INTERLUDE

Serves at least 4. Well, 4 normal-sized people. It’d probably only be enough to serve 2 greedy ones. Or 1 morbidly obese man with a massive appetite, but then only as a snack between deep-fried pizzas. (I hear there is a cookery book of Elvis Presley’s favourite snacks written by his personal chef which will kick your heart to pieces with the force of a four-ton burger just by reading it. Sounds absolutely foul to me. I’m sorely tempted.)

Things it’s handy to have:

Chicken thighs, legs, drumsticks &c. About 5 or 6 of them. (Organic and free range if you can. (Be nice to the chickens: they have a horrible life. They’re far too stupid to realise this, true, and your shopping habits are much more a feeble statement about you and the hypocritical compromise you make between your appetite and your attitude to cruelty, but then you know that already: that’s why you’re not a vegetarian.) If it’s a toss-up between organic and free range then you’re on your own. It’s the ultimate middle-class dilemma and no one’s solved it satisfactorily yet. Sit in Waitrose crying for an hour if you wish: no one will answer your plea.)

Carrots (Organic. You don’t have to worry about veg being free-range, thank heavens, and if they were free-range you’d be worrying for entirely different reasons. (Visions of angry carrots marauding across the hillsides… Actually, why do we always picture hitherto-inanimate objects as marauding angrily when granted movement? They could well turn out to be interested only in rambling or some similarly wholesome, harmless outdoor pursuit. John Wyndham has a lot to answer for.))

Leeks (Ditto.)

Onions (And again.)

Fresh thyme (If you don’t happen to be growing any (and I for one am not at the moment: my mother occasionally turns up at my flat, triumphantly bearing plants she’s gently nurtured from seedlings, only for me to kill them fairly promptly either through neglect or over-zealous kindness), keep some in your freezer for added freshness. Freezers are great for herbs. Plus, there is the added pleasure that when your freezer inevitably turns into one massive block of ice it will at least have pretty green specks throughout. You can imagine they’re slow-moving aliens cut short by an ice floe if you like. I don’t do that sort of thing myself, of course.)

PEARL BARLEY (Wonderful, wonderful PEARL BARLEY gets to be written in uppercase because it’s amazing stuff. I’ll say no more. You know how good it is. PEARL BARLEY. Mmmm…)

Chicken stock (We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? Perhaps I shouldn’t have written up two chicken recipes on the trot, especially two chicken recipes as similar as this and the risotto, but for all you know I’m just writing these things in thematic order. (I’m not.) Anyway. I do of course keep bags of the proper stuff frozen like Mrs. Saatchi, and spend all of my free hours boiling up carcasses with leeks, carrots and onions. Gallons of the bloody stuff I make. Honest. It’s just that, well, stock cubes are easier. Plus, of course, whenever I go shopping I get bored and thus absent-minded, think I’m running out of cubes, and end up buying more: my cupboards are overrun with all the animal and vegetable variants of OXO, Kallo, Knorr, Sainsburgh’s, Cohen’s etc. you can imagine and I’ve got to do something with them all, the Mrs having pooh-poohed my suggestion of chucking them in the bath to provide her with a low-cost fake tan. (Women nowadays don’t really get the concept of thrift, do they? Shame. Shame!))

Probably other stuff I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter; it’s not as if anyone’s going to cook from this anyway, is it?

Methodology

Switch on Radio 4. Listen to Martin Jarvis burble soothingly until such a point that your level of smug relaxation is suitable for the cooking of something warm, hearty, and comforting. Crack open a bottle of Badger’s Fursty Ferret* to help the mood. (*Other beers are available.) Survey kitchen with proprietorial pride etc. (qv). Sigh contentedly. Select largest pan, place on stove top or hob, add a generous glug of olive oil. Switch on gas. Singe knuckles again. You do not learn. Wait for pan to heat up.

Add the chicken limbs, skin-side down. They will spit at you. Do not be disheartened. It’s not personal. Keep the heat up. Let them spi- OW, will you STOP that you fu- put lid on pan.

Wait a couple of minutes. Remove lid from pan. Using tongs (not tongues; I cannot stress this strongly enough: tongs, not tongues), prize the sticky chicken flesh from the bottom of the pan and turn them over. The skin ought to be a glistening, mottled brown. Clatter the lid back on and continue to let them brown without spitting hot oil at you. Chop up an onion, a couple of leeks and two or three carrots into hefty chunks. Remove lid from pan, add thyme and onion and a generous grind or ten of black pepper. Put lid back on. Leave for five minutes. Quick gulp of beer. Chuck in the carrot and the leeks. Lid back on. Let them sweat a bit.

When you can bear it no more, stir, and pour in chicken stock (or hot water and a couple of stock cubes ho hum), covering the contents of the pan. Sling in a few handfuls of PEARL BARLEY for good measure. Simmer. Lid on. Notice Radio 4 has stopped Jarvising and is now broadcasting a bleak programme about tragic only twins (no, not like Peter Cook, but those whose genetic duplicates have died). Feel a bit grim. Quickly switch to Radio 3. Sit down at kitchen table with glass of ale and laptop. Start writing this. (Actually, you can probably miss this step out. It depends how slavishly you want to follow my example, really. As a general rule that’s something it’s never worth doing.)

Time passes. Let it. Tick tock…

Check on the pan. Curse roundly. Remember PEARL BARLEY is like rice: it grows. The pan is full of PEARL BARLEY. Panic. Boil kettle. More water, more water!

Crisis averted, lid on again. Heat as low as possible. Leave for a few hours. Chop some parsley, mix that in, serve with crusty bread (or a couple of slices of whatever you’ve got in the cupboard if you’ve neglected to buy any crusty bread) or a few more veg, perhaps a potato or two if you’re really hungry. Big glass of red wine. Eat.

I ignore them easily as I try to find a loaf of bread that doesn’t look like it was baked more than a month ago. I want toast, not a paperweight, after all. I am a fussy consumer. I hear a shrieked protest.

“You can’t give her cat food: she’s not a cat!”

I glance round the corner of my aisle, trying not to seem too shifty. I contemplate the small selection of shampoos on offer as if I suddenly have a desperate urge to wash my hair. I think I’m being subtle but I’m probably as conspicuous as a man in a Stasi-issued trilby staring through two holes cut in a newspaper. It doesn’t matter. I turn, ever-so-nonchalantly, away from the Vosene Medicated and see the older of the two mothers, the grandmother if you like, looking at a tin of Whiskas. Her daughter has her hands on her hips. She is the one who has just offered this admonishment.

The older woman continues to look at the tin of cat food. She is lost in contemplation.

After an overly-long pause she glances up at her daughter.

“I’ll get it anyway.”

Guffawing, I have to turn away. I do hope she didn’t want to give it to the little girl in the pram.

To say the place was abandoned would be wrong, since that would suggest the villagers went willingly, and indeed permanently. They didn’t: they only left their homes temporarily. The tragedy was that they were never allowed back.

The War Office initially commandeered the village and the surrounding area for the duration of the war to be used for the training of troops to bash the Bosch, and some 250-odd residents were displaced with just a month’s notice. One of the last to leave pinned what is with hindsight a heartbreakingly sad note on the door of St Mary’s, the village church, before going:

“Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.”

In 1948, however, having hung on to the area long after the Kaiser had been kiboshed, the War Office issued a compulsory purchase order for the village and surrounding land, since when it has been a part of the Lulworth Ranges. The villagers, not owning their homes, were compensated only to the value of the produce in their gardens, and many of them died without seeing their village again.

After much hectoring, the MoD (as the War Office, in a fit of characteristically British nominative obfuscation, became) granted limited access in 1975, since when the village has become a sort of nature reserve-cum-run-down rural idyll, albeit one with regular nearby tank fire. The school (which had actually been shut in 1932, though it is presented as having been left as it was in 1943) and the church have now been sympathetically restored as museums to the village’s past and its former inhabitants, but aside from them only a few shells of buildings now stand, the depredations of the elements, trigger-happy soldiery, and the greatest enemy of all, time, having reduced them to ruins.

Pevsner notes (as well as making the prissily typical proclamation that ’the chancel is Victorian, and so is the best feature of the church’) that ‘the loss to the public of a tract of lovely hill and coast is lamentable.’ The great irony is that the army unwittingly preserved this place much better than any other tract of land in the vicinity by not allowing development. Clouds Hill, TE Lawrence’s cottage, is nearby. (As, for that matter, is Monkey World, which proves that geographical proximity has no bearing on character.) It’s worth a day trip.

Chicken & broccoli risotto.

Stuff it’s handy to have:

Onion. Arborio rice. Wine. Stock. Chicken. Wine. Broccoli. Parmesan. Wine. Crème fraiche. Wine. Black pepper. Wine.

Methodology:

Open bottle of wine. Pour a large glass. Take gulp or two and survey kitchen with proprietorial pride, knowing what culinary miracles will be worked herein. Peel onion. Find this easier said than done with blunt knife. Try again. Try too hard. Observe knife slip from skin of onion into skin of hand holding onion. Yelp. Wonder why knife is not sharp enough to cut onion but is sharp enough to cut finger. Apply plaster. Sharpen knife. Chop onion. Leave chopped up bits of onion in a small heap on edge of chopping board for a moment, admiring your handiwork. Award self with a large glug of wine.

Plop butter into big, heavy-bottomed pan. Reflect on big, heavy-bottomed girls, think briefly about butter, have unsavoury reminder of Brando in Last Tango… Have another slurp to restore nerves. Notice butter is not melting. Realise you should have lit gas. Turn gas tap, humming Flanders & Swann to yourself. Light gas. Singe hairs on knuckles doing so. Observe that these are not manly injuries and start to think up plausibly masculine explanations for them. Notice butter has melted. Remember how foul burnt butter is and quickly sling chopped onion into pan before it’s too late. Watch it sizzle for a moment. Sniff appreciatively. Turn down heat. Stir occasionally until onion is softened.

Add rice. Know that rice is an unquantifiable substance which expands to the point of filling whatever pan you use no matter how much you originally put in in the first place, so don’t bother measuring, safe in the knowledge that there will always be too much. Stir. Chuck a glass of white wine at it. Pour another glass of red wine for yourself. Realise you now have red and white open. Consider your options.

Remember you should have prepared some stock by this point. Turn down heat and hurriedly fill kettle. Rootle around in store cupboard for chicken stock cubes. Crush two or three into second largest pan. Realise that although you filled the kettle you failed to switch it on. Switch it on. Remove largest pan from heat lest the rice/onion/wine mixture burns. Pour yourself a glass of white wine while you’re waiting. Pour boiled water onto stock cubes. Marvel at how this immediately becomes stock and try not to think of professional cooks and chefs weeping at your using stock cubes. Feel guilty that Hugh F-W would have been boiling birds for days. Capable lad, Hugh F-W. Remember that Marco advertises stock cubes and feel better. Chuck a ladleful of stock at the rice/onion/etc., making sure to put it back on the heat first, turned down halfway. Stir rice/etc. gently. Add more stock when first lot has been absorbed. Repeat. Pour glass of wine, red or white, you don’t care anymore. Drink. Repeat. Notice the next 10-15 minutes slip away pleasantly in boozy reverie.

Drop broccoli into what is now more and more resembling a risotto. Add last of the stock. Tear flesh from yesterday’s roast chicken. Add chicken to risotto. Stir. Turn off heat. Put lid on pan. Grate in a huge amount of parmesan. Stir. Add a large dollop of crème fraiche. Stir. Put lid on. Leave to rest while you finish off the wine. Serve. Notice that you have made about half a ton of the stuff. Feel great pride. Bursting, drunken pride. Eat. Doze. Done.

“Hide me: I’m a bank robber.”

He was clearly no such thing, unless a very unsuccessful one. The only thing he had probably stolen recently was the tube of Body Shop Hemp Handcream which he was perpetually rubbing into his hands like Lady Macbeth doing her out-damn-spot routine, flecks of the stuff spattering everything within five feet of him. We had a brief chat about his career as a professional drummer. This seemed perfectly natural at the time.

A member of the pub bar staff approached, asked him to leave.

Having clocked her, he turned conspiratorially toward us.

“You see that woman?” He leers at us. “If she stirs her tea clockwise, she’s ANY man’s.”

You can’t argue with that sort of thing.

Two Asian men behind the counter, clearly having some sort of involved discussion. One turns from his friend to me.

“How many positions of bang are there in a woman? There must be at least 69, yes? They are numbered.”

I love that phrase, ‘positions of bang’. I’ve never had a chance to use it, though.

I was skimming through The Times, when suddenly a copy of The Sun was urgently flapped under my nose. I looked up. A troubled face was quizzing me, repeatedly stabbing a digit at the back page, specifically at a story about a footballer’s weekly wage.

“You see that number there?”

I did see. I confirmed as much.

“Is that a BIG number?”

It was somewhere in the thousands. I said, yes, it was pretty big, but such things were relative. The face looked momentarily less troubled. Then it shouted at me.

“A million! THAT’s a big number.”

I couldn’t deny it.

“Did you know that the sun is a million times bigger than the Earth?”

I wasn’t sure if anyone could be said to know such a thing but was also aware that an epistemological debate would clearly be neither relevant nor welcome. I told him I didn’t. He smiled proudly. He knew something I didn’t. That was enough for him. Knowledge is power.

A couple of weeks ago I found a copy of The Moons Of Paradise [1], and I’ve been smirking ever since. It’s a book about tits. More specifically, as you will quickly deduce from its proper title, ‘The Moons Of Paradise: some reflections on the appearance of the female breast in art…’ by Mervyn Levy (Arthur Barker Ltd., 1962), it is a book about arty tits, a subject certainly ripe for exploration which, as far as I know, wasn’t tackled by the likes of EH Gombrich. (I could be wrong about that, of course; art historians are a notoriously rum bunch.) I’ve no idea how seriously Levy takes his subject either because I haven’t actually read the book, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But then, I don’t need to; the previous owner of this copy has read it for me, and read it with a zeal and eye for detail that is little short of astonishing. Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter and the pains he has clearly taken in his annotations and additions, it seems he may have strayed slightly from the scholarly path on to the well-trodden promenade of seaside smut; but even if his amateur scholarship was academe’s loss (unless there is a secret Benny Hill Chair in Mammarial Studies at Cambridge), it is undoubtedly our gain. I think it best if I take you through the book page by page for a while.

We start with a quotation from Eugenio Coseriu [2], a mystic incantation and a bad French pun on the front endpapers:

sur les seins de l’epouse, on ecrase l’epoux.

A BRA, CAD, A BRA!

le seins-posium

Overleaf, the verso grants us further puns based around the word ‘seins’, whilst the recto gains two carefully-drawn papillary dots in each O of the word ‘MOONS’, the reflection that ‘Bust (bosom) is just sublimated bottom’ and the first hand-drawn bosom of many, labelled ‘From Great Divide to Cleavage’. I think you may be beginning to get the picture…

There are 31 further drawings of pairs of breasts on the dedication page (along with the inscription ‘tats for tits’),

and then the fun really begins. From here onward almost every single page of this 140-page book has a newspaper clipping, postcard, or picture inserted, each of which, as you may already have guessed, is… well… is like this:

and this:

and this:

You get the idea. Oh go on then; one more:

Several of the newspaper clippings are from 1970, so it seems fair to date this extraordinary endeavour of thematic archiving to around that point. From our hyper-sexualised vantage here in the early 21st Century, this book’s new contents seem rather innocent. Preserved for the last forty years as a memento mammary (I’m not going to apologise for that; it gets to you, this book; I’ve already had to stop myself talking about trips down mammary lane), it may seem little more than an oddity, a curious relic of one man’s unusual obsession, but I think that as an historical document (yes, really), this book might have some value. Discuss.

[1] Freudian typo: I originally wrote ‘mons’ instead of ‘moons’. Make of that what you will.
[2] No, me neither. Sorry. Google him.

“Days of laughter

SIR- As a very old woman, I often think of friends who were always happy, stimulating, joyous, radiant and ever-welcoming. The word which exactly described their spirits was gay and we used it constantly.

Now, alas, one almost shudders to say it. Surely it is not too late for homosexuals (almost unheard of in those days) to give us back our word gay and choose another epithet. I suggest “chummy” or “matey,” and there are many others, all fairly descriptive and quite inoffensive.

If so, I shall die happy and gay.

OLIVE ADHEAD-BRECKON
London, S.W.18.”

Obviously, I think of this:

And if you think this is an interesting thing to find in a book, wait till I tell you about the Moons of Paradise…