BATTERED AND TWISTED

 It’s a wonderful trope isn’t it? 

You’re in unfamiliar territory and you go into an unfamiliar pub or bar, a bar that 

doesn't look too terrible, but where nevertheless, terrible things happen.  

Maybe it’s a cliché, but it still has legs.

 

I find myself thinking about American Werewolf in London. 

Full disclosure, Griffin Dunne worked his little socks off trying to convince somebody in Hollywood to make a movie of my novel The Food Chain. With all too predictable results.

 

I also think about the Edward Woodward  The Wicker Man

 

This is only to say that a couple of days ago I was in Harwich on the Essex coast, a place I scarcely know at all, and me and my pal Mel were looking for somewhere to have lunch and a sit down, and we found a pub called the Hanover Inn.

 

It looked all right, and the lady behind the bar was very friendly but some of the locals did give us ‘funny looks.’

 

But let’s face it, Mel and I are harmless looking men and we sipped our ale and ate the fish and chips we ordered and we survived unmolested.

The fish was great – the batter was described on the menu as ‘tempura’ which I believe is a very good thing, the chips were chunky, and the mushy peas were not especially mushy which strikes me as a real plus.

 

We had a good time.

 

No titties were twisted in the course of this blog post.

ORGANIC BOUNTY

Well, this is exactly why a man might run a blog called Psycho-Gourmet.

There’s a recent piece by the divine Elina Shatkin in Squid Ink, the food blog of the LA Weekly, about a book titled  “Natural Harvest: a Collection of Semen-based Recipe.  The headline says, “We threw up in our own mouth” which seems an especially interesting use of the royal “we” - plural throwings-up but into a singular mouth.  Blimey.

There’s a quotation from the book’s blurb, “Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants.” And so on.  The Squid Ink reaction is “blech, gag, barf.”

I think there’s a little too much protesting going on here. Come on, if semen is the worst thing you ever have in your mouth you’re doing very well.  In any case, the book’s ontological status seems at best uncertain.  Squid Ink doesn’t want to believe it’s real. I, of course, do want it to be real, though in fact I don't think it is, and that strikes me as a great shame.

You’d probably expect nothing else from a blogger who once authored a novel titled The Food Chain, in which a certain amount of jissom-ingestion goes on: mystery ingredients, magical elixirs, mystical essences, that kind of thing.

Perhaps what’s most surprising about The Food Chain is that over the years quite a lot of people have thought it would make a movie, including most famously Griffin Dunne. I once had lunch with Mr. Dunne at Chez Gerard in London to discuss the project.  He was enormously late; not really all that unexpected since he was jetting in from Paris, where he’d spent the night carousing with Rosanna Arquette and others.  I felt confident he’d get there eventually but I was starving, so at last, in his absence, I finally ordered.

At which point he arrived, flustered, windswept, genuinely apologetic, but dramatic and elegant, and looking quite the star.  I said I’d just ordered, and without looking at the menu or asking me what I was having, he said to the waiter, “I’ll have exactly the same.”

The waiter and I were both equally impressed by that.  I hope to do it myself one day.