Mar/Apr 1998
PS
Food is not my thing. All my life I’ve been a skinnymalink, and that’s my own mother talking. But Bath was then and is now full of quality eateries, so it was no less than one’s duty as editor of the leading local glossy magazine to keep the citizens apprised of their excellence. The problem was, I was always far too timid to ring them and say “give us a free expensive meal and I’ll write it up in the mag.” Fortunately our advertising manager had no such qualms, so one way and another we got to enjoy some splendid nights out.
That “we” came with the territory. I knew nothing about fine dining but I had read a few poncy restaurant reviews in the up-market press, so I knew, for instance, that you were supposed to call the person you were dining with “my companion” or “my eating partner” rather than “the wife” or “my secretary actually, old boy, but keep it under your hat”. And because the names of the dishes were always so far removed from my general experience, I made a point of copying the details carefully in full from the menu. I tried to find a way of conveying the sensations without falling back on the exhausted and over-used cliché “delicious”, but frankly taste is probably the most difficult of the senses to convey and I seem to have resorted more to the visual. Then there’s that line, “game in season sells like hot cakes” – is that witty? I don’t know. It was meant to be. Maybe I was subconsciously subverting the genre and resorting to my favourite language, pastiche, only because I felt so exposed.
The restaurants K and I visited during the course of my time with BWL were without exception warm, welcoming, and incredibly generous to us, and I always did my best to convey my gratitude for their hospitality and genuine appreciation of their unfailingly rich and wonderful fare. I might well have asked the bullish advertising manager to secure us even more free meals out if it were not for the fact that at some point I developed a rather debilitating stomach complaint, which resulted eventually in a stay in hospital and the removal of forty centimetres of abscessed colon. While for a period there I was even less interested in food than I ever had been, and my ankles swelled up alarmingly, I was at least able to use the convalescence period to reread The Honourable Schoolboy, one of my favourite John le Carré’s. All this à la carte, table d’hôte nonsense may be a closed book to me, but spies in Hong Kong – now there’s something I do know a thing or two about…
PS
Yes, the idea here was to try and inject a bit of humour into the proceedings, so I invented a kind of useful idiot with a suitably bucolic punning name who could be my roaming mouthpiece with a brief to report on any and every subject that might occur to him (me). I’ll be honest with you, in one of my overstuffed bottom drawers of unpublishable material (see most of this archive…) I had a kind of humorous memoir about student life (see The Naff Student’s Handbook) whose chapters I subsequently plundered and adapted for this column. After all, there was little likelihood the book would ever see the light of day, so as editor of a glossy lifestyle magazine here was an unmissable opportunity to shamelessly recycle my own stuff. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think the material strong enough – but I did, so there.