so that Digby Anderson's imperative cooking is really Nazi cooking and The Spectator now has to sell an extra 500 copies a week to pay for Nigella Lawson's lunches. But I suppose I will have to stay with the Times for Jonathan Meades as well as the sports and obituary writers.
I was more surprised that he should write about Monte's because it is a club than because the membership is £500, the entrance fee £250 and the lunch or dinner every day £200. He described what Monte's calls 'crushed' potatoes as ineptly mashed potatoes, and he suggested that if you have that sort of money to throw around you could do better by flying to Bordeaux and eating at La Tupina. There are those, how- ever, who would rave about Monte's or knock it but would be unlikely to complain that the polished and veneered surfaces in the restaurant make it a paradise for nar- cissists. And I can think of food writers who would revel in what Meades calls the timid decorative taste that speaks only of money. His opinion that overcooked pasta is a French idiosyncracy should be Thought for the Week for any food snob.
`Got any diet porridge?'
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