Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (3 page)

The Part of Me that Is Forever Cosa Nostra

There's a shop I seem to keep passing at the moment. No matter where I'm going or what manner of transport I am using, there it always is, somewhere between X and Y, a constant irritation to my senses, not because I don't like the shop and what it sells, but because I do. I am not going to describe its location exactly, partly for the reason that I am not certain myself, and partly for the reason that I don't want other people to know of its existence. Once everybody knows, it will have lost its allure. Enough that it's in London, in the vicinity of New Bond Street.

Generically, it's a shop you will recognise at once. A gentlemen's outfitters, as such were once called – though, of course, no man now thinks of himself as a gentleman nor goes along with the concept of  being fitted out – expensively Mediterranean, of the sort always named after a famous Italian composer, Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, Monteverdi, Donizetti, Morricone, though you suspect the owner, like the majority of his clients, is actually from the Levant.

The clothes, meanwhile, whoever buys and sells them, are definitely Italian. Southern Italian is how I think of them. From Naples or Bari or Taranto. Or maybe even more southern still – Sicily, say. Mafia clothes, that's what I'm saying. Clothes to meet other members of the Mob in. Which is presumably why I am drawn to the place, why I keep seeing it from the top of a bus, or from the window of a speeding taxi, or out of the corner of my eye when I am running to get to the chemist before it closes. There is a part of me that is forever Cosa Nostra. Nothing to do with violence or extortion. I wouldn't hurt or take money from a fly. It's an aesthetic thing, that's all. It's about dressing. I hanker to dress like a Sicilian-born Mobster.

I sat next to someone from the Mafia once, in a swing club in New York. He was tall for an Italian, with a long pale face and beautifully tapered fingers. He wore a treble-breasted grey silk suit, shot through with filaments of platinum, and the softest of soft white shirts, with long pointed collars and cuffs lined with swansdown. I admired the way he sat at the head of the table dispensing favours, buying the most expensive Armagnacs, choosing cigars for everyone, including the women, and permitting, with a slow inclination of the head, those who wanted to get up and dance to do so. He was, of course, above dancing himself. Personal dancing is not what you do if you're Mafia.

The other thing I liked about him was the way he kept smiling at me. It's possible that he was coveting my clothes as much as I was coveting his. A blue linty blazer worn over a button-down Viyella Tory shirt, yellowish corduroys and Chelsea boots. There weren't, after all, many other people accoutred as I was that night. But what I think he really saw in me was Mob material. Someone who might, in other circumstances, have been useful to him, maybe his bag carrier, maybe his sidekick, who knows – maybe even his Godfather. When my father drove taxis in Manchester they called him the Godfather. So it's in my genes.

A couple of days ago, anyway, I finally found myself, with half an hour to spare, outside the very window I'd been speeding past for weeks. Pavarotti, I think the place was called. Or Lanza. I can't remember. What I do remember, though, and with great vividness, was a powder-blue ensemble – powder-blue blouson with navy leather elbow patches, powder-blue trousers with navy leather piping round the pockets, and powder-blue canvas yacht shoes, laced with dyed rope of the deepest indigo. All very well, but what shirt do you wear with that?

Then I saw it, high in the collar as is the vogue all over Italy at the moment, two buttons at the throat, the collars edged tastefully in steel, the cuffs sawn away at a diagonal, so that you can show off your diamond watch at the same time as your diamond links, and the colour – this being the best part – a peacock blue which seemed to change its hue according to the angle from which you viewed it, now azure, now violet, now as crimson as spilt blood. So there would be economy in buying such a shirt, as it goes with everything in your wardrobe.

Did I mention that the shop was also one of those where you have to ring the bell and say ‘Luigi sent me' before they let you in? They looked me over a couple of times, through the grille, then must have seen what the mafioso saw in New York, and unlocked. I wasn't in there long. Just long enough to ascertain that the incarnadined pigmy buffalo belt for the trousers alone was £85
0
. ‘Nice,' I said, not showing alarm. ‘But I was looking for something a little more ostentatious.'

I don't like being unable to afford things. Foolish, I know, but I feel that not being able to afford things is a sign of personal failure. Had I organised my life better, become the surgeon my grandma wanted me to be, or better still a footballer, I could have bought ten powder-blue blousons edged in navy leather with my earnings from a single missed penalty.

No doubt that's who Pavarotti's fits out – footballers with the aesthetic of the Mob. But who am I to disapprove? I studied English literature with F. R. Leavis and can barely quiet the Mafia in my soul. What right do I have to expect better of men with CSEs in the three Rs of rapping, raping and roasting? Give any of us too much money and regard and we'll act like fools.

My single consolation as I leave Respighi's empty-handed: thank God I belong to a profession that keeps me too poor at least to
look
a prat.

Juicing

Just occasionally a column should be a two-way thing. The small distraction I provide from rage and sorrow every week I provide without expectation of reciprocity. A job's a job. But today I'm the one in need. Help me, somebody. How do you juice? But don't rush to answer until you have fully grasped the question.

I have the necessary equipment. I have more gadgets for juicing than anyone I know who doesn't own a juice factory. Mixers, masticators, macerators, extractors, blenders, squeezers, juicerators, pressers, citrus reamers – you name them, I have them. Loose me into a kitchen shop and I buy a machine for juicing. Perhaps it's the word.
Juice
. I think I must hear the secret of life itself in it.

Every year at about this time I begin to emerge from a personal winter of extreme catarrhal discontent, and experience a deep longing for juice. It could be atavistic. Long ago in the primeval swamp my ancestors either survived on citrus fruits or
were
citrus fruits. It can be no accident, anyway, that I live in an area where the only shops that don't sell sex sell health foods. Hot ginger zingers to the left of me, siriguela spicer to the right, and those are not the names of lingerie or aphrodisiacs. Sensing sunshine and the promise of a new beginning last week, I made it to the nearest of these health delis and by pointing – for I am voiceless after a long winter – got them to juice me up some orange, apple, ginger and lime.

Normally you must stipulate precisely what you want – ‘So is that a wild acai berry sparkadula or an all-night boogie-woogie banana nirvana and watermelon nog?' – or they won't serve you. But in this instance they wanted me out of the shop fast; I am not, after all, a good advertisement for their produce. I drank it in a single swallow and ordered two more, the bill coming to a watermelon pip short of twenty smackers. At that rate, I calculated, I'd be out of my life savings – however worthless – by nightfall. So I did what I always do on exactly the same date every year and that was buy everything I needed to make my own juice and in the process surprise my wife by my initiative.

I don't know how other people retrieve their blenders from the cupboards in which they've been stored all winter, but I do it sideways on and blind, relying on feel rather than visual recognition. I found what I was after eventually but cut my finger on the rotary blade which I am always at pains to remove from the machine itself when I put it away, mindful that the majority of fatalities take place in the kitchen. Now I am not one to complain of injury – broken nail, grazed knuckle, paper cut: I bear them all with equanimity – but the juice of lime stings a cut finger beyond endurance. The juice of orange ditto. And I am messy with an orange, never having mastered that rococo single-movement peel of which our grandmothers were capable. My way is to squeeze the orange with one hand and then to make lunges at it with the other, not unlike Jack Nicholson hacking at the bathroom door in
The Shining
. Why I don't simply call that juicing, suck my fingers and have done I cannot explain. I must like the mechanical process more.

By this time, anyway, it was necessary for me to wash the citrus out of my stinging cut and apply plasters to it – one to go round the finger left to right, the second to go over the top and secure the first, and the third to go round the finger right to left to secure the second. How the first plaster got into the blender I am again unable to explain. But in seeking to extract it I accidentally pushed a button named PULSE – a button which until now I'd never seen the purpose of unless you are meant to feel it to check whether you are still alive. In the confusion caused by this sudden throbbing, I failed to secure the lid on the blender, as a consequence of which enough juice for a small kindergarten erupted volcanically, some of it landing on the kitchen ceiling, some of it landing on my wife's cookery books, but most of it landing on me.

Except that you couldn't by any stretch of the imagination call this juice. Juice runs. Juice flows. This moved, since we are talking horror films, like the Blob. These are mere interim questions, but why was this more like soup or purée than juice? Why, though it had two whole witch-twists of ginger in it, didn't it taste remotely of ginger? And whatever it tasted of and looked like, would you, reader, consider it permissible – hygienically, and from a culinary point of view – to soak up the spillage with a sponge, squeeze it back into the blender and serve it to your wife pretending nothing had happened?

All hope of getting anything that could be called a drink out of this having fled, I set about cleaning up. Not only were the jackets of the cookery books covered with a tacky pith, the pages were already glued together. I didn't dare put them in the sink. I couldn't dry them on myself because I was tackier than they were. In the end the only thing I could think of doing was to lick them clean. Which raises another question: do you tell your wife you've licked her cookery books? And if she asks why, do you explain?

Unable to lay hands on a tea towel (they spoil the look of a kitchen, my wife believes), I took off my shirt – a silky two-tone Brioni slim-fit with blue piping on the inside of the collar; not a shirt to juice in, I accept, but I like to work in the kitchen in unsuitable clothes in the same way some men like to bungee-jump in three-piece suits – and mopped the mess up with that. It wasn't inevitable that I should slip on the shirt, but I did. In the act of keeping my balance I pulled over the blender, cracking a tile and damaging three more fingers. The blender itself, of course, is finished – finished in the mechanical and the reputation sense. But that's not the worst of it. After four washes I am still unable to get the bitter-smelling confetti of sticky orange and lime pulp off my Brioni shirt.

So here's my question. How do
you
juice?

Books are Bad for You

Callooh! Callay! It's World Book Day. Or at least it was on Thursday. You must have noticed – pages falling out of the sky, libraries festooned with publishers' catalogues, writers on every corner, words flowering on wintry trees.

As a writer of books myself, I am almost hysterically in favour of anything that ministers to their consumption. ‘Read, read, you little bastards!' was one of my suggestions for a World Book Day slogan, the exhortation to be delivered by a masked flagellator sent to every school in the land.
A proposal the organisers rejected, presumably on the grounds that ‘little bastards' contains too many syllables for the little bastards to read.

My other suggestion, also rejected, was for a poster campaign likening a book to a packet of cigarettes, with the words ‘Reading is Bad for Your Health!' or ‘Literacy Kills!' splashed in blood-red letters across the jacket. This would have had the advantage of enticing into reading those children who need to feel they're doing something dangerous with their time. It would also have had the advantage of being true.

Books are bad for us. Books are murder.

If you don't believe me, read what books say. Of whom was it written, that ‘Coming later to Sir Walter Scott, she conceived a passion for the historical, and dreamed about oak chests, guardrooms, minstrels . . . She studied descriptions of furniture in Eugène Sue, and sought in Balzac and George Sand a vicarious gratification of her own desires'? Scott and Sand and Balzac, note – literature! So by modern standards, at least, we're talking about a rather classy reader here, a woman with more grown-up books under her belt by the age of sixteen than most kids leaving school today will have read before they're sixty.

‘
Elle avait lu
Paul et Virginie,
et elle avait rêvé la maisonette de bambous
. . .' The French is a clue, if you didn't pick it up already in Balzac and George Sand.
Elle avait rêvé
. . . Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, ‘of love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges . . . gloomy forests, troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, rowing boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the groves, gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs . . . weeping like fountains'. The very stuff of the imagination, members of the jury, the very education of the heart. And her name? And her fate? Emma Bovary, Miss French Provincial Page Turner herself, killed by the non-fulfilment of expectations planted in her heart by literature, choking on her own book-fuelled yearnings, destroyed by the brain-rot which is unchecked reading!