SPOONS AND CUSHING

Why do Wetherspoon pubs get such a bad rap? I mean I know that the owner Tim Martin supported Brexit but then so did many millions of others.  

And Wetherspoon pubs do have some reputation as the home of ‘bad behavior,’ but you know, I suspect there may be one or two other pubs in Britain to which that may apply.

Of course I know that Wetherspoons (and no, I don't know why it's sometimes singular and sometimes plural but as far as I can see it never has an apostrophe) doesn’t represent the pubby perfection as described by Orwell in his essay 'The Moon Under Water,' but that’s because, as Orwell says, perfection doesn’t exist in pubs.  Nor in anything else, we might add.

 

But the few times I’ve been in a Wetherspoon pub I was perfectly happy.  The beer was affordable, the vibe was OK, and I wasn’t surrounded by drooling Yahoos.

 

I was especially happy in the Wetherspoon in Whitstable last weekend.  The branch there is named The Peter Cushing  after the actor - he bought a house there in 1958.  It’s a converted cinema and the conversion is very well done I’d say it doesn’t look cheap. There was Cushing memorabilia, some bits of antique cinema machinery and some very nice stained glass.

 

The beer of course was much like the beer anywhere else, and the cheesy chips we ordered arrived quickly and were exactly as good as you’d expect cheesy chips in a pub to be to be.  

 

I couldn't see what people are complaining about.

  Although of course I accept that at chucking out time on a Friday night, things may be different.

 

I don’t know how much of a gourmet Peter Cushing was but there’s a recipe of his in Parkinson’s Pie (as in Michael) for ‘Pain-Grille Brule’ that in part runs ‘Place 1-2 slices … of brown bread under a grill set “high.” When flames appear, it is done. Reverse until the other side cries for mercy.  Do not scrape off the cinders.  Served with butter and your favourite marmalade plus a pot of Indian tea, it constitutes a meal that can be eaten any time of the day or night.’

         As yet this doesn’t appear on the Wetherspoon menu.

 

Meanwhile on the streets of Whitstable, thoughts turned more than once to mother’s ruin.

BRITAIN DRINKS AND STAYS OUT

It was in New York that I learned to sit at the bar and drink. It’s not a thing you want to do in most English pubs because you get jostled by customers trying to attract the barman’s attention, and then they spill their beer over you as they carry it away once they’ve been served. But finding ourselves in Sloane Square, and seeing a watering hole called The Botanist (a small chain priding itself on its ‘elegant atmosphere’) that had a couple of empty stools at the bar, we thought what the heck.

 

It looked pretty much like the image above and those empty stools are the very ones we sat on, though the picture is from a website called designmynight.com.

 

The cocktail menu looked good and so we ordered two Sipsmith Gin Martinis.  That didn’t seem too much to ask but it was.  There was none behind the bar, and some lad was despatched to the cellar but came back empty handed, so we had to settle for a Sipsmith Vodka Martini.  Who says I’m afraid to try new things?

The ritual of the martini-making was everything you could have asked for, and our barman certainly had a sense of the occasion – no cocktail shaker for him, more a sort of glass vase. 

 

And the resulting martinis were absolutely fine, if expensive and a bit small.  But heck, we were in Sloane Square.

 

You will have noticed that the drinks were served on black napkins, ‘Black Napkins’ being a composition by Frank Zappa which I always use to say I wanted played at my funeral.  Or if not that, then perhaps Zappa’s ‘America Drinks and Goes Home.’  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUwwj4rvakI

JARDIN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, AND BARGAINS

 No doubt, like me, you’ve been reading about the efforts to get young people in Japan to drink more alcohol.  And no, I have no idea what the guys the picture below are drinking. Milk?  Ouzo?

 

Well ere’s my plan – reduce the price!

 

My local supermarket had a couple of bottles of Adnams Jardín Mexicano Gin on sale, ‘reduced to clear,’ down from £32.95 to £17.79. Of course I would never have bought it at 33 quid but at £17.95 I thought it was worth a punt.

 

The label says, inscrutably, that it’s an ‘Avocado and botanical gin’ and that singular through me for a while. Just the one botanical?  But the Adnams website explains that it’s made with juniper and angelica, so far much as expected, but then, ‘There are also warming notes of cinnamon from Cassia Bark, a punchy woodiness from the Mexican herb, Epazote and a smoky hint of Chipotle Chilli in the background. The addition of Coriander leaf and Mexican Oregano (which is related to Verbena) and Lime Peel created the underlying citrus freshness, much like that found in Mexican salsa.’ 

 

A first taste test suggest they may be exaggerating its specialness - though I think I detected some hotness - but it tastes fine and hey, it’s alcohol and it’s cheap (ish).

GIN AND IDA

Ida John

 Here is Ida John (nee Nettleship, Augustus John’s first wife) writing to Dorothy Salaman in 1894 or 5.

     ‘… wouldn’t it be lovely to be free of self for a little while - at least consciousness of self, I mean.  For ever - just to be a beautiful mind growing from outward impressions,  I think self-consciousness is like gin – it stops the growth!”

     

Does self-consciousness stop the growth?  I had no idea.

As for gin … more research may be required.

            

GIN AND LIT.

OK, I accept that reading books and drinking gin may not be the complete solution to our Corona-virus troubles but they certainly help.  And will it surprise anybody that there’s some crossover between these two things?

Here for example is Anthony Powell’s Journal entry for August 29 1990.  Roy Jenkins has come to lunch: ‘Before lunch Roy drank gin on the rocks with a dash of sherry, somewhat exotic taste.’  Which frankly surprised me.  Powell was a sophisticate, surely he’d been around enough to know that Jenkins was drinking a not very exotic variation on a martini.

Barbara Pym’s name pops up from time in time in Powell’s journals, though as far as I can tell they never met, and this led me to her novel No Fond Return of Love.  It’s a cracker. There is some less than exotic gin drinking here, drunk at room temperature with water, no ice or slice.

          And there’s a funny, if not altogether convincing, episode when two of the novel’s characters – Pym would have had no problem referring to them as spinsters – go into an off license to buy a quarter bottle of Gordon’s.   

Dulcie says ‘Perhaps we should have a corkscrew.’

‘A corkscrew? Oh madam,’ the salesman laughed quite pleasantly, ‘you won’t need that, I can assure you.’

         When her fellow spinster says she surely must know how a gin bottle opens, Duclie replies, ‘I know you don’t need a corkscrew for champagne, but I’d forgotten about gin.’

It was a different time, the book was written in 1961, but it still doesn’t quite ring true that a somewhat formidable middle aged woman wouldn’t know that gin bottles have screw caps.

The naivety of course is the character’s, not Barbara Pym’s.  In Jane and Prudence, Prudence is consoling herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘She must be unusually kind to herself today.  A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ 

This was written in 1953.  There was still rationing in England!  I have no statistics but I imagine that very, very few women were drinking martinis alone in restaurants in 1953, though I’d love to be proved wrong.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of either Powell or Pym with a drink in hand, but as you see, cat pictures are comparatively common.

CARRY ON BOOZIN'

I’ve been reading - actually rereading - Roger Lewis’s small and perfectly formed biography of Charles Hawtrey, the star of Carry On films until he fell out with the producer Peter Rogers in an argument about why he wasn’t given bill in a play he was doing with Patricia Hayes.

It’s well known, by anybody who cares about these things, that Hawtrey was a serious alcoholic and at times a very nasty drunk, and sometimes he  incorporated his own characters traits (though not the nastiest) into his performances, as in this scene:

Even so I was amazed to find out just how much the man managed to put away, especially given his very slight frame.  According to Lewis ‘His average evening tippling comprised two and a half bottles of port, a quantity of whisky and a pot of tea.  Which sounds bad, though we’ve all heard worse.  

        But then Lewis tells us ‘He breakfasted on five double gin and vermouths.’  Were these martinis?  Gin and Its?  Did he do the whole ice, bitters, stirred not shaken routine?  I’m guessing not.

BOTANICAL BILL

“Botanical” as a noun – it’s not really all that complicated a word, is it?  Does it really mean anything other than derived from plants?  In which case it would surely include everything from flour to cactus juice. 

But if you’re going to be making gin (or for that matter vegan face wash) announcing on the label that your product contains botanicals seems to imply that it’s special and you know, GREEN.

Of course gin has always contained botanicals – primarily juniper but some other things too, and I think these things used simply to be called ingredients.

So how about this bargain price smoked salmon, from Waitrose, with a label telling us it contains gin AND botanicals.  Do I need apple and angelica with my smoked salmon?  I never thought I did.  And I definitely didn’t think I needed gin.

It tasted fine and you could definitely taste that there was something a bit out of the ordinary going on in there, but in a blind testing I don’t believe I’d have identified the gin.

On the other hand, since gin has to contain some kind of garden ingredients what could be better than this bottle of Beefeater London Garden gin from the Chelsea Physic Garden?  Botanicals – they got ‘em! 

It’s an ‘exclusive edition’ and if the label is to be believed ‘at its heart is the flowering herb lemon verbena’ – there’s also thyme in there too, plus all the stuff that Beefeater gin usual contains – so you know it wasn’t exactly a wild experimental concoction.  Tasted damn fine though.  The bottle has two labels, one front, one back: the word botanical does not appear anywhere on either of them.

GIN CRAZY

You know, a part of me will be really glad when this whole ”gin craze” is over and gin is once again left to the hardened professionals, like me.

I like gin a lot and obviously I prefer a good gin to a bad gin but I really don’t need it to be artisanal and hand-crafted. I certainly don’t need it to be made with “shoreline botanicals including ground ivy, bladderwrack and scurvygrass." Yep, that’s a real thing –  those things are apparently in Edinburgh Seaside Gin:

I first witnessed the effects of gin, when I was a kid at my cousin Margaret’s wedding – she's the bride seen below.  

Her mother, my auntie Daisy, was in floods of tears at the reception, and I already knew that people do get emotional at weddings, but Daisy was utterly inconsolable because she hadn’t been introduced to some relative of the groom, and she took this as the worst possible, infinitely wounding, insult.  Even though I was just a kid, this struck me as out of proportion, but my dad explained to me that Daisy had been DRINKING GIN!  This, he said, was what happened to people when they drank gin – they ended up swept away by floods of uncontrollable emotion. My dad didn’t like that sort of thing one bit.

Recently I encountered (I mean obviously I didn’t drink it) this stuff: Pinkster – “premium gin made with real raspberries.”

Now look, if by some bizarre chance, I wanted strawberries in my gin, I’m quite capable of putting them there myself. I don’t need some ginmeister, or former accountant, to do the job for me, OK?

And then last week in an otherwise very sensible restaurant named Pulpo they were offering a special cocktail, the Reverse Martini.  

 I asked the waitress for details. She said, “You know how a martini is lots of gin with a tiny splash of vermouth, well this is the reverse, a lot of vermouth with a tiny splash of gin.” I turned it down obviously and I’d like to believe that nobody ordered it, but I expect somebody did.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, this stuff hits the news: Morus LXIV.  We’re told it’s distilled from the leaves of a single “ancient” Mulberry tree.  We’re also told that with each leaf is “hand-harvested” and “individually dried.”  Do the leaves know they’re been hand-harvested? Do they care?

Harvey Nicks in London is selling this stuff in a “set” – a 70cl jar and a 3cl one – yeah, yeah, it comes in jars, and the set costs £4,000. That's not a typo.  There are only 25 large bottles available.  I do hope that’ll be enough.  If the good folk who make the stuff would like to invite me to a tasting, I'd definitely be there.

And speaking of typos:

THE RIGHT STAUFFENBERG

Today, July 20^th, as you may know, is the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, in 1944. The bomb plot failed, and Stauffenberg and several dozen military and conservative supporters were arrested, tortured and executed.

Now, you don’t need me to tell you that history can be used for any number of different purposes.  One the hand, since 1999, the swearing in of new recruits to the Bundeswehr – the united forces of Germany - takes place on July 20^th to show that the military are entitled to resist immoral state actions and commands.

But Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt has also now (incredibly) been embraced by the far right, as a symbol of resistance, that Germany shouldn’t be controlled by “foreigners.”

There is also (I now know thanks to Susanna Forrest) a gin:

The advertising guff (below) suggests it invokes seeing "The Rite of Spring" for the first time in 1913, that was May 29th, though other dates and events may, of course, present themselves.

GIN AND I

It was, apparently, Gin Month while I was in England, and although you and I may think that every month in England is gin month, I suppose the marketing departments of liquor companies need to keep busy, and obviously they wanted June to be even more gin-sodden than the other months of the year.  I did what I could.

Not so very long ago the only place I knew in London where you could be sure of getting a good dry martini was the American Bar at the Savoy.  I’m not saying there weren’t other places, I just didn’t know them.  But the game has changed completely.  Bartenders all over the city now know what a dry martini is.  The days when they served you a glass of warm vermouth are passed.  And the Savoy endures.  Like this:

They make their house martini with Bombay Sapphire which, given the availability of a thousand and one artisanal, handmade, special edition gins, seems a little pedestrian but I had no objections to the taste.  However, should you have a 120 quid burning a hole in your waistcoat, you can turn to the “vintage cocktails” page of the drinks menu.

You’ll notice the presence of three cocktails using “vintage gin.”  Now, I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a vintage gin and I’ll tell you for why.

A friend of mine had an aunt and uncle who were happy and unrepentant alcoholics, and gin was their favorite drink.  As they approached retirement, and knowing they wouldn’t have much money to spend on booze once they’d stopped working, they filled the basement of their house with many, many crates of gin.  And when they retired they started to drink the first gin they’d laid down, which was now a couple of decades old, and they discovered that unlike whisky or brandy, gin did not get better with age, in fact it went off.  They ended up with a basement full of gin, most of which was undrinkable.  That’s the story anyway and it may not be 100 per cent true but the moral is clear:  drink your gin as soon as you get it.

Next stop was Dukes bar in the Dukes hotel in Mayfair.  This is where Ian Fleming drank – he lived close by – and they serve a Vesper which is a version of the martini Bond orders in Casino Royale.  He demanded Kina Lillet in his drink and Lillet can still be bought but they changed the recipe some years back.  So Dukes adjust their recipe accordingly - No. 3 London Dry Gin, Lillet Blanc, Angostura bitters, and Potocki vodka.

And this is the beauty part: the Dukes Vesper is neither stirred nor shaken but rather constructed tableside from ingredients that have come straight from the deep freeze.  If you like ritual you’re going to like this a lot.

And later a return to Mother’s Ruin in Walthamstow – a gin palace with, on the night I was there, the slowest bartender I’ve ever encountered.  He was Dutch, I think, and he said he was tired and he had to keep checking the drink recipes. It made you want to give him a good shake, although when the martini came it was perfectly fine.  Yep, that's a sage leaf.

And you know me, there are only two cocktails I really like: the martini and the gimlet and there it was on the Mother’s Run’s list – “Gimlet – Hendricks Gin, Ancho Reyes Verde chili liqueur, lime juice, gomme” - so I ordered one.  A different, far zestier bartender had swept into action.

The gimlet looked like this (yeah, I spilled some):

I think Raymond Chandler (and indeed I) would have preferred something a bit more translucent – and without a slice of cucumber - but it tasted very good.

And finally, because I was coming to the end of my time in London, I had a cocktail in Fitz’s bar at the Principal Hotel - the bar is named after Charles Fitzroy Doll who was the architect of the hotel and, among other things, designer of the dining room of the Titanic. 

Above is the Baby Babel made from “Tanqueray No. TEN Gin, Visciolata del Cardinale, LBV Port, Cream Sherry, Egg, Burr & Co. Coffee Ground Tincture.”  And of course I had no idea what “Visciolata del Cardinale” was, but research shows it to be a cherry dessert wine.  And frankly the whole thing tasted very much like dessert. But once in a while an alcoholic dessert in a glass goes down extremely well.  The bartender was absolutely wonderful.