Notting Hill and beyond the pale...

You’d think they’d get it. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that when the world falls on your head, you might do something different. It’s like Moses. Comes down from the mountain, still smelling of burning bush, eyes revolving, levitating with the true believer’s va-va-voom, and he bellows: “God, the God — Mr God to you — just gave me these instructions, written in sodding marble, and it's going to get us out of here. After 40 years in this hole, we’re going home. Milk and honey, vineyards, fedoras. Listen up.”
Then a bloke at the back says: “Well now, hold on. Hold on. Maybe we shouldn’t be hasty in discarding the golden calf. Granted, it’s been a bit tricky recently, but it just needs a bit of tweaking. Have you ever thought that perhaps what we need is a bigger golden calf?”
And that’s when Moses loses the plot, and throws a right strop. Not only did God give him celestial sat-nav, he also gave him a proper, Old Testament, fundamental fire-and-brimstone temper. (That and a foreskin, which was something of a novelty for the Jewish ladies.) Anyway, I’m with Moses. Not only the foreskin bit, but I’m just about to have an exodus tantrum.
What is it that restaurants don’t get about their customers? Seeing as customers are poorer than they were last year, their suppliers are being straitened, their manufacturers are shuffling to the edge. What is it about restaurants that makes them think the normal rules don’t apply? I’ve lost count of the number of managers and owners who’ve taken me aside and said, “Touch wood, the times don’t really seem to be affecting us.” Which bit of the global economy do they imagine doesn’t apply to them or their customers? Even if all you feed are bailiffs and accountants, that’s not the point. This is a moment when you need to look at yourself in the mirror of what you do, and realise it isn’t good enough. It might have been all right then, but it’s not all right now. You can’t go on selling squander and snobbery. Customers want to be fed from a different menu; they want to feel differently about themselves.
This week’s review isn’t so much a criticism as a parable. It is about a place that has so comprehensively failed to notice the change in the weather, that is so utterly out of step, desperately, sadly passé, and embarrassingly over, that it should be called The Bigger Golden Calf. Instead, it’s called Daylesford Organic, in Westbourne Grove, in London’s crunched and conflicted Notting Hill. It is a small, self-satisfied chain that’s been unloaded from the mother shop, which is a sort of Cotswold Westfield, selling everything you’ve never wanted for that cashmere lifestyle. At its heart, it is a food shop of such towering pretension and expense that only those who are bored and weepingly depressed enough to live in Oxfordshire can appreciate. A passing friend told me he’d gone in to buy some cheese, “but I only had £196 on me”.
The Westbourne version is situated on premises that were a previous organic grocer, before being bought out by the American organic grocer Whole Foods, which promptly closed the venue down. Don’t you love wholesome, green capitalism? So now there is a shop that truly defies description. I don’t know what it thinks it is. It sells horn-handled trowels for people who do one-handed gardening. . There are bits of rustic scratchy stuff that might be for sitting on, lying under, or tying in a tasteful bow around your head, but are probably only for putting in a drawer. It’s staffed by sad women who have been employed because they look like Victorian scullery maids, and almost curtsey when you come in. Next to it is another shop, selling foodish things. It isn’t a food shop in any useful sense; nobody would bring a list here. It sells edible knick-knacks, Valium-induced impulse buys for people whose other impulses include painting their dining-room tables white and distressing them with a bicycle chain, and slicing their arms with broken lead-crystal glass.
There is a restaurant and, downstairs, another restaurant. Upstairs, it’s a cramped little cafe. We sat in the window, watching Notting Hill pass by, like straggling refugees from Kosovo.same dear deer that lost its head to the gardening equipment. The meat was covered in some concoction that made it taste like a medieval poultice for boils. English vegetables were roots that you could tell were English because they were flaccid and politely tastelessNot that a girl should know of such things...

Elizabethan Rose

After the heavy rains of 2008 which rusted all the fine roses all over the land, what a joy it is to smell the heady scent once again of Albertine -Its a medieval scent and so rare. The garden is bursting with scented heads and its a fine thing indeed. Bliss in the late evening. I even think it makes wine taste better or it deadens other senses and heightens others..mmm..leave that one with me.

Surrounded by divorce

its an odd notion. Divorce. It sounds fierce and surrounded by wolves. There is nothing to delight in. Its not like a wedding only dressed in black. ( well perhaps the attending friends may now wear only black). We owe to the middle ages the 2 worst inventions of Humanity-Romantic Love and Gunpowder. The dangers of romantic love-well we don't mean the danger in the obvious way-the cheap betrayals and broken promises-we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. This idea is a particular monster because although it is in fact quite new, it feels old. Its phony patina of age gives it an immutable quality. The very few voices that qualify it are so quiet that they get entirely drowned out by the noise of a thousand films, poems, books and articles that shout for its dominant truth. Its credentials are bolstered by the ancient and unimpeachable sources-It was Plato who said that Humans are like two sides of a flat fish-endlessly searching for their other half. And then there is Shakespeare, who still has the last word on everything even though he has been dead for 400 years-who gave us the sonnets and Much Ado and Antony and Cleopatra-even though admittedly the last one did not turn out so well. Throw in Byron and Yeats and Auden and the conclusion is that that Romantic love surely must be the highest human goal;the sources are irrefutable. There are women who entertain the subversive notion that like a mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical side kicks in and they observe couples that marry in a Haze of adoration and sex are 10 years later throwing china and fighting over who gets the dog. Not sure what the answer is-leave that one with me.

Teddy and his Matfir and Haftorah

Enfin. Finito.Those perilous 7 months of preparation. They can all now give way to endless twin deck mixing and crushing defeats on the track( well scalextrix at least)and new air can be breathed whilst taking the opportunity to silently smirk at the struggling trail of others who will always lay in his wake.So well done, Mr with-such-aplomb. The Boy did well. My annual fix of Shul has been completed. I now also understand about Reform breakaway groups in the faith. Its all comes from women. They spend so many hours of isolation in the gallery that when they have done the shopping list, mentally invited a set of people for dinner next month, checked out the recalcitrant men below, checked our their be-hatted peers, they tire and the mind wanders to ideas of Reform; " Perhaps they should put a Costa up here , they muse and perhaps heated seats and perhaps.... That's how it all started. Mutiny is invariably never a mans thing. That's too much like hard work, esp when there is a fish supper to source and a game on the telly and wine to be slugged.Ah well.

In love with the game...

I don't suppose it comes as a shocking revelation that I am not exactly a sporty person. I am, as a colleague once pointed out with the kindest of intentions, built more for comfort than for speed. But even in my lithe youth I showed little promise and less enthusiasm.

You see, that's the thing: my sloth, my indolence, my desire to walk rather than run, stand rather than walk, sit rather than stand and be supine rather than sit, has led me to sport or, more specifically, to soccer.

It quite exciting to think of the match tonight whilst working...bliss in fact but dont tell a soul.

Rather in the manner of those bumper-sticker witticisms, it's amazing how many hours I can lie flat on my back watching people run up and down a pitch. Or - as I now know it should be called - the park.
I don't pretend to understand all the rules, or often even what is going on. I know that if asked to explain the offside rule I wouldn't do as well as Angela merkel did when challenged by Bild am Sonntag.
I've got more napkins with more squiggles on them from men trying to explain it to me than you would believe and I'm still not sure I really get it.
My career as a football follower, however, has led me to conclude that since players, refs, commentators and pundits spend quite a bit of time arguing over it, the confusion can't be all mine.
But there are a lot of sports shown on television, and it's only soccer that stirs me. In fact, it does more than that: it moves me. I should say straight away that there is nothing of the ladette leeriness about this love.
I feel embarrassment and distaste when I hear women rhapsodise about a player's legs or generally go "phwoar". It's just tacky and vulgar, and anyway I don't share their taste.
But perhaps that's because I'm older, and maybe it's also because I'm older that I love football, love football players. I fear my affection may be maternal: I feel as a mother does so specifically for a son - both proud and protective.
There is something about football players, that particular mixture of otherness, strength and petulance that seems to sum up the muscularity and fragility of maleness. As Mae West said before me: "I like my men to be men: strong and childish."
Perhaps that's why I prefer soccer to rugger. I feel rugby shows men how they like to see themselves - noble warriors, primitive god-monsters -whereas soccer shows men as women see them:

competitive, full of greedy ego and with that mummy-watch-me-jump need to impress.

I'm not claiming that watching football gives me insight into what it might be like to be a man, but I certainly like the feeling of being, if not in the boys' club, then allowed to eavesdrop on it. I love witnessing that different thing: male camaraderie.
I like it when players give a hug to someone on the opposing team after a match, or help one another up after a stumble - even if it was the result of what, in that delicious lingo, is described as a "cynical foul".
And what I love most is the affectionate joshing in the Match of the Day studio. Oh, how my eyes mist over as they rib each other and make in-jokes.
It doesn't matter that I don't always understand the references, not having followed football when actually played, but I feel I belong.
And of course, that sense of belonging is such a great part of being a football fan.
It's not just about having a sense of kinship with, for me, other Man UTD supporters, but about being able to do what men have traditionally always done - find common ground and have an agreeable and warm chat about sport.
I'd call it bonding, except that word is emetic and the joy of this connection is that it's superficial.
Women in the same position are plunged into profundity, with all its concomitant banalities: talk of relationships, parenthood (itself a hardly inclusive club) and Real Life. Give me a break! Or else it's make-up and shoes, and after an ironic few minutes, the joke can wear off, believe me.
Funnily enough, although I baulk at the clichés of female bonding, I adore the clichés of soccer. I love the hairstyling and colouring, the earrings, the hackneyed vanity. I enjoy every footballer who comes on to be interviewed after a game on Match of the Day in a matching suit, shirt and tie combo.
And the size of those knots bursting bulgingly out of the stiff pointy collars: there's not one detail wrong. You could tell they are footballers at a hundred paces. Mind you, they do pretty well on the studio sofa, too.

And it's some competition. I've noticed that they overwhelmingly favour piping, trimming and other fancy detailing, and have a defiant insistence on anything that will strobe in the studio. On every count, the over-highlighted miserabilist Lawro wins.
All that's a plus, but it's not the whole of it. As women, we have too much narrative in our lives, and for me perhaps the excitement of watching football is that it just happens. I'm not following a narrative, I'm absorbed in the game.
Well, not that absorbed: I still manage to commentate myself. I provide not only a running commentary on the game, but a running commentary on the commentary.
And now we've got to what I think is one of the deepest thrills provided by the game - its language.
I adore the way that when an attempt on goal rebounds off the post, commentators invariably report this as being "denied by the woodwork". I love it that when a bawling, brawling, foot-stamping monster shouts at the referee for a decision against him, this is noted as "dissent".
I particular relish how commentators are keen to avoid any infelicity: thus, instead of repeating the name Drogba, say, too often during a commentary, he will be alternatively referred to as the "Ivorian centre forward" or "the former Marseille player".
The commentators are not there just to comment but to present us with carefully crafted linguistic offerings. I cite one favourite of mine (I think emanating from a Middlesbrough-Aston Villa game): "The apprentice is level-pegging with the sorcerer."
And then there's the literature. True, there are no great claims to be made for this oeuvre but give me a footballer's stolidly ghost-written memoirs over a smart 'n' sassy bit of chick-lit nonsense any day. Yes, I have read the whole of Totally Frank (by Lamps) and yes, I relished Cashley (as he's known in the game) Cole's My Defence.
In particular I admire how on one page he confesses demotically "As soon as my foot struck the ball, I knew it meant trouble, but there weren't no stopping it." A few pages later, he is pondering to himself (as he listens to a conversation between Davids Dein and Seaman) oh-so grammatically: "Who isn't listening to whom?"
Why do I find that touching? Well, no matter how many times that Wildean apothegm is pulled out - the old "football is a gentleman's game played by thugs while rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen" - and for all that our football teams are overloaded with out-of-towners on huge salaries, and spoilt children who give as poor accounts of themselves off the pitch as on it, I do feel that football is the last bastion (we're in cliché-country, why fight it?) of the old-fashioned, respectable working class.
It means something to me when a player or manager refers to "the lads". Who else says lads any more? And yes, football is composed of teams but it relies on people who haven't been brought up to think that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. I admire that honesty. Everyone minds. They really, really mind.
And that's the thing, really: it may have no narrative, but soccer provides the most compelling, most enduring soap opera I know.

However I realise my enthusiasm is mine alone and isnt shared...

When all is said and done...

He's not that bad...

Most things in life fall in to 3 status categories;

• We want...


• We would settle For...


• We Get...

So with that in mind I shall share my experience with you, to illustrate my point.

• Primrose Asscher cut 5 carat diamond ( great with jeans)


• A flawless Asprey baguette emerald cut classic clear gem ( great all the time)


• a £199 nasty number from some dodgy outpost in the Trafford centre( never never good except for chavs planning a shotgun at Salford town Hall -if they can get a bus there.

TMH has to be thanked for his generous offer, as it would be rude not to. I shall get him back-be assured, when he isn't paying attention.