Remember, Remember; or, Forget Completely

Across England there will be conflagrations. Accident & Emergency centres will be on standby for their busiest night of the year, waiting for one idiotic teenager after another to explode through the doors with firework related injuries. Effigies of England’s most notorious Catholic will be burnt without a second thought, while delighted nippers will get sick on bonfire toffee and toffee apples. What fun!

For my American readers, which accounts for most of you, tonight is Guy Fawkes night, or if you prefer the euphemism, Bonfire Night. It’s a tradition that’s been suffering in recent years because of the rise of the infinitely more commercial Hallowe’en, which is an abomination of a festival in the eyes of this author. The proximity of the two events rather tires the public, who traditionally gave a ‘penny for the Guy’ (more on that below), but who are now held to ransom on their doorsteps a few days earlier by adolescents threatening to vandalise their property unless some money changes hands. Such is ‘trick or treat’ in England.

My childhood reminiscences about Guy Fawkes night are in the mode of innocence. Building a bonfire, watching the fireworks, making and then burning the Guy – it was all such a terrific wonder. The great taboo – fire – was once annually the licensed preoccupation of school children. It was an excitement akin only to Christmas morning. And it came with a song, which everybody knew and repeated, lest we should forget:

Remember, remember the 5^th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

And so we sang it, having not much of a clue why we were supposed to remember it. Sometime in the 1980s, the health and safety brigade made the ‘remember, remember’ motto into a cautionary tale about ‘The Firework Code’, with pictures of little Johnny’s burnt hand, and the girl who had a firework go off in her face. I’m pretty sure that this put the very idea into the heads of many a scoundrel.

Round the neighbourhood we would go, dragging a lumpy representation of Guy Fawkes, the manufacturing costs of which were to be met by the village folk. The burning of this effigy was to honour the real burning of Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in a Catholic plot to get rid of King James I. We vaguely knew this. We also vaguely knew that Fawkes had been caught in the act, tortured until he confessed, taken to the gallows, from which he jumped and broke his own neck. He was then drawn and quartered, and finally chucked on a great pyre as an example to any other Catholics with big ideas (there is some confusion about this last part). Somehow or other, it became a legendary victory for democracy.

The Conspirators

So, in short, a religious extremist took umbrage with the status quo and, in a desperate act of terrorism, tried to assassinate the representatives of government. That government, terrified and reactionary, used torture, killing, and rites of public humiliation to assert its authority. The public, raised to fever pitch with hatred and intolerance, smacked their bloodthirsty chops and carried out representative acts of torture and burning, so as to make their allegiances clear.

Oddly enough, it’s always been told as a story of just punishment for treason. In 1605, doubtless it was.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar? Funny, because while we’re all busy ‘remembering’ we seem to have forgotten completely.

Tonight I’ll be introducing the tradition to some Germans in a little village near Potsdam. There will be children, eyes sparkling at tales of historic gore, who will be instructed to remember. But as a good historian, my exhortation will have more to do with what seems to have become the moral of this story: what goes around comes around. Be vigilant.

A Tweed Romance

It is tweed season. Long gone are the humid quandaries about the short trouser and the intransigent male knee; past is the rumple and crumple of processed flax; forgotten are our cotton discontents. We wait each year for the donning of Scottish twill, much as we shall lament its passing come spring, for the tweed season warms a man’s bosom just as his mantel warms his body. In tweed we reign majestic, clad in sturdy tradition, embodying fine craftsmanship, and ready for anything. Striding o’er hill and dale, sheep shoot us jealous glances at the finery we have woven from their coats. No fabric bespeaks sturdiness, fortitude and downright bloody-minded stubbornness as does this highland wooliness.

It is a solemn and momentous day when a man first acquires a coat of tweed, because it represents his emergence as himself. Tweed, after all, is the stuff of youthful scorn, unfairly associated with fusty granddads and stolidity. It comes with a bouquet of aristocratic rottenness that marks it out as a corrupt badge of distinction. It is a pompous old crotchety farmer. It is an Olde English hairshirt. It is, of course, none of these things, but it takes a profound moment of inner strength to tear off the drab overtones of threadbare stereotypes and thrust oneself into the loosely woven complexity of a truly adult suit of clothes. Tweed is a rite of passage.

From the wonderful Timothy Everest, of course.

Like all ceremonies, one is transported there each time the memory of it is evoked. Hence, at this time of year, one returns to the first tweedful radiance, in the blush ebullience of youth. The virgin crop of feelings of maturity, gravitas, authority and, above all, self-respect, return reinvigorated. One is re-born a man once again.  Let not the rock star, the high-street faux-tweed faux pas, or the Gant model deceive you. Tweed is truly a manly affair: not an on-again-off-again fling, but a perennial foundation stone of the goodness of man.

This post is dedicated to Gilles. Welcome to the club.

Apparition in Birdland

There’s only one way to improve a martini, and that is to have a commodious throat breathe a saxophone over it. Now, there are saxophone players and there are others for whom the horn is an extension of their souls. Most of these people are dead.

One such dead man is John Coltrane, whose ghost I half expected to see mooching around Birdland. Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for a living, breathing, reincarnation of the man, his essence, and his tone. Ravi Coltrane embodies the very posture of his father, forcing one to shake one’s head in disbelief. In a set that navigated between the energetic and the melancholic, Coltrane’s muse was explicitly his mother. His four-piece ensemble played music by her, for her, and to her. If this wasn’t a direct line to the ‘60s, I don’t know what could be.

Too often in great cities with great pasts, historic venues have become merely tourist traps. If I’m honest, I expected Birdland to be just such a hokey hole. I am happily disabused.

Make Something of Something

I’ve been following the energetic creativity and general joie de vivre of Claire the illustrator for a good while. Sometimes young people give you hope – there’s a spark there: a passion, a purpose, a spirit. If you’re looking for an example of resourcefulness, seek her out. I thought she was a real individual who happened to be handy with a pencil, but it turns out she’s also handy with saw and set-square. She wanted for something, and went and made the damn thing. Now that is a kind of problem-solving psychology that is all too rare these days. And there’s a fair example of fatherhood here too. Go look.

Image lifted from http://illustratorclaire.wordpress.com/. Pretty sure she'll be alright with that.

The example set me thinking. Time was that there were three kinds of people: people who made stuff or dug it out of the ground; people who sold the stuff that was made, or else filled in ledgers to record how much was sold; and people who did bugger all. Each had a value set. The first put value in skill; the second put value in money; the third put value in blood, or else in tradition. It seems to me that there is something very honourable in setting store by skill, something noble about blood, and something essential about tradition. And that makes me lament all the more that practically everyone these days is of the second category. Everyone is a salesman or an administrator, and our lives are reducible to an overwhelming concern with the bottom line. I find very little by way of humanity in the mere chasing of green.

Alas, the artisan and the patron are not likely to be resuscitated any time soon. I therefore exhort you to do as our young exemplar does, and make something of something. Find some value in life that does not reduce to dollars and cents. If you have a frivolous hobby, pursue it seriously. Play an instrument? Dedicate yourself to mastering it. If you’re a gardener, don’t satisfy yourself with pulling weeds, but work to enchant it. Write stories? Get published! There is humanity in these things, for the human creature is artful and skilful. Therein lies one source of our cachet.

How Many British Royals Have A Degree?

I was given to ask this question yesterday when I remembered that the Duke of Cambridge’s last title will forever be ‘MA’. Such a fuss was made years ago when Prince William opted for St. Andrews that anyone might have been forgiven for thinking he had broken with sacred tradition in snubbing Cambridge. In truth, William was probably the first to go to University according to merit (in the Blairite sense). Military careers have been more the norm for the British monarchy, not known for its intellectual nous, and in fact the royal degree remains a rare bird indeed.

Only six of the royal family ever have earned a degree. You can find out quite easily that Charles, current Prince of Wales, was the third ever royal to gain a degree, with a 2:2 from Trinity, Cambridge in 1970. Working out who the two before him were has proven challenging. Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, seems to have been the first to attend university, most notably studying history with Charles Kingsley at Trinity, Cambridge, but he didn’t graduate. That takes us down to the 1860s already. Queen Victoria’s eighth child, the Prince Leopold (Duke of Albany) went to Christ Church, Oxford, and left with an honorary Doctorate in Civil Law in 1876. Does that count? The second would then have been Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, who has a BA in Architecture from Magdalene, Cambridge (1966).

Prince Richard, the bright spark in the Royal Family

More recently, Prince Edward, current Earl of Wessex has a degree in History from Jesus, Cambridge (1986, after some controversy about his rather unmeritorious admission); Peter Phillips, who often gets forgotten because his mother didn’t want them to have royal titles, has a BA in Sports Science from Exeter (his sister Zara also went to Exeter, but I’m not sure her physiotherapy qualification is a degree); and then there’s William, with his Geography MA from St. Andrews. Beatrice (Goldsmiths, 2011) and Eugenie (Newcastle, 2012) will follow along soon, all being well. And I suppose we must now count the Duchess of Cambridge as number seven?

My interest here is purely academic, as it were, but I’d be grateful to anyone who could correct any of this, or provide further information.

On Loyalty and Unassuming Pride, Part I

I watched a film today that I found posted by Will at A Suitable Wardrobe. It was made under the auspices of Esquire, and I only wish everything perpetrated by that particular rag paid such sober reverence to quality and tradition. If you have a spare hour, go and have a look. There are some very ordinary, salt of the earth, old-fashioned working people interviewed in this film; or at least, they seem ordinary, but they are not. In fact, they are stunningly exceptional.

Time was when the best working people spent years honing a skill, a craft, a vocation. The finest artisans did things that their brethren could not do, and they were rightly revered. They built the backbone of an empire, literally, with their bare hands. Forget machines. Forget steam. What drove British preëminence was a mind to quality. It was superiority in skill, in combination with the finest resources. As with so many ironies of history, the world these men built was to be inhabited by men who found no further use for them. The machine – the engine of mass production – was the death knell of empire. The zenith of imperial production was also the possibility for colonial competition. Any man, after all, can turn on a machine. Not everyman can make one.

How refreshing, therefore, to see a number of people who have spent years at their craft, loyally serving companies that had their origin in headier days. They are the last of their breed, but you can almost see the sense of pride running through their veins. Pride is not something I would typically advocate, save where it is magnanimous and absolutely justified. These people make the finest things of their type anywhere. They cannot themselves afford to own the things they make, but they are proud to see them being worn by others. Watch the tweed maker fill up when he sees his cloth transformed into a bespoke jacket, on the back of a Savile Row man. The social distance traversed in this extraordinary meeting is really something to behold. The pride is precious.

The loyalty of these people is bound up with their pride. They work for men who give them jobs for life, on the understanding that the standard set is high. Note how few young people you see in this film. We have lost hold of what it means, what it meant, to work for somebody, for something, that you believed to be important. Much greater than the pursuit of chasing pound notes was once the pursuit of position. Among working-class people, a skilled position within an esteemed manufactory was to be blessed with the best that could be hoped for: the respect of one’s peers, one’s employer, one’s family. To own a skill was a much greater asset than mere wealth. To ply that skill for the man who first employed you, and to do so for all your working days, was a matter of honour. One can read of it in books; it is a rarity to witness.

So, where do your loyalties lie, and does what you own mean anything? Without skills, and without allegiances, we run the risk of being frivolous, even to ourselves.

The Butcher

One of my earliest memories is of the local butcher’s shop. I’d press my nose on the refrigerated glass and look at what to me was a smorgasbord of delight. Black pudding, lambs' kidneys, fresh sausages, streaky bacon and back, pigs’ trotters and sows’ ears, and so on and so on. I never was much of a one for sweets or toy soldiers. These cuts were my heart’s desire but, much like the child who never owns the toy of his dreams, it was the visit to the shop that I cherished more than the things themselves. On the back wall, which was covered in shiny blue and white tiles, was a row of meat hooks upon which hung a variety of larger carcases. In those days things weren’t pre-cut and packaged; the butcher waited for you to order your joint before hauling down the whole hunk on his shoulder and pouring it out onto the block. He sharpened a gloriously large knife with a long steel that was kept in a leather belt, moving with such speed but miraculously never cutting off his hand. The joint was cut to size, but still attached by the bone. Out came the clever: the moment I always anticipated most. My local butcher was a wiry, tall man with glasses. He’d raise the cleaver right above his head – a good seven feet above my gaze – and bring it down with clinical accuracy upon the bone, making the most delicious crack, immediately followed by the dull thud of blade in block. For many years as a child I really wanted to own a cleaver. All of this took place in a uniquely cool atmosphere – like walking into the fridge to choose your dinner – but with a warmth of conversation that taught me to recognise that butchers are (sadly, were) pillars of the community.

The butcher used to know everyone and, in all probability, everyone’s business too. The single-most important quality for a butcher was discretion, and that made him a great listener. Yet history has been unkind to them. By precedent they did not serve on juries because their work was thought to harden their hearts. I never could work out how a butcher was any more likely to be callous than a surgeon, a veterinarian, or a funeral director – those pillars of middle-class life who might have been thought ideal candidates for duty at court. But butchers were working class, and concomitantly thought to be unrefined, unpredictable, and already somewhat hardened by life. Their singular quality of being able to listen without prejudice was overlooked because of other doubts.

Gillray, The British Butcher supplying John Bull with a Substitute for Bread, 1795

Still, not everyone maligned these men. Representations of John Bull, the stalwart freeborn Englishman, had a forerunner in the caricatured form of the butcher, and William Hogarth left no doubt about the importance of beef (and implicitly, those who provided it) in his idealization of a content and fulfilled society. He was the pivot point around which local life gathered, for everyone had to visit him, and most probably would meet each other at his shambles. In wartime the butcher became a man of great power, able to do unto his neighbours that which they had done unto him. It became a matter of great importance to respect the butcher if one was to feed a family in times of ration. Mr. Jones the butcher of Dad’s Army fame is the archetype: friendly, eager, courageous, and with a heightened sense of justice.

Hogarth, Beer Street, 1750 (hunk of beef to the left)

There aren’t many left. My mother still has a good one – actually a husband and wife team – but they are knocking on, and soon the supermarket will have won. My Hungarian butcher in Montreal is the salt of the earth, but he too is getting long in the tooth. In Berlin things are a little brighter, but I don’t quite yet have the hang of the experience yet. I’m working on it. In any case, I thought I’d share a thought or two on these rare men, for they are not long for this world, and we may not yet realise just how much we shall miss them.

 Rembrandt, Carcass of Beef, 1655

A Man’s A Man for A’ That; Or, Burns Night

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that
The coward slave, we pass him by
We dare be poor for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
Our toil’s obscure and a’ that
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp
The man’s the gowd for a’ that

What though on hamely fare we dine
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine
A man’s a man, for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
Their tinsel show an’ a’ that
The honest man, though e’er sae poor
Is king o’ men for a’ that

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord
Wha struts an’ stares an’ a’ that
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word
He’s but a coof for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
His ribband, star and a’ that
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that

A prince can mak’ a belted knight
A marquise, duke, an’ a’ that
But an honest man’s abon his might
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that
For a’ that an’ a’ that
Their dignities an’ a’ that
The pith o’ sense an’ pride o’ worth
Are higher rank that a’ that

Then let us pray that come it may
(as come it will for a’ that)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that
For a’ that an’ a’ that
It’s coming yet for a’ that
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that

(1795) 

Scotch Myths

A boy of twelve, fair-haired and freckled, essentially innocent but with suspicions, went to the Highlands of Scotland. He lamely fished for salmon in river and loch, and later saw them spawning in their thousands. Fat-bellied monsters threw themselves against rocky waterfalls, and he was impressed by their determination. He gathered mushrooms in the woods, and learnt which ones not to pick. He went all the way to the Northern coastline, to eat a fish supper with the gulls, and over to Skye to see that there really was nothing there. Winding through glens on narrow roads, craning over dizzying precipices, noting eagles and ospreys, he discovered a hallowed trail. It has stayed with him since, although he does not appreciate it. The amber reward at the end of this trail that thrust him into adulthood is with him yet.

It was the distillery trail: a marked route that networked the producers of the stuff of libations since time immemorial; the noble spirit that Scotland may consider its most worthy contribution to the world. Nestled in heady country, higher than any other, was the Tomatin distillery. The boy looked around at row upon row of barrels of oak, some of which once contained Spanish sherry. A dram was passed around, of their standard twelve-year-old single malt, and he was not overlooked. Two things the same age, one mature, the other fresh, met. The moment of imbibing brought blood to the lips and the cheeks, a momentary numbness, a rush of aroma – malt, apples, pears, bonfires – and then sheer joy, followed by a molten feeling of the generation of internal heat, as if he had swallowed an exothermic elixir. The moment passed; the world began again; the boy had taken a step towards manhood.

It is many years later. The boy is a man. He has not thought of these things for a long time. He is in a foreign land, surrounded by unfamiliar things, and he is walking. It is winter; a harsh winter. He passes a liquor store that seems to have an air about it. He stops in his tracks, agog, and presses his nose against the plate. When the fog of his breath clears he sees what his mind had told him must surely have been an apparition: a row of bottles labelled Tomatin. There are twelve-year-old and fifteen-year-old varieties. He is transported; connections are made; synapses in the brain tripped. He is twelve again, taking steps into an incipient manhood. How came he here? By what route? The man enters the establishment and purchases a bottle. It feels like buying a memory, but somehow more substantial than that.

The man writes to all his friends. ‘If you can find it, I strongly urge it upon you. It makes men of boys’.

Keeping It In The Family

‘Tis said that tweed only comes into its own when passed down to the next generation. Generally speaking, it’s worth hanging on to well-made, well-cut clothes, so long as there is someone on hand to wear them. The following example is a case in point. No longer doing quite the job for my father-in-law, this Aquascutum lovely has come my way, just as I was needing a new overcoat. Its splendidness is matched only by its having come freely my way, from one who was pleased as punch to see its life not only extended, but kept in the family to boot.

Oddly enough, I was wearing this coat on the plane back from Canada, and as I was disembarking in London, the purser (male) looked me up and down, sighed, and exclaimed, ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about! A proper Englishman!’ I was tempted to reply in German, but as always when this kind of thing happens, I offered humble thanks and went on my way, wondering what, precisely, makes me look so English. On this occasion, wearing an entirely Canadian coat built on the foundations of English sartorial heritage, I wondered how my father-in-law would have reacted to such a statement (he is ancestrally French, with a touch of Scandinavian; until now, the family has been unsullied by English blood). Sacrebleu!

Game On; or, Manly Cuisine

Men aren’t nearly so afraid of cooking as perhaps they were twenty years ago and more, but there’s an awful lot of knife wielding, fire building and grunting going on. It’s almost as if channelling your inner cave man is a good idea, and I can think of no greater insult to the great achievements of civilisation – of the refinements of skill, thought, and art – than to extol the virtues of the cave. Really, the so-called crisis of masculinity that has abounded, especially in the US, since the early ‘90s, is nothing short of a resignation. The romantic notion of a time when men were real men – an image of loincloth-wearing, spear-carrying, knuckle-dragging hominids – is plainly absurd. From the Greeks on down, refinement in food preparation, eating, drinking, and philosophising about it all, has been the remit of the greatest men and the greatest minds. Lighting a grill just doesn’t cut it. And the gnashing of teeth makes you little better than an ape. It’s time to put the manliness back into food.

Inspired in part by my good friend who likes to eat like an Edwardian, and by thoughts of things honestly raised and honestly killed, I ventured to make this game terrine:

Several things immediately strike me as worthy about this. First, nothing in it came from a supermarket. Second, and relatedly, I was given a reason to visit a number of local butchers and grocers, which are still like little community centres if you can find them. My Hungarian butcher was stunned by a request for streaky bacon, which he had not heard before in fifty years dealing with pigs. I still have a lot to learn about the English language outside of England. While he was giving me a tour of his bacon varieties his colleague was busy trying to give financial advice to an old eccentric who only knew the poles of extravagance and destitution, with nothing in between. The butcher offered to put money aside, for the lean times, but whiskey dreams beat out the benevolent butcher banker. Third, the making of such an intricate dish connects one with a wealth of tradition. Fourth, there was so much of it – four pounds of meat went into it, including venison (fillets and livers), duck, ostrich, sausage, and the aforementioned bacon – that it did the rounds at the holiday parties, and brought friends together. Food is the bedrock of friendship – cum panis, company – so isn’t it all the better if we can supply it?

Most importantly, perhaps, this dish was honest. It is was somewhat labour intensive, but it contained absolutely no processed crap. Somehow it embodied provision, and this, perhaps, is what ought to define the manly cook.

School Uniform; or, The Beginnings of Self-Respect

My paternal grandmother was a fierce woman. I don’t think that anyone who knew her would disagree. Until she was 80 she would go on long marches with a stick, and I was never convinced that the stick served any purpose but for beating stubborn livestock that crossed her path. No doubt her early experience with a bull that had blocked her way home across a field had taught her a lesson. On that occasion she had been forced to spend the night under the stars, staring down the animal with contempt.

The 5th Earl of Carnarvon, or my grandma's largely absentee squire

Always take a stick. This lesson applied to life in general, and she wouldn’t suffer any nonsense. Nevertheless, my grandmother knew her place. She was working class, and defiantly proud of it. I’m sure she used to curtsey for the Earl of Carnarvon when he was up there shooting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she cuffed the lads who weren’t prompt enough in the tugging of forelocks. Being working class was about being respectable: work hard; never let anybody see that you’re hurting, or that you have feelings; toe the line, even when you hate it, but give ‘em what for if there’s a whiff of injustice. Knowing one’s place involved everyone also knowing their respective places. In its own way, it worked. Of course, it also damaged. All that swallowed anger and resentment, those bottled up emotions and un-talked about problems – it was a patchwork of scarring. Still, face was saved. Respectability was assured. Heads could always be held high.


C.J. Vaughan

I wonder if we can dispense with the scarring and somehow reinvigorate the self-respect. What drove people then was a sense of belonging to a group, the code of which ensured that social transgression was policed not by parliament but by community. The same held good for the elite. C.J. Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow in the 1850s, once gave a lecture at Repton (home town of the aforementioned grandmother), claiming that authority and respect was maintained in the elite public schools by the prefects and praeposters, keeping bullying and oppression in check through their own activity of mind, industry and good conduct. Self-respect among leaders set the example for followers.


Local (to me) working-class school uniforms, c. 1970.

This week I read in the news that Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to encourage schools to re-introduce blazer and tie uniforms, and traditional prefect and house systems. There’s not much that’s come out of the mouth of this man in the last few months that I would care to endorse, but I think this is a worthy idea. I was looking through some archival photographs of kids from my childhood locale and noting that it really wasn’t so long ago that even the lowliest of comprehensive schools chose to sport collar, blazer and tie. Kids used to look smart, and schools had an identity because of their colours. Children felt like they belonged, and took ownership of their identity. Sure, they chaffed at the system at times, but surely they looked (and behaved) better than the track-suited and denim tribes one sees these days. I also remember with fondness the house system, with its house points, as late as the 1980s. I was in Nightingale house, and there was a genuine sense of wanting to do well for it. Good conduct, not to mention good work, benefitted the group as well as the individual. Bad behaviour penalised the group, and the group therefore policed itself. I really don’t know why we scrapped such things. To be house Captain surely was no bad thing. Why would we not want that for our children? All of it taught them self-respect, and all of it helped to ensure that the community sorted out its own transgressors.

My senior school scrapped the blazer and tie just before I joined it at 11. I’m sure my grandmother was appalled. Given the chance she would, no doubt, have cuffed the headmaster. Bring it back, I say, and let’s re-begin with self-respect.

Giving Thanks for Americans

Regular readers will know that I have an equivocal relationship with America and Americans, but it should be noted that while I have disliked It and some of Them with a fervency quite unmatched, I have also loved It and others of Them to degrees otherwise unknown. And this is not unbefitting for a country that has had a tendency of late to divide opinions, even among its natives (and historically, among its Natives). However much this leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, one can nonetheless state with complete certainty that American life is currently fully fuelled with passion, debate, and activity. While we may find fault with some of the chosen outlets for the burning of this fuel, we should be thankful that people are exercising their right to have a damn good barney.

Tomorrow is a special day for them, and it is scarcely creditable to me that this time last year I was there, cooking roast beef as a sort of Old World protest. I marked the day with mental relief at the removal of Hallowe’en decorations, and thought it was a jolly good thing to have a day of family and recreational time, filled to the gills with good food, only a month before Christmas: sort of a dry run for the real deal.

So, from my distant vantage, I raise a glass to the manly Americans out there, and salute your spirit. Long may you continue free.

To the Future King and Queen

The announcement of a Royal engagement is newsworthy for precisely one reason: we discover who is to be our future Queen. It is not important for us to know if she can work, but if she will serve; not if she is happy, but if she is dutiful; not if she is pretty, but if she is healthy. And one might say that even these things should be beyond our ken, for it is nothing to do with us after all whom His Royal Highness chooses to wed. She is entering a public role, and this should have nothing to do with the paparazzi, or with intimate knowledge about whether she can cook, or with what she chooses to wear.

Our utter disrespect for the Monarchy is generally expressed through our interest in all the bits and pieces of their existence that are completely and wholly irrelevant. We reduce them to first names, follow them in celebrity magazines, pass judgment on their comments, their actions, their every move. We answer nonsensical polls about whether we ‘like’ them, or what they’re ‘good for’, and go about as if our opinions on such things matter. We are generally so dim-wittedly unaware of what the Monarchy is for, and from whence it came, that one wonders why we bother taking so much ‘interest’ in it at all, or rather, why they seem so intent on managing their media presence. The Monarchy is now on Facebook, and you can ‘like’ it, and for its part, it will delete offensive comments. The post- modern court is dull, plebeian, and hideously democratic. If Royalty is reduced to this, then how do we distinguish it from its opposite: the Anti-Monarchy Society, also of Facebook?

We really should take note of the Monachy mottos, and so might They

We are mistaken to think, and the Monarchy is mistaken to endorse the thought, that we all inhabit the same world; that they’re ordinary people, like you and me; that we have a right to know, and that they have an obligation to tell us. If all of that were true then they should not continue as a monarchy, but instead retire into middle-class ennui. The Monarchy has forgotten how to be a monarchy, it seems. They care what we think, and they appear on sofas talking to journalists who call them William and Kate. And this breeds nothing but contempt in those who look for reasons to abolish the whole lot of them, for they flaunt the lie of their special distinction, rubbing our noses in it. For God’s sake go back into your palaces, and occasionally deign to wave at us from a balcony. Be mysterious, aloof, eccentric. Be evasive, elusive, and above all have contempt for the media limelight. You do not need to court it, or to woo us. You are the Monarchy. You have to believe, or at least portray that you believe, that you are morally, spiritually, and constitutionally distinct from me, and from everyone else. It may be utter nonsense, but those are the terms, or else all bets are off. Either You reign, or You do not. Either You serve a constitutional function, or You do not. Either You appear on stamps and the money, or You do not. There is nothing democratic – meant in the crass modern sense, where everyone thinks they should have an equal say about everything – about You.

But who am I to tell you what to do? I’m just one man at court among millions.

An Honest Burger

The cook is Joe or Carl or Al, hot in a white coat and apron, beady sweat on white forehead, below the white cook’s cap; moody, rarely speaking, looking up for a moment at each new entry. Wiping the griddle, slapping down the hamburger. He repeats Mae’s orders gently, scrapes the griddle, wipes it down with burlap. Moody and silent… Al never speaks. He is no contact. Sometimes he smiles a little at a joke, but he never laughs. Sometimes he looks up at the vivaciousness in Mae’s voice, and then he scrapes the griddle with a spatula, scrapes the grease into an iron trough around the plate. He presses down a hissing hamburger with his spatula. He lays the split buns on the plate to toast and heat. He gathers up stray onions from the plate and heaps them on the meat and presses them in with the spatula. He puts half the bun on top of the meat, paints the other half with melted butter, with thin pickle relish. Holding the bun on the meat, he slips the spatula under the thin pad of meat, flips it over, lays the buttered half on top, and drops the hamburger on a small plate. Quarter of a dill pickle, two black olives between the sandwich. Al skims the plate down the counter like a quoit. And he scrapes his griddle with the spatula and looks moodily at the stew kettle (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939).

I’m quietly celebrating my return to a thirty-inch waist, and that hardly seems like the time to offer a panegyric on junk food, especially having just re-entered the United States. I’ve said before that ‘man food’ is not all fire and grunting, and have waxed opinionated about the value of an educated palate. So, what am I up to?

Well, the thing about junk food is that it is not all junk. Some of it carries a great weight of meaning, as well as of fat. Forget your big chains and your TV-advertised hunger busters: proper American junk food is as honest as the day is long. Authentic hamburgers are made fresh, on site. Nothing about any of the ingredients is remotely processed or mass produced. It is all free from the artificial contaminants that blight so much American food, and that weigh heavily on the American gut.


Best of all, honest American junk food is still served in old-fashioned diners, where nothing much has changed since Steinbeck immortalised the hamburger joints of Route 66. Last night I ate at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown, Mass., which serves by its own testimony ‘Industrial Strength Food’. It was all just so. There’s something about a good old-fashioned honest burger in America: in a strange way, it has long reassured a nation that everything will be okay. As long as there is food for workers, then there is work to be done.

Cooking Up a Storm

I am pleased to note that men are not strangers to the kitchen. In fact, it seems that there is something of a movement to get us there, through various forms of appeal. Most of the celebrity chefs on our goggle boxes are men of some description, with more or less refinement. Last night I saw Anthony Bourdain extolling everyone to get into the kitchen and properly cook. This morning I found a book, with accompanying blog, called Men’s Cooking Manual, which looks unnecessarily like the mechanics guide to a family car. In short, men are cooking. But I’m worried it’s all fire and grunting.

Man Vs. Food

Eating isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality. It’s also about traditional values and some form of local or national belonging. There are an awful lot of gluttons, posing as gourmands, and the gourmets are left out of the equation. Skip around the Food Network for five minutes and you’ll find all kinds of strange overweight men eating as much as possible. Man vs. Food, for example, is really not a sound message; especially not for Americans. If this is how we eat, then I am suspicious about how we cook. Is there an awareness of art? Is there an appreciation of skill? Are palates being cultivated? Is heritage being honoured and preserved? Is the necessary time being taken? Cuisine merits respect. Do we respect it?

One of the forgotten heroes?

Men should cook, but men should cook properly. The aforementioned blog appeals to a masculine love of sharp knives, tools, swearing and sex. First and foremost, however, should be a passion for food, what it does, and what it means. A passion for creation, and for the instruments of creation, is not effeminate. An active involvement in traditional tastes ought to come with a sense of duty. Lighting up the grill alone will simply not suffice.

Hitting Out of the Woods: Manly Golf

The world of golf has been reeling of late. Tiger Woods’ indiscretions have brought our collective attention to the question of character and we have found the preëminent golfer to have fallen a long way short of respectable. Not that golf in America has a lot to say for itself anyway. Golfwear has become a caricature of itself. Golf fans have become loud and obnoxious. Never was there a less edifying shout than ‘You’re the man!’. Never was there a more crass allusion than ‘Get in the hole!’. Falsetto whooping abounds from fans and players alike, accompanied by contrived fist pumps. The niceties of etiquette (which, by the way, was the major topic of conversation when I started to play golf in the late 1980s) are probably still observed, but not so that anybody would notice. In short, golf’s media image has never looked worse. As Augusta approaches, the most strictly controlled Major for both players and fans alike, it may be apropos to restate golf’s values and its virtues.

Golf is first and foremost a competition with the self. One only needs to have struck one ball well to have gained the knowledge of possibility. Thereafter, gaining control over one’s movements, and the elements, is the challenge. It is frustrating, but breeds fortitude, patience, and temperance. The impetuous golfer is mercurial, and mercurial golfers garner no respect. The refined golfer embodies controlled power. He is never flamboyant.

Now, this ongoing battle with the self, if persevered with, leads to humility. On a golf course, inadequacies are public, failures self-evident. So too are triumphs. It is never wise to indulge too much in the latter, for the former always lurk on the next hole. Moderation is key. The golfing temperament, ultimately, is moderate: courageous where necessary, but sensibly safe where fools rush in. This is why Phil Mickleson has not won many Majors, despite his genius. It is why Sir Nick Faldo won five, despite his flaws.

In the best of worlds, this moderation would trickle down to golf’s ‘army’ of fans. As things stand, a more effete army has never been seen. Knowledge of the game – its ethos – should be the first criterion for a golf fan. There is a wealth of tradition, form and respect in this great game that make it bigger than any one individual, any one event. Those who choose to spoil the professional golfer’s good walk would do well to bear that in mind.

Hunting Attitude, Part II

In days of yore I had the dubious fortune to manage a busy magazine department in a now defunct book chain. There were many worthy publications fighting for a place of esteem. Among the more memorable of the less well known were Bowhunter magazine and its diminutive counterpart Junior Bowhunter. In prime English fox hunting land, these American interlopers were seriously out of place. The overfed white folk of middle America were on parade, with their ripping yarns about bows and arrows. Stag hunting, which to your average Englishman sounds like the search for a pre-wedding pub crawl, was pictorially laid out in all its gory glory, with all kinds of wonderful opportunities to blood your own young. One notable prize competition offered some seriously pointy hardware for the best kill by the under twelves. Photographic proof required.

I must say it was all very gung ho: more Rambo than Horse and Hound, and about as far removed from the manly ethos of hunting as it could be. Where is the sport in a bow with a laser sight? Robin Hood would have been an entirely different proposition had he been so armed. How strange that the country that gave us Bambi, and all the Disneyfied sentimentalism that comes with it, has a hunting culture that does not have a meaningful connection to the animal. Hunting is steeped in historical, cultural and ritual justifications that might be employed to counteract the crass activism of those animated by doe-eyed cartoons, but I can’t see it here. If it is really just point and shoot then what is the point in shooting?

Shooting with guns begs the same question. There will no doubt be objections raised here, but frankly I refuse to acknowledge anybody who goes about with a gun as a gentleman, unless he happens to be duelling, conducting a just war, or engaging in fair play. Hunting in America may be alive and kicking, but bungling about shooting at anything that moves while sporting combat camouflage simply won’t cut the mustard. The battue was decried even in its heyday, and the chaps who partook of that at least had the good grace to wear tweed. Why was it decried? Because it was not fair. Manly men do not stack the deck, load the dice, inject steroids, or kneecap ice skaters. If you are insistent on killing animals, then venery – a term I use because hunting and sexual gratification have always been linked – should offer a sporting chance to the quarry. Hunting, where it is thought worthy, is the pitting of wits: the reasonable against the sly. A hunter struggles for his advantage in a terrain better suited to his target. His success, if he is successful, is the reward for his prowess, not the result of his superior weaponry. Perhaps a sensible reconnection with the hunting ethos, for all those who proclaim their right to bear arms, would be to roll up their sleeves and chase their lunch with their bare arms.

Solemn Associations: Vir Beātum

Tom Roper, in a moment of divine inspiration, has let it be known that yours truly, or my name at least, puts him in mind of Psalm 112, set by Monteverdi. Far be it from me to argue with such associations. Without further comment, I leave you with the King James version of Psalm 112, and a performance of said piece by Monteverdi, conducted by Jean Tubery.



1 Praise ye the LORD.
     Blessed is the man that feareth the LORD,
     that delighteth greatly in his commandments.
2 His seed shall be mighty upon earth:
     the generation of the upright shall be blessed.
3 Wealth and riches shall be in his house:
     and his righteousness endureth for ever.
4 Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness:
     he is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.
5 A good man showeth favor, and lendeth:
     he will guide his affairs with discretion.
6 Surely he shall not be moved for ever:
     the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance.
7 He shall not be afraid of evil tidings:
     his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.
8 His heart is established, he shall not be afraid,
     Until he see his desire upon his enemies.
9 He hath dispersed,
     he hath given to the poor;
     his righteousness endureth for ever;
     his horn shall be exalted with honor.
10 The wicked shall see it, and be grieved;
     he shall gnash his teeth, and melt away:
     the desire of the wicked shall perish.

The Buzz On Barbers

As a boy, I had my barnet barbered by Mr. Frank Shakespeare. He was among the last of a dying breed of local men’s hairdressers, with a large clientele of men who had never patronised any other cutter. He was desperately old fashioned, and as a child I hated going there. He knew two cuts: short back and sides, slicked back with a side part, and the crew cut. The place reeked of oils and treatments, old men and old leather. He knew all the talk, but then, he knew everyone inside out. No appointment necessary – everyone waited his turn – Mr. Shakespeare did a good trade. On a Saturday, you might have waited for two hours. I reminisce with a faint nostalgia. I don’t think he was a good barber, but he was certainly better than the all those who followed, with the buzzed bonces they created. Shakespeare lacked drama, but he had character.

Most men couldn’t care less about their hair. Many of those who do so spend hours making themselves look like a sticky greasy mess, except for at the back, which gets no attention at all. Well-groomed men top their image with an incongruous ‘messy look’, and elegance everywhere is confused with ruggedness. The occasional individual pulls off a look, but for each of these there are ten who labour under the misapprehension that mullets, pony tails, and clipper-art still look good, if in fact they ever did. My hair is the least likeable thing about me (I think). It is limp, straight, unruly, and seems deliberately to confound all attempts to make it neat. It does these things despite the treatment I furnish upon it, and despite its bespoke tailoring by the best barber I’ve ever had.

It’s not his fault, it’s mine. My itinerant nature means that I am in his neighbourhood far less often than my hair requires, but I am fiercely loyal. For the last four years I have had my hair cut only by Anthony, who now has his own salon – Metropolar – in the Montreal plateau. This despite the fact that for three of those four years I have lived in Berlin and in Boston. Yes, that’s a long way to go for a trim, but when you find your man, it’s hard to go back to the run of the mill.

What makes this the place and him the man? It’s like Shakespeare had a re-vamp. Vintage cutting chairs and an environment that screams character are mixed with cutting-edge style, techno-savvy presentation, and sharp skill with the scissors. It’s also genuine. There’s no faddish, up-to-the-minute, but wafer-thin, veneer. What you see is substantial, and it breeds confidence. It’s backed up by profoundly engaging conversation. Anthony is the barber philosopher extraordinaire. Best of all, it’s never rushed. I could cut my own meagre mop in fifteen minutes, but Anthony takes his time. An hour or more is not uncommon, and the time should not be underrated. A barber has a social responsibility – he doesn’t just cut your hair, he takes you out of yourself. A haircut is a holiday from your daily grind; a moment of luxury for, and indulgence in, yourself. Only a great barber can facilitate that. I only wish I could get there more often.