An Englishman's Castle

Anyway, in your capacity as the Beau Nash of this gentlemen’s forum, I thought you might be interested in checking out the following restaurant that was nominated by Charlotte Rampling at the weekend for The Observer’s guide to The 100 Best Places To Eat This Summer.

According to the only good reason to watch The Night Porter, the next time you take your bucket and spade to Cannes you should dine at Club 55, which is apparently very good for sea bass.

Actually, I wonder if I could lean on your considerable marine experience and have you advise me on the subject of sea bass.

As you know, for more than a score of years I have eaten neither fish, nor fowl nor anything that arrives on a plate asking for its mother. And since my quack has recently discovered that I am a nesting-site for heart disease, no cheese nor eggs neither now. So I am hardly an expert on foodstuffs, even though I could cook better than Delia with my dick.

Anyway, what is this sea bass that has grown in international popularity during the past ten years? I may well be the animals’ new best friend, but I was born and raised by the sea and am not totally ignorant of the nature of a bloater. And when I was a lad, we used to fish for bass. And we called them bass. Just bass. Not sea bass. Just fucking bass. Like we didn’t call cod sea cod and as far as I am aware there is not much call either for sea sprats.

So what’s with this sea bass lark? Or, more to the point and as I once said to infuriate an especially pompous waiter (before reminding him that he, not I, was the one serving at tables on a Saturday night), what is a river bass? Or a lake bass?

This sea bass affectation is rubbish. Have you ever heard anybody order grape wine with it? Exactly, it’s just another example of the culinary class structure that I would like to see torn down and stuffed, with coriander and pine nuts, up the parson’s nose of Martha Stewart.

Another example of this pretension is found among The Observer’s list of 100 best places to eat. On page 20, column 4, to be exact. For there it is that we find The Observer advocating that you eat at La Columbe.

Ah, I hear you puzzle, I am not familiar with La Columbe. As well you would not be, chum, for La Columbe does not nestle next to the other Suffolk and Thameside eateries on The O List. That is because it is in fucking South Africa!

What possessed The Observer’s usually-excellent team of pot and pan-bellied food writers to think that among their three readers there may be one who picked up the supplement on Sunday and said “Do you fancy lunch down the pub, darling? Or shall we go for a quick bite in South Africa?”

As newspapers are very aggressive these days, I was not sure whether their listing of all these dining rooms meant that you are expected to eat at all 100 places this summer. As I calculate that there are only about another 60 days left of summer here, that means eating at a rate of almost 10 restaurants a week.

Besides the evident toll on your stash of air-miles, that’s an awful lot of waiters’ piss to unknowingly drink in your gravy.

Actually, I once knew a woman who looked like Charlotte Rampling. Just like the Francophile actress, she had a hell of a wide mouth on her. She could get two men in her mouth at once and still be able to say “Oh, you’re home early”.

Anyway, the Fourth Estate’s fetish with food reminds me that I must write to the BBC to request that they put more programmes on TV about celebrity chefs.

No, really; I mean it. I want to see more celebrity chefs cooking on television. But I’m not talking about foul-mouthed fuckers like Gordon Ramsay; that’s just him doing his job. I mean proper celebrities, celebrities who are chefs – not chefs who are (apparently) celebrities.

By celebrities, I do not mean those game-show hosts of transient talent who are forever getting pictured coming out of that China White club with the white bit of it running down their nose. I mean stars like Girls Aloud.

I do not know whether you have Girls Aloud in France. Take a tip and write to somebody important suggesting that you do. Girls Aloud are the best thing since The Beatles.

As you know, I am not one to make such an authoritative claim glibly. But Girls Aloud are TBTSTB because, unlike your Ulrikas and Davinas, they are among the few real stars who bother to actually look like proper sluts.

And I love them not least because they look (a) Normal and (b) Like they probably bang like The Beatles (read any biography to get the sense of that).

In other words, Girls Aloud share that magic that the Fabs had in that they appear to be believable and real. I like my TV trollops to at least appear as if they might let you; as the attraction of stardom is that it is achievable. I mean you wouldn’t try to cop a feel with Madonna, would you? You wouldn’t immediately suggest Taking It Greek on your first introduction to Barbra Streisand.

Well, you might; but I wouldn’t.

I think we have become far too stuffy in our global idolatry of the famous; unless the girl next door is in actuality the woman who owns Berkshire, it has become popular not to admire them.

And once again this snobbishness in our worship of the holders of the headlines reveals how out of step we are with the opinions of people who wash.

You can scoff, but a quick glance at the list of what’s best-selling in Britain will muzzle your cynicism. According to the Top Ten chart of best-selling non-fiction hardbacks, jolly Jodie Marsh’s autobiography is at #3, thereby outdoing both Bono On Bono and Geldof’s log of his trek around Africa in a hat.

This intrigues me but possibly puzzles you the greater because you, being half-French, are wondering “who is Jodie Marsh?”

A couple of years back, Channel 4 discovered that it was running out of footage for its usual listing of Foreskins Of The Famous and decided to dive into the batter of reality TV instead with a series called Essex Wives.

As you hail from that maligned county, you will already have anticipated that Essex Wives was a study of families who shouted over each other like thirty Jewish grandmothers locked together in a coal bunker. The wives showed themselves true to stereotype by forever cooking meals containing an abundance of chips and driving to shoe shops in Japanese cabriolets. Being a bit of a fan of the habits of the proletariat, I tuned in.

What became evidently captivating was not the opinions of old mother Marsh, but the sauce of her daughter Jodie; a bright girl who did things like go to Stringfellow’s night club dressed only in a belt. I do not mean a short skirt, I mean no skirt; just a belt. You know the sort, I expect.

I remember turning at the time to the tight half of my conjugal knot and predicting that Ms. Marsh would become a big star and complimented her ingenuity at giving a new meaning to the cummerbund. I may have made some additional mumbling about how it would not be the worst idea in the world for certain other people to follow Jodie’s lead in the waistband department.

Anyway, after I had found a packet of frozen peas for the bruise on my face, I made a note in that part of my brain that was not temporarily illuminated by the sight of stars to remember the name Jodie Marsh.

Damn me if I shouldn’t go into talent-spotting lark because within twelve months young Jodie was spread all over the shop here (well, at least her legs appeared to be) and a star was born. And yet talk about mucky; according to what I’ve seen reported, dear old Mrs. Rampling’s predilection for nasty room service don’t even come close. JM’s got a gob on her that could accommodate all of Wembley Stadium and still leave her room enough to clearly enunciate Abide With Me during the community singing.

Naturally, there are some within our homesteads who cruelly choose to compare her to the fused material formed during the refining of metals, but I question her deserving of their distain because she is, poor girl, merely the personification of chaps’ age-old fondness for the type.

Calibrate my claim by casting yourself back to when you were at school and therefore at your most atavistic – when you went to the 6th Form Disco drunk on Don Cortez, was it the scrubbers that you tried to dance with or the high-achiever prefects who looked like Thora Hird?

If you’re going to be difficult, I’ll ask you again…….

Right. Exactly.

So why do we now, in our dotage, get all high and mighty about girls who we used to wish had been in our tutor group? After all, it’s Jodie Marsh whose name is at #3 in the list of Britain’s best-selling books; I don’t see Professor Mary Warnock charting there in a hurry.

We shall return to this topic of The Importance Of Being Earthy at a later date, but I have to rush off now as I’m cooking lunch of Autumn Stew and Herb Dumplings (recipe below) for the new home-help that social services is sending me. She’s apparently called Nurse Titmuss.

Best,

GB