by A. A. Gill
I spent 10 minutes just watching them, half expecting that they might continue to metamorphose on the counter, slowly becoming a united sweet sludge. And I began to think about the worldwide eugenics of food. There is a set of international dishes that have shed their national origins and, like rats, pigeons, fleas and boy bands, become ubiquitous. Freed from the scrutiny of their families, they grow degenerate, spoilt, sloppy, lascivious, foul-mouthed, inconsistent, amoral, slovenly bits of mouthy comfort.
Take pizza. It started as a simple ascetic crisp stretch of dough, frugally flavoured with tomato and mozzarella, perhaps with the addition of a sliver of local ham, a sprig of rosemary. Away from Naples, into the fleshpots, it became a bloated painted whore. Anything can have a go on a deep-crust pizza, and anything does: pineapple, caviar, smoked salmon, cheddar. It’s been cosmetically enhanced and coarsened. And Caesar salad – a simple and clever piece of serendipity that married cos lettuce, egg, parmesan, garlic, anchovies and croutons – has grown into a soppy cold stew of chicken and bacon, smothered in mayonnaise, invariably without anchovy.
The list of things that grow wayward when they leave home is the longest lamented menu in the world. From dim sum to chicken tikka, there is a Darwinian natural selection in these fast food international dishes. Recreated without chefs, unencumbered by recipes, often with their constituent parts, their DNA, mass-produced by technicians with degrees in engineering, this is food that has become its own master, and to survive in the competitive stuff-throat world of cheap catering, it has to adapt to attract the humans who are needed to consume it as part of its natural life cycle.
We all think that when we pick up a menu we are the predators, we are the hunters, the grazers and browsers, but have you ever considered that you are in fact also the prey, that the hamburger needs you quite as much as you desire it? The memory of its taste, its coarse smell, the dribble of nameless juices, is what it uses to lure you in. Without millions of victims worldwide, the hamburger would go the way of the Cornish pasty, the posset, salmagundi, sops; the list of extinct dishes is quite as long as the list of wayward ones, a list of extinct dishes that couldn’t adapt to colonise new palates and markets.
I sat looking at my cappuccino and croissant and considered that in their instigation these two simple things represented a triumph, not just of the West against the invading hordes, but of taste and culture, craft and civilisation. The delicate lightness of the croissant with its wonderful chewy heart, the coffee the result of a combination of trade and discovery from Africa, Arabia and Europe, a synthesis of curiosities, each to start every new morning. In their inception, they were the best of us. In their mass production, their sweet, unctuous, stupid, slurred, caloried, careless flavours, their toothless textures, they appeal to the worst of us. There is, in the descent of fast global grub, a moral, and also a warning: who do you think is consuming who?
Bombay dreams
Ultimate enlightenment lies in the collective will, intelligence and glamour of civilisation, and the bustling city of Bombay is the perfect place to find it.
Travellers can be divided into two categories: those who travel to get away from people, and those who travel to find people. The fashionable thing now is to go to a place where there is no one. For some unfathomable reason, it’s called ecotourism. Places that don’t have people in them generally don’t have people in them for a reason. The Norwegian government is offering cheap flights to the extreme north of the country, just shy of the North Pole, with the teasing promise that ‘it’s the most remote place on earth’. Except, of course, for the airport and the plane full of gym instructors, camping-shop fantasists, extreme vegans and travel bloggers you’ll find there, all shivering blissfully in the blinkered belief that they’re on their own learning something pristine and magically true about themselves and the world. Well, I’ve been to the Arctic Circle, and I can tell you, if you can find somewhere so remote that Eskimos won’t live there, then you’ve got about half an hour to get somewhere they do.
The first travel piece I wrote was about the salt pans in the Kalahari – still one of my favourite places on earth. Nothing lives there. Birds don’t fly, fish don’t swim, antelope don’t stot (that, by the way, is a technical term for what antelopes do; they also ‘pronk’). Whatever stots, pronks, saunters, limps or flaps into the Makgadikgadi stays there and desiccates. I came across a man who had a New-Age revelation in the Kalahari. He was a rather ordinary buttoned-up mercantile chap. He told me he’d taken his spade and wandered into the bright, glittering nothingness for his morning ablution and, while squatting in the unforgiving spotlight with naught for his modesty, he was blinded by the truth that he was merely a speck in the great spinning harmony of the spheres. Stripped away of everything, including his dignity, he understood that he was a small thing. And? I asked. And what? he said. And, what else? Nothing else. He grew quite peeved: Isn’t that enough, the cosmic truth that we are just dust in the Hoover-bag of existence? Well, that’s not so much a revelation as a French cartoon cliché. How dare you call my revelation a cliché? Don’t you know who I am?
And that’s rather the point of New-Age travel into wildernesses. It leads to a pompous snobbery – the wisdom that belongs to those who have been to the high places and the distant shores, and it’s all a nonsense and a delusion. The idea that there is some kind of special found knowledge, some higher understanding indebted to nature, is quite a modern one. It was invented in the 18th century by the Romantics and was centred prosaically around the manicured crags of Switzerland and the sodden sod of the Lake District. Wordsworth and Byron and various composers and lady watercolourists found an awe in the outdoors, and they commandeered a new word for it: they called it the sublime. Beauty, you see, was a man-made thing. The sublime was what was created by wind, rain, time and the god of your choice. And, in it, they found a great metaphor for people with too much time on their hands, too many black suits and too little sex.
The other type of traveller, the one in whose caravanserai I happily include myself, is after people and the places of people. We are the older school. We trace our tour guides back to Herodotus, and they include Marco Polo, Richard Burton, Moses and Genghis Khan. We understand that the greatest wonders of the world are all man-made and they’re wonders because men made them. That what’s ultimately enlightening is the collective will, intelligence, aesthetics, fun and glamour of civilisation. So this piece is belatedly about one of the greatest cities in the world, Bombay. (We don’t say Mumbai. Only newsreaders and charity workers say Mumbai.)
Bombay is a city where it’s impossible to avoid people. Indeed, the defining grace and glory of the whole subcontinent is its people. The teeming, steaming great masterpiece of humanity. Every vista, every angle has a cast of thousands, and Bombay is one of its principal joys. It’s not a beautiful city, not in the man-made sense, not in the Venice or Prague sense, although it has many spectacular parts. Its attraction lies in the throb and the hum of its population. It is a city in the process of shedding its skins. It was the great port of Empire, a self-consciously provincial view of the East from Home Counties clerks, a place of order and selfconscious provincial good taste. Victoria Station is an absurd totem of stiff grandeur to English self-regard and smug grandiloquence. Crawford Market is an attempt to turn a bazaar into a department store, with decoration and a fountain designed by Rudyard Kipling’s father. Kipling was born nearby, in the art school. And when the British left, Bombay reverted to being a city of Parsee mercantile wealth, and Indian snobbery. Then along came Bollywood, and it got a whole lot sexier. Now it’s got music and advertising and banking and financial services and a middle class that has reached some sort of delicate tipping point against the teeming penury. It is a city that is glowing with energy. It is a mesmerising attraction for India’s rural poor, who arrive in their thousands every day to camp in packing cases, a ghost city that fills in the gaps between the real concrete-and-glass city like human ivy. They’re here for the chanc
e to be part of it, to jump aboard the spinning generator of light, power, wealth and discontent.
None of these are reasons you’d generally go to visit a city. As a rule, we visit metropolises that were once great but have now settled into old age, a charming decrepitude, so that we view the spoils of enthusiasm as nostalgia. But you really should go and see Bombay. This is a city becoming, shrugging off its past and bursting into the future. It’s riveting and enthusing just to be stuck in its traffic jams for a few days.
And if you want to get a head-full of the sublimity of humanity, then come and look at Bombay as a natural wonder, a human Niagara, a rainforest of CVs, a Grand Canyon of ambition. And if that’s not enough, then there’s the best street food in India. And if you want to shop, there’s the finest shopping in India, including the marvellous antiques market on Mutton Street. There’s a sophisticated nightlife that’s as expensive as Tokyo and as sexy as Rome. There’s cricket at the weekends played against a backdrop of colonial Gothic steeples. And there’s life, pulsating and grasping and dreaming with great politeness and vanity. If you’re fed up with being made to feel guilty for being born human, then go to Bombay and be reminded what a brilliant, breathtaking species we are. In the end, that’s the distinction between those who travel to see nature and those who travel to see people. The one is ultimately all about you. The other is all about everyone else. Wilderness travellers are self-regarding bores. Humanity-commuters are the storytellers.
Call of the wild
On big-game hunts in the African wilderness, there is a tangible sense of being part of the rough and violent scheme of nature.
Africa is the great divide for many travellers. For the worldly, Africa contains more places that they don’t want to go to and more things that they don’t want to see than anywhere else in the solar system. I suspect you could divide the globe into two groups: those who wake up every morning thinking, ‘Thank God I’m not in Africa,’ and those who look out of the window first thing and think, ‘What I wouldn’t give to be in Africa.’ Admittedly, the second group is a whole lot smaller than the first. I know because I’m one of them. And like the members of some geo-religious sect, we fall upon each other’s necks when we meet because most of the time we’re having to explain to the incredulous and the repulsed what we like about the Dark Continent.
There is a third group: those who wake up and say, ‘Oh my God, get me out of Africa.’ I know that however frightening, threatening and distasteful it can be to visit Africa, it’s nothing on how tough it must be to live there. Of all the seven continents, Africa has the worst reputation. Ever since my first visit 25 years ago, I’ve missed it. A year without a trip to Africa is a year without a particular flavour of heat, sense of colour. And this year, although I’d been to Algeria, I’d not set foot in black Africa. It didn’t look like it was going to happen, and then a friend said, ‘Why don’t you come and join me in the bush in northern Tanzania for a week?’ and I bought a ticket there and then. And my heart sang, and my soul quivered, and my doctor started filling prescriptions and needles. One of the most embarrassing and shaming things about going to Africa is that we have to take an expensive chunk of First-World pharmacopoeia with us. Prophylactics, inoculations, oils, ointments, unctions and sprays, none of which are available or offered to people who live there.
I had been invited to go big-game hunting, in the bush that runs along the southern edge of the Serengeti plain and the Ngorongoro Crater. I’d never done this before. I don’t have a problem with hunting per se – I spent quite a lot of my autumn shooting birds and stalking deer – but game hunting in Africa comes with a long tail: from Teddy Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway and all those army officers galloping about bagging things, and the murderous taxidermically challenged Americans, looking for big and rare things to decapitate in the name of interior decoration.
If you peruse YouTube, you’ll find that the very cream of all of the most objectionable white males in the universe are posting little films of themselves wearing absurd amounts of camouflage over their paunches and baseball caps, dribbling over mega-ammunition and rifles that would cost five years’ wages of the men who have to carry them. These hunters beam on raw mainlined adrenaline, punching the air over some diminished corpse. It’s not a good look, and it’s not something I want to be associated with.
But then, being white in Africa comes with all sorts of bad looks. Every white face arrives trailing a long story. And that’s difficult, and you wish that you could wear a T-shirt that read, ‘Really, I’m not like all the others’, in 13 tribal languages. But of course you are.
I’d never done big-game hunting, and I was interested particularly because I like being out in the bush, and this was a couple of weeks before the rains were due. The temperatures were stifling. Everything was parched into shades of beige and terracotta, but there were still amazing splashes of green, and in the brittle grass, flame-ball lilies of bright orange and yellow sprouted miraculously.
If you didn’t know, you’d think all this was a dying place, that precious little would return from the desiccation. Every afternoon the heat rises, and the great cumulonimbus clouds sit on the horizon like mountain ranges, a threat and a promise of things to come. This is not beautiful in any traditional aesthetic way. This land has got more forms than any other living environment. Everything is gnarled and bent, hunched and defensive. Everything has to fight for its little corner. It’s like looking at nature with all the adjectives stripped away.
This is where we came to hunt buffalo. Buffalo are mythologised by hunters as the most frightening animal in Africa. They’re not. It’s the ones with the guns that are most frightening. But buffalo are huge and tend to be bad tempered. They have short sight but excellent hearing and noses, and will charge first and ask questions later. (They don’t ask very complicated questions.) They are very unpredictable when threatened or spooked. Most herd animals will run. Running offers the best statistical option for every individual in the herd. However, in small groups, ones or twos, it can be that attack offers the best statistical option, so buffalo can go either way.
A professional hunter, two local trackers and I stalked into the middle of herds of buffalo, waiting beside trees, standing very still, like big kids in silly hats playing Grandmother’s Footsteps or What’s the Time Mister Wolf, as the huge black cows slowly moved past us, sniffing the air, staring with small, baggy eyes, sensing something. Watching buffalo is spectacular. In fact, I can’t think of any other 40 minutes of my life that have been as completely concentrated on one task. Every footfall and every movement becomes as precise as a mime in a graveyard, becomes slowed down, becomes hyper-real. You’re aware of the tiniest details, every noise, every small insect. Finally, the shot is just a point in a paragraph.
It is awkward, through the fork of a tree just behind the old bull’s shoulder. I can see him chewing the cud in the dappled light. The trigger is squeezed. The enormous bullet, with its New Year’s worth of gunpowder, crashes like the final trump. Though I can’t feel a thing, the sight jerks up and for a moment I’m blind. I look back, and where I thought there was only a pair of old buffalo there must be 20. The bush splits and splinters all around us. As they pound away, I crank the bolt, spilling bullets into the leaf mould. And there, 50 yards away, my bull bellows a furious, accusatory, pitiful and brave last post, staggers and slips sideways, its lungs full of gore. It is an amazing and terrible thing. It touches some atavistic drive. It is a narrative and a feeling I can’t compare to any other civilised aesthetic ethicurean thing I’ve ever done.
The bull is skinned and jointed in 20 minutes. He’s thrown into the back of a Toyota truck, and that night we eat oxtail soup and boiled tongue. The rest of his bulk is hung in strips to be dried and taken home to villages. We leave the circular miles of gaseous gut to the vultures that circle and fall like a centrifuge from a pulled plug.
There is in the hunt a tangible sense of being part of a rough and violent scheme of nature.
That may be as spurious as the rush of a fairground ride, but nonetheless it’s a moment of something. Something gripping. Something wordless. Something instinctive.
Dream world
Take a trip to Vienna and in no time at all you’ll understand why Freud came up with psychoanalysis.
If you’re one of those well-balanced people who think that psychoanalysis is only for sad folk who don’t have enough friends to buy them a beer and to tell them to stop being such a big girl’s sponge bag and take their thumb out of their mouths and bury their self-pity under a couple of good jokes about nuns and cucumbers or just to take a couple of doses of mindless exploitative sex by way of treatment, then you really could do with a long weekend in Vienna. Anyone who thinks Sigmund Freud needed his head examined and who knows a bloke who caught his father giving himself a Brazilian with wax from an altar candle while he happened to be wearing his sister’s underwear and eating figs out of a stiletto and he’s still a straight-up guy who’s never had a trick-cyclist moment, then you really should think about spending some time in Vienna.
After two hours in the city you suddenly understand Freud and the whole analysis thing. It all makes sense. Or at least it makes perfect sense to the Viennese. They are quite possibly the most unexpressive and repressed people you’ll ever meet en masse, and that includes Eskimos in January. Somewhere outside Vienna there is a mass grave where they’ve buried all their emotions.
