Here and There (12 page)
And one of my books will always be Herodotus, the father of history and travel writing. The collection of observation, prejudice, analysis, lies, supposition and brilliant colourful narrative, it has in it the essence and joy of discovery. And although we're separated by two-and-a-half millennia he reminds me of the purpose and the excitement of travel. I also wonder what he travelled with. What did Ancient Greek suitcases look like? You never see them on the pottery or in the sculptures. They're never standing there with suitcases or big packets of stuff tied up with baler twine. There's never a man with a rucksack. The Trojan War happened without suitcases.
Civilised and attractive, yes, but
there's a contrariness at
the heart of Sweden which is
deeply alluring.
Paris in the spring, Gstaad in the snow, St Tropez in the sun, Roppongi in the dark. Everywhere has its season, its time. Except London. London only has one look. It's always London in the rain. For people from drier climes I know that sounds a bit like boasting, but I thought you might like to share a moment's precipitation porn because what's damply suicidal for me might be a bit of a wet dream for you. It's been incontinent here for weeks. Grey, feeble rain. Not strident, monsoonal, hard-arsed rain, but wimpy, prostate-dribbling double-wet fat drizzle, with the occasional bucket-load. Constantly. Everything's overflowing: gutters, rivers, cellars and a lot of homes in the south-west.
Still, like Florida cheerleaders, London looks best when wet. The glinting granite and Portland stone has a rubber beauty: streets of swaying umbrellas under yellow afternoon neon. The city doesn't look right in the sun. It's like seeing your gran on the beach. The new bits that are revealed you'd really rather wish weren't. But there is a lot to be said for visiting a place when you're not expected.
I think the most magical time to see Venice is actually in the autumn, when the tourists have left. The domes and campaniles float in the mist, and the city becomes a quiet, morbid and mysterious place. The sounds of footsteps in alleys are muffled and there is the incipient sense of ancient guilt and troubled secrets. I always like seaside towns out of season. The gull-blown promenade, the shuttered amusement arcade, the terminal depressives walking sad dogs on the muddy strand, and old people in plastic macs with thermoses in the shelters watching the distant oil tankers.
By chance, I was once in Cannes when it snowed. I was there in December. December in the south of France can be beautiful. Chilly, but bright and clear. (In fact, the worst time to be in the Côte d'Azur is in August. Not just because everyone else in the world is there, but because the air is muggy, thick and tastes like a million Germans' bad breath.) I went to a restaurant on the quay, and when I came out it had snowed and the whole town was pristinely dusted with a fine layer, like a magic confectioner's final touch. The Croisette sparkled, the palm trees looked strangely biblical. It was a mixture of Victorian Holy Land and gothic Christmas carol.
And in the streets ran a horde of shrieking, ecstatic little North African boys. None of whom had ever seen snow before. To see something this familiar in the company of someone for whom it is astonishingly singular is one of the small pleasures of the world. The icing on the icing of the snow in Cannes was that only me and a handful of Algerian boys were there to see it. And that's the other thing about turning up out of season. Everyone else has gone. If it had snowed during the film festival, it would've been slush before it hit the ground.
I've just been to Stockholm. Now, everyone, even the locals, said you should really come back in the summer when it's hot and everyone's in the water in boats and canoes and you can swim if you're fast and hardy. Even in the summer it's still the Baltic. And they all go to merry little islands in the archipelago and sweat and eat herring in a hundred different ways in the never-setting sun. And have saunas and spend their summer naked without ever staring at each other's reproductive bits. That's when you should come, they said.
December is not yet white, but the sun is only let out, like a prisoner on death row, for a couple of hours. It's cold, and the wind whips off the water and ricochets through the narrow streets of the old town, eddying off the cobbles and buffeting the secure doors and shutters. But it's this very pearly grey light and the sprightly coldness of the pewter sea and the occasional moments of pale golden sun slanting off the windows that make this city in a country of 14 bite-sized islands so memorably enchanting in the sense of having come up and caught it unaware, resting. The place is at home with itself and the natives go about their pre-Christmas business with their collars up and their guards down.
Sweden and the Swedes are such a well-defined global brand. The capable hands that feel out the lie or the boast in inanimate things make beautiful design. The people who are in many ways a social paragon, the class swots at the top of the world. Like St Augustine, who prayed to God to make him good, but not yet, we might all aspire to be Swedish. But please, God, not yet. They all have a utilitarian beauty and a thoughtful, measured fairness. They care for the details of life. Every knife and fork is perfectly balanced. Clothes fit well and do their job with a sturdy confidence. Things have straight edges, their latches latch, their catches catch. It is the meeting of the worthy man-made with the smooth and efficient man who rarely sticks at the joints.
The Swedes are the form that follow function. But just under the surface is a bright, very uncool hand-knitted kitsch, a thigh-slapping land of peasant superstition and goblin folklore. Sweden's history is as hard, violent and unremitting as any in the world. Remarkably, they have created an enviably liberal state, but it sits like the crust on a pie. Scandinavians all seem to live with these binary contradictions. Empiricism with superstition. A sober rectitude and a fearsome drunkenness. Immense moral probity combined with a blush-making sexual liberty. There is a contrariness at the heart of Sweden that is deeply attractive. The balance of competing imperatives. It's their success in maintaining both without either overwhelming the other that makes Stockholm such a very civilised and attractive city. It's built on a human scale with human motives of trade, culture, inebriation, adventure and folk dancing.
I'm not making this sound like the most exciting place on earth. And it is a long way to go from almost anywhere you choose to get a lesson in civics. But it's often the subtlest harmonies that stay with you the longest. The taste of Stockholm lingers. A Swede told me the city was planning to get rid of all its petrol stations. Isn't that going to be jolly inconvenient, I asked. Well, a little, he admitted, but it's a precaution against terrorism. Petrol stations might be targets for suicide bombers. He looked surprised when I burst out laughing, mentioning perhaps Swedes were not top of Al Qaeda's devil-list. You think we're not worth blowing up, he asked, hurt. It was a very Swedish concern.
People love to talk about what
they would eat for their last
meal, but it's actually far more
rewarding to consider one's
favourite cuisine.
Two double-cheeseburgers, two large servings of French fries, half a gallon of vanilla fudge ripple ice-cream. Or perhaps cheese pizza, cheese omelette, green peppers and onions, white cake with white icing. Now these probably aren't anyone's choice for a last meal, ever â except they were for John Schmitt and David Dawson, two executed American murderers.
Reading through the last-meal requests from death row is one of the most gastronomically and socially depressing things you can do. I really don't recommend it. Rubbish food. Yards of enchiladas. Stacks of well-done steaks. Towers of pizza and buckets and buckets of fried chicken. Swimming pools of ice-cream, root beer, Coca-Cola and fruit juice. Tenements of pies and peach cobblers and vast ranges of chocolate cake.
Very occasionally you come across something out of the ordinary. Farley Matchett asked for four olives and wild-berry flavoured water. Arthur Rutherford had fried catfish and green tomatoes. Unusually for a last meal, he had it twice. The first time he was reprieved. The second time, not.
Philip Workman asked that a vegetarian pizza be delivered to a homeless person. The prison refused. On the day of his execution, Nashville's Rescue Mission received 170 pizza deliveries.
These meals are small windows into the lives that led to their consumption. Almost everything in them, you could get from convenience chains or diners. This is food without grace, without joy, without hospitality.
Johnathan Bryant Moore's life culminated in the self-inflicted dinner of Kraft cheese and macaroni and beef-flavoured Rice-A-Roni. Obviously, junk food doesn't necessarily make a drug-addled premeditated murderer, but it's an inescapable truth that with every last meal ordered at all executions over three years, not one of them was what you'd call home-cooked.
At the moment when a man might be expected to reach for comfort and a final taste of hearth and a family kitchen, something that his mother made, they only have franchised convenience food available. Almost all of it can be eaten with their fingers.
Only Sedley Alley, with an infantile pathos, asked for milk and oatmeal cookies. I was interested in this because âWhat would your last meal be?' is one of the most common questions asked of food critics and chefs. Keen young home economists are always looking to turn out a celebrity cookbook of last suppers.
If your last supper includes something that isn't fried or you need to eat with a knife and fork and it doesn't come with ketchup or barbecue sauce or chilli, then it's almost certain you won't ever be asked to make the choice for real. Asking for a napkin to go with that would probably be grounds for a retrial. Bad food doesn't lead to bad lives, but rotten lives eat rotten dinners.
I always dodge the last-supper question because I think it's in bad taste. It's one of those things like âMake up a list of the 10 sexiest women ever.' You have all the anxiety of the choice but none of the pleasure of the execution. You're never going to get a date with Uma Thurman and, in fact, your last meal will probably be an uneaten cold tomato soup.
Much more interesting from a foodie point of view is the question âWhich food would you choose for the rest of your life, if you had to live with one other people's national cuisine?' You can't choose your childhood food or a neighbour's that's too similar to make no odds. So if you're Irish, you can't say Scot. And you can't just say Italian because everybody just says Italian and there really isn't such a thing as Italian food: you have to specify a region.
I've thought about this a lot. In fact, sitting in airports and traffic jams and editorial pep talks, I think of little else. And I've got it down to four cuisines. Fourth is south-western France â foie gras and cassoulet, all sorts of duck, figs and roquefort. This is the home of the French anomaly. People here eat more saturated fat than anyone else on earth and have a very low incidence of heart disease. This is the food of old Gascony, of Cyrano de Bergerac: a cuisine for the last leg of life, of post-prandial naps, of meals that soak into each other, of a languid, replete and easy life. I could live with that.
In third place, there is the food of Piedmont, of northern Italy and the Po Valley, where they grow rice, make risottos, collect truffles, cook with butters, lard and the light olive oil of Genoa and have the youngest veal. I'd have to stretch it a bit to Parma, to take in hams, cheese and ice-cream, but that would do me. This is the origin of the Slow Food movement that grew to become the Slow City movement and now has a slow university where presumably they don't care much if you turn up for lectures or not and you can take your exams over three or four hours or perhaps three or four weeks.
Second is the food of the North West Frontier, the mountainous tribal lands of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan: the very best lamb curries, biryanis, pilaus, apricots and quail, Peshawari naan, yoghurt and pomegranate juice eaten with gusto and arguments and your fingers on the roofs of mud-brick houses, in a confusion of power lines and washing, the smell of charcoal fires and the call of the muezzin.
And in first place is Vietnam. I love the food in Vietnam. I love it so much I've invented new meals. It is an ideal combination of delicacy and panache. It has enormous variety of flavours and textures without being irredeemably twee. It's refined but it's also assertive. It has tiny little finger food and dog. But what really did it for me was breakfast. When you consider a cuisine for life, you have to start with breakfast. Your home style is the most difficult thing to give up. I defy anyone but a Japanese person to enjoy the breakfast of the rising sun. My sub-continental Afghan breakfast of dhal, curry and chapatti is difficult to swallow. Italians don't do much more. They have a minute syrupy coffee and perhaps a bad bun. But in Vietnam, they have a pho. The divine broth with do-it-yourself additions of coriander, mint and chilli. It's perfect. Actually, if you're going to have a perfect food retirement, it would be Vietnam for breakfast, northern Italy for lunch and then alternately south-west France and the North West Frontier for dinner.
But if you want to start a real food fight, just ask your next dinner table which of the three great staple carbohydrates they would choose forever, to the exclusion of all others. Wheat, rice or corn, that is the decision that formed empires, made history and grew civilisation. So take your time.
Muscovites have taken to
capitalism like pigs to swill.
You can see and feel the white-
hot energy of the free market, a
kind of economic Darwinism.
Here's a hypothetical question for those moments of awkward silence in the pub: what would have happened if, during the Cold War, Russia and America had changed sides? When the dam of the Berlin Wall had come down and capitalism flooded into the Soviet bloc like cold water and drowned 100 million people in the unquenchable desire for 50 varieties of doughnut, T-shirts advertising Hard Rock Cafés in crap cities, reality TV and fantasy porn, designer everything, and things that cost more if given English names; what would have happened if, at the same time, a wall had gone up on the 49th parallel and along the Rio Grande and, overnight, America had become a centralised command economy devoted to the promotion of the common wheel and the negation of personal gain? If all the shops had been full of the same suit and loaf of bread, and if there was one television channel, one newspaper and a thousand 19th-century classics in the bookshops but no 20th-century ones. Who would've coped better? In short, are some people more suited to collectivism and some to individualism?
