HALF MAN, QUARTER SANDWICH

Sometimes the man eats the sandwich.

First two pics by Caroline 'Flashgun' Gannon.

Sometimes the sandwich eats the man.

And sometimes a headline is more exciting than the article underneath it, e.g. ‘Beckett and Guggenheim’s four days in bed, with a break for sandwiches.'

 

It’s a cracking headline if not exactly a great surprise.  According to the article, Peggy Guggenheim made the sandwich/Beckett remark in a ‘documentary about her life,’ though it doesn’t give chapter and verse.  In any case, it won’t come as a complete surprise to anybody who’s read her memoir Out Of This Century, Confessions of an Art Addict.

 

She depicts Sam Beckett as the kind of lad who’d happily spend four days in bed whether there was a woman in there with him or not. He was nicknamed Oblomov after the lead character in the novel by Goncharov. ‘I made him read the book and he immediately saw the resemblance between himself and the strange inactive hero who finally did not even have the will power to get out of bed.’

 

On the other hand she writes in Out of This Century that after she and Beckett first got together, after a dinner at James Joyce’s pad, they stayed in bed overnight and all the next day until dinner time that evening.  ‘We might be there still, but I had to go to dine with Arp, who unfortunately had no telephone.  I don’t know why, but I mentioned champagne, and Becket rushed out and bought several bottles which we drank in bed.’

 

I have a few questions.  How many bottles is ‘several’?  And did she drink her share of the several before going out to dinner, in which case she must surely have arrived three sheets to the wind? Or did she just stand up Arp?

 

In any case, no mention of sandwiches. Which I think is a shame.

Arp's the one in the middle below, supported by Hans Richter and Tristan Tzara.

 

 

CHEESY HUMILITY

It was Manningtree Pride last weekend, and in the interests of inclusivity we (Caroline, Jen and me) went to the Crown and had some cheesy chips.

 

We also had some curry sauce, which was probably a mistake.

 

ANOTHER CAROLINE GANNON SPECIAL.

Incredibly this wasn’t the highlight of the day.  The highlight was the raffle at the fire station – a pound for five tickets - and I won this, a rainbow cocktail shaker.  Best pound I ever spent.  Better still, I borrowed the pound from Caroline. 

 

Looks even better with booze in it.

PIC BY CAROLINE GANNON

Another highlight was being blessed on the beach by the ‘Funky Celebrant.’  

A photograph of the blessing, taken by Mikaela Jade, even appeared on the BBC, which made it all especially worthwhile.  Yep, we’re in there – see if you can spot the blogger!

OVER PARR

 Colonialism: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.  Say it again.  

 

And in the magazine Third Text, edited by the very distinguished Richard Dyer, it is said many times, in many ways, and I just got around to reading Number 182, May 2023, my eye caught by an article titled ‘Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography’ by Cammie Tipton-Amini. 

 

This is Martin Parr in his own home in Bristol, shortly after I’d bought him a pizza.  I was interviewing him for a magazine.

 

Cammie Tipton-Amini has a lot to say about a small publication of Parr’s titled  7 Colonial Still Lifes, published in 2005, consisting of seven images taken in Sri Lanka, six forming a slim volume, the seventh a signed print. 

 

Tipton-Amini is especially taken by this image, which is simply titled (or captioned) ‘Nawara Eliya.’  

 

Nawara Eliya is the name of a city known locally as ‘Little England,’ and that’s a helping of porridge served in a bowl with the crest of The Hill Club, and as Tipton-Amini points one, the bowl is showing signs of wear, though The Hill Club itself seems to be thriving.  This is from their website:

         Tipton-Amini doesn’t seem to be any keener on porridge than she is on colonialism.  She says porridge is ‘outstanding in its ordinariness’ and ‘the most boring food imaginable.’ but worse than that it is ‘a sign pointing directly to a sinister British colonization.’ 

         ‘Like porridge’ she says, ‘many of Parr’s photographs are shrewdly thick in layers of ambiguity and nuanced meaning.’

Am I being a complete literalist if I find myself asking how porridge can be the most boring food imaginable, while also being ‘shrewdly thick in layers of ambiguity and nuanced meaning.’  Or are we just talking negative capability here.?

         

         She then goes to attempt a postcolonial reading of Martin Parr’s 1986 collection The Last Resort, to argue that the images in that book ‘bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection Street Life in London (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. ‘

         Thomson was a Scotsman, and it does seem that Street Life in London made his reputation, though only after he’d been one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East. Illustrations of China and Its People, ran to four volumes, and yes many of the pictures in those volumes do seem to present the Chinese people as the exotic other.  There's a lot of text in the books too.

 

         Tipton-Amini focuses on the image below which she names as ‘The Fruits of China,’ 

though anywhere else I’ve found it, it’s just called ‘Fruit,’  a collotype, dating from 1868.

 

    Tipton-Amini writes, ‘In a nearly sexual enactment, China lays herself bare for the English viewer to take.’  I can’t even, but I’m glad it’s only ‘nearly.’

 

And then she says, ‘The glass of wine front and centre is the only non-Asian, Occidental element. Wine and the glass itself are of European descent and make for a jarring juxtaposition.  The central wine glass and wine impose a Eurocentric presence.’

 

Is this true?  Now I’m no expert on Chinese food and culture – I leave that to Fuchsia Dunlop, but there is this thing called the internet, and a bit of online research suggests that wine was around in China from at least 7000BC, so I’m not sure how entirely European that is.

As for the glass, well, that’s far more interesting.  My further patch research suggests that 19^th century Chinese wine goblets looked like this:

 

or this:

 

So yes, that does look like a European wine glass in the Thomson photohgraph, but how did it get there?  Did John Thomson carry it around with him waiting for the moment when he could use it in a still life?  Or did he just pick it up on his travels because maybe European-style wine glasses were already around in China at the time?  Although of course that would still make them bad or wrong.

I don’t expect an answer.

 

THE COOKED AND THE SMOOTH

 

Have you ever had something called a Turkish omelette?  Until last week I hadn’t, but being in Walthamstow in need of breakfast and there being a restaurant nearby with a big sign offering Turkish Breakfast, in we went and we both went for the Turkish Beef Sausage omelette. It seemed a safe choice.  After a longish wait it came looking like this:

 

And the question I had, still have: is it meant to be like that?  The beef sausage was fine but the ‘omelette’ was a large slick of luke warm, not quite cooked, not quite scrambled, not quite set, eggs. But maybe that’s the way they like their omelettes in Turkey.

 

It was edible but only just.  Also they seemed to be having trouble with their coffee machine, and the coffee didn’t arrive till we were half way through eating.

I think the waiter and waitress, who were both pleasant enough, realized things hadn’t gone smoothly and we were offered a free dessert but by then we were ready to get going.

The few other diners there appeared to be having a kind of meze which looked great – the pic below is from the website – I did have food envy:

 

Compare and contrast with the fab dinner we had at Orford Road Tapas and Bar, a fairly authentically Spanish I think, where we’d been before. We weren’t madly hungry so didn’t go the full smorgasbord, just croquettes, a selection of charcuterie, olives, octopus with potato – arguable we overdid it a bit on the potato.  But it all went very well.  No cause for food envy.

\

TAPAS PICS BY CAROLINE GANNON (of course)

Swings and roundabouts, rough with the smooth, innit?

SNAIL MALES AND FEMALES

A little while back I was at Milsoms, an interesting restaurant in Dedham, to celebrate my pal Nicola’s birthday. I saw snails on the menu as starter so immediately ordered them.  They came looking like this.

 

My own bad phone picture.

They were fine but a bit sweet and sticky.  I hadn’t read the menu in any detail so only later did I realized they were ‘Garlic snails on toasted sourdough, madeira & thyme sauce with parsley mayonnaise.’  And yes, that's a kind of potato waffle type thing perched on top. 

Three issues arose: one that I’m not very fond of madeira, two that it was a very long time since I’d last had snails – didn’t you used to see them on sale in any decent deli?  And three, my pal Penny who was also at the dinner said she thought snails were just a delivery system for garlic, butter and lemon.’ And you know I think she was absolutely right.

 

So I decided to have my own snail adventure.  First, I happened to know that the local antiques emporium had snail plates for sale.  They had a few different options and they’d been there a while, which was further evidence that eating snails may have gone off trend. I went for these metal numbers:

And then I bought a can of Burgundy snails (Helix Pomatia).  I had to go online - I didn’t know where else to get them.  And they were much more expensive than I was expecting – about 12 quid.

In a better world I would have bought shells as well, but that would have added another tenner to the price, making it a very expensive starter.  And yes we did use them as a delivery system for lemon, butter and garlic. Also parsley.  

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

I wish I could say that mighty bunch of parsley came from my own garden but it actually came from the farmer’s market, and cost less than a pound.  ‘You don’t get that in Sainsbury’s,’ the woman on the stall said, and how right she was.

 

And so it all went well.  Lemon, butter, garlic and parsley were all duly delivered. We ate them with untoasted slices of baguette which was fine – don’t overcomplicate things!

 

I’ll be trying again soon.  Now, I ask myself, am I spearheading a snail revival?  It seems unlikely.  However, according to Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, a taste for snails has regularly come and gone throughout history.  The Mesopotamians ate them, the Romans domesticated them and bred them in vivaria, but there seem to have been centuries when few people ate them at all. Of course in Britain we associate snails with the French which means that many British folk have felt obligated to hate them.  Davidson writing, in 1999 or so, says he hopes such attitudes have gone never to return. He was an optimist.

WAILING FOR HER DEMON LOVER

 

I’ve always thought that Anthony Powell surely got it right about Aleister Crowley.  They had lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand, they ate saddle of lamb, and Powell concluded that although Crowley was absurd he was nevertheless terrifying. 

 

Still, nobody’s all bad. In Olivia Williams’ Gin Glorious Gin  she describes a cocktail Crowley supposedly invented at the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, named the Kubla Khan No2 (no, I don’t know if there was a Kubla Khan No1).  

It was, apparently, a standard gin and vermouth martini but topped off with laudanum. 

 

Now, the name laudanum seems to have meant different things to different people at different times in history, but it always involves opium dissolved in alcohol.  

 

The 17^th century English physician Thomas Sydenham came up with a recipe that as well as opium, also involved cinnamon, cloves, saffron, castor, ambergris, musk and nutmeg.  Now, depending on what gin you use, you may of course may find cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves in your martini anyway.  Ambergris is rather less likely.

 

Anthony Powell’s connection with Crowley came about via a book he was responsible for when he worked as a publisher, titled Tiger-Woman, the autobiography of Betty May (nee Elizabeth Golding) who recounted daily life in Crowley’s abbey on Sicily.  Powell writes that ‘among other disagreeable ceremonies’ Crowley’s followers were sometimes required to sacrifice cats by decapitation, and then drink the poor kitty’s blood. ‘This cannot have been good for anyone’s health’ Powell concludes, wisely.