Here and There (6 page)
The most socially distinctive places I've ever visited are, in order, Cuba, Iceland, Haiti, Tasmania and Madagascar. Island people become vital and exotic. They make up stories about themselves and have obsessive fantasies and shared superstitions because over time those shared tics and eccentricities become communally held character traits. All people from small islands dance funny. When in Cuba, it's funny, but brilliant and original, spectacularly erotic and deeply enviable, but it's still odd. Cubans dance all the time. In the queue for the chemist, sitting down, in their sleep. Icelanders also dance weirdly, with strange Nordic exuberance, like men with imaginary salmon down their pants. As soon as we landed in Madagascar, I said to Tom, we've gotta find some dancers, they're going to be terpsichorean gold. And they were. A sort of synchronised flashing, with cramp, to music that is the African version of the Macarena, played on guitars made out of fruit boxes.
People haven't been in Madagascar all that long. Still new here â still learning the ropes. A mere 1300 years. The oldest island on earth with the youngest human inhabitants. Actually, Iceland's younger, by about 500 years. The original refugees here didn't come as you might expect from Africa just over the way, but from right across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. Later, people did come from across the strait from Mozambique to make a singularly attractive half-Asian, half-African people who rise above the sum of their parts and, thanks to a brief spell of French colonialism and some English Methodist missionaries, are split between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is really only the wrapping that hides their old ghostly beliefs in extreme ancestor worship.
They've nurtured an extreme dysfunctional hybrid that transcends its heredity and its history. They have become the children of an astonishing geography with 10 distinct climates and habitats and more indigenous green things than anywhere else on earth. The Malagasy have gone about transforming their island, planting the rice they must've carried carefully in their outrigger canoes from Indonesia and herding the humpbacked cows that may have come from southern India or Africa. If you're a conservationist or a New-World earthful ecologist, then the arrival of humans in Madagascar has been an unmitigated disaster. They have for a thousand-odd years rigorously burnt away the forest, made extinct several species of lemur and the largest bird ever to stand on this land, the mythical roc.
But ecologists and environmentalists always think that about people. They never look at humans as anything other than the problem to be blamed and fettered and laden with collective historical guilt. They've never looked at our beauty and ingenuity and the vivacity of people and what they build and grow and the lives they spin. Malagasy are as fascinating and as memorable as any of the weird species on this island. The burnt landscape that was created for the cattle and the rice is just as astonishing and memorable as the forest. The unlikely combination of Asia and Africa in this land is miraculous and wholly unexpected.
Australia and Madagascar have a very particular thing in common. It's the baobab. There are said to be nine species of that remarkable hollow tree that the bushmen of the Kalahari say was planted upside-down by an angry devil. Seven of them exist only here in Madagascar. One lives in Africa and one in Australia. A keepsake, a souvenir from a time when all three were part of the überdaddy continent Gondwana.
Quickly, without looking, what's the capital of Madagascar? If you knew it was Antananarivo, buy yourself a beer. Now say it to the person sitting next to you. If you managed without stuttering, giggling, repeating, spitting and arriving at no fewer and no more than six syllables, buy everyone in the office a beer. It is the most impossible language. It sounds like Swahili spoken with an African accent and it loves syllables almost as much as it loves As. They insert extra As wherever they can. It's a language that could only arise on an island. It's not meant to be spoken by outsiders. John Donne made the oft-repeated clichéd observation that no man is an island. It's a truth about men, but it's also an implied truth about islands, that they stand apart. That they're not like other lumps of land. That the things that happen on them only happen on them. Visit Madagascar â while stocks last.
France's allure may have faded
for some but it will always be the
model of worldly sophistication.
Every year I go to France, to the same place in Provence. I do the same things. I go to Saint-Rémy and drink café crème, pick at a croissant, and read two-day-old English papers, trying to ignore all the other Englishmen doing the same things around me. I buy another pair of rope-soled espadrilles that will grow sticky and uncomfortable and join the other 48 pairs in the basement cupboard. I buy lavender oil, though actually the finest lavender comes from the south of England. I go to the fromager and get three sorts of chèvre and wait for an age as the assistant wraps them as if they were a present for an ancient aunt. I go to a market in my new shoes that slip and chafe and I'll buy five sorts of olives and some figs and little packets of sausage and some pâté and a jar of confiture de fraise des bois and probably a new crew-necked, long-sleeved stripy T-shirt, unwearable unless you're going to a fancy dress party as Picasso. I will listen to passing accordionists, resist a beret, and watch women walk small dogs.
Oscar Wilde said that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Well, when liberal intellectual insecure Englishmen die they go to a queue for a cheese stall in a Provençal market. It is where everything we associate with
la bonne vie
, the
déjeuner
without end, exists, and I for one wilfully ignore the truth. That the cheese is made in Holland, the saucisson comes from Poland, that the shoes are from Croatia, the T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, the figs are from North Africa, as is the girl who sold them to me, and everyone else is probably Albanian or a Gypsy or an Englishman like me, pretending to be French. Everybody's pretending to be French.
Like other Englishmen, I manage to have selective partial vision. We only see what we need to see to maintain the fantasy of old France. But I must admit it's getting harder. France is becoming a virtual country, like an old computer game you play on the back of your eyelids. For 200 years France and the French have been the arbiter if not of culture then of the cultured life. It was always a bit of a fraud, a self-delusion, but it was based on some very solid, civilised foundations. Post-war France was the world centre for almost everything that made you feel sedately superior. Films, novels, art, fashion, design. And the food.
Now, one after the other, like insouciant dominoes, they've fallen. French films have withered into dire, horrible self-reverential bores or desperate, unfunny comedies. (A sense of humour was never a terribly French thing.) French books: do they still write French books about anything other than politics and gossip? French fashion doesn't exist. The French names are all run by Italian and English and German designers. Art, it must be admitted, was mostly done by foreigners living in Paris or the south of France, but that was fine because they wanted to live in Paris or the south of France, and the art seemed to come from the place that offered them licence and light, a certain
je ne sais quoi
. French art today has flatlined. French design is a pretentious joke. And worst of all, saddest, is French food.
In many ways it has remained the same, only in far fewer places. As in England, where there is a congenital disease which is killing off pubs, so across the channel it's the bistros which are withering. The prix-fixe menu of a few francs for a mound of rillettes and a steak frites or a plate of tripe, a small tranche of fish in beurre blanc, followed by some brie or poached prunes or tarte fine, all going, turned into pizza or kebabs. French food has remained, but everyone else has changed. Attitudes and diets have changed, and the chefs' attempts to mutate bourgeois cuisine, to lighten it and slim it, have made it ridiculous. The ingredients that French food comes from, that astonishing obsession with the finest things that could be grown or plucked or bottled, the most labour-intensive manufacture for the smallest possible production by a peasant society, are all dead. The infinitely fine filigree of artisanal markets is threadbare and cynically manipulated and bought up by brands hiding behind folksy labels.
What has France left in its cultural waistcoat pockets? Well, French philosophy is still as screamingly risible and portentous and irrelevant as it always was. And French pop songs remain the most awesomely naff and brilliantly crap musical moments ever conceived, every one of them some mayonnaise-voiced doggerel attempt to squeeze one more syllable into a line than it can comfortably or rhythmically accept. The French still think pop songs are essentially poems stuffed into tunes, and they still imagine that the words matter. And stoically and absurdly, like a man who always carries a condom and a red rose because he knows that one day the right girl is going to fall off her bicycle at his feet, the French wait for the Charles Trénet, Edith Piaf-zeitgeist thing to come around and bathe them again in rightness. In the meantime there is French rap to be avoided.
Being from the gauche side of the channel, I should of course spend a moment in sniggering glee at the precipitous decline in French culture. What is left is now a rootless and meritless French arrogance, which simply makes them funnier and more pathetic, like paunchy men standing in Europe's drawing room, dressed only in their Speedos. I should giggle, drain my cup of schadenfreude, but really I can't.
France was always our idea of heaven. Paris was the city I yearned to be transported to as an art student. My lust still remains caught on the sulky, petite, smokewreathed women of the New Wave. I will ever be drawn to French art and French style. I hope to go out in a surfeit of foie gras and cassoulet. It's my age. France has always been the model of sophistication for men like me, and I'm too old to find some new fantasy.
But not my children. They will only read Camus if they have to sit him for some exam. They want to eat burgers and curry. They think that Angelina Jolie is the sexiest thing on celluloid. Fashion is an international scrum of strange, exotic branding. Art is Brit and Jap. Their cultural world doesn't even have a hole in it where France used to be. France has the same cultural standing for the young as Finland does. (Possibly less than Finland; Finland has Nokia.)
France is now a museum for the old. It is a great open-plan retirement home for the Englishmen who can't wear shorts and are still meaning to read Proust under a peach tree. The rather glorious truth about France's extinct culture is that it died out for good Darwinian principles. It had reached a point of almost perfect equilibrium, and a change in the balance of suavity, manners and impetuosity, intellect and flirtation would've been to diminish the whole, so they waited for the world to regret its bad taste and come back to le vie Française. But they didn't, of course. Except us portly Englishmen, and a handful of aesthetically fine-tuned American gays, which is rather galling for the French. But they're right. Better to die an unmodified, unrepentant, ridiculous Frenchman than to live on as some Eurotrash ersatz mongrel.
We've got an inane ditty for
birthdays, so why not bless other
noteworthy occasions with a
similarly discordant sentiment?
I walked across a beach, and in 30 seconds, I knew it was the worst beach in Minorca. The sea was fine, the sand was okay, the view was lovely, it was clean and sheltered. I got off it as soon as I could. People occasionally ask, where are the best beaches in the world? And I always reply, it depends on who you're with. But I can tell you how to tell the worst beaches in the world: they're the ones with the bare-naked people on them. Not bare naked because they don't own clothes, though if you do find yourself on a beach with committed lifetime 24-hour naked chaps, it's probably in the Nicobar Islands and they're about to kill you with barbed spears. No, I mean people who live and work all wrapped up and who come to the beach specifically to get utterly and butterly naked. In short, Germans. Proto-spiritual Germans.
There is a seaside global truth that says the worst bodies wear the smallest trunks, and the very worst wear none at all. It's the aesthetic horror of people who think that being nude will show the rest of the world what beautiful people they are on the inside. Their nakedness is a billboard not for nubility or sensuality, but for rigorous ethical housekeeping and moral mountaineering. And if that were all, we could just laugh at them. But the fact is that naturist beaches are the most bad-tempered radiantly sociophobic stretches on the planet. You know the dream where you find yourself naked in a public place and you wake up in a sweat and wonder what it would feel like if it happened for real? Well, all you have to do is walk down a nudist beach wearing clothes and feel the glares of scorn and the ugly muttering anger of naked intolerance. Nudist beaches are the only places I'm tempted to moon people.
I'm also often asked for insiders' tips on being able to tell a good restaurant from the other sort. My advice is to enter, ask for a menu, order some food, and when it arrives, eat it. Generally the inquirers are not satisfied with this. We could have thought of that, they say, implying that if that was all there is to being a restaurant critic, then I'm taking my pay cheque at best under false pretences and at worst under pretend pretences. What they want is a tip, a secret inside sign. Okay. Well, don't eat in a restaurant that has ankle-deep pools of vomit outside or a chef who's picking his nose or is being picketed by slaughterhouse workers.
Granted these are unlikely-to-rare sightings, but here are two things that never, ever happen in good restaurants. Never eat anywhere that sets fire to things on purpose in front of you. Not pancakes, not Italian digestive. And never return to an establishment where the waiters sing âHappy Birthday'. Nothing is so indicative of desperate sycophancy than the barbershop quartet of service staff warbling over a terminally horrified woman just coming to terms with being 50, who now knows she's got to eat a vile ice-cream cake with blue candle wax on it and then walk through a room full of people all thinking, thank God I'm a Sagittarius, remind me not to come here in December.