Here and There

by A. A. Gill

  I’ve thought about this a lot. In fact, sitting in airports and traffic jams and editorial pep talks, I think of little else. And I’ve got it down to four cuisines. Fourth is south-western France – foie gras and cassoulet, all sorts of duck, figs and roquefort. This is the home of the French anomaly. People here eat more saturated fat than anyone else on earth and have a very low incidence of heart disease. This is the food of old Gascony, of Cyrano de Bergerac: a cuisine for the last leg of life, of post-prandial naps, of meals that soak into each other, of a languid, replete and easy life. I could live with that.

  In third place, there is the food of Piedmont, of northern Italy and the Po Valley, where they grow rice, make risottos, collect truffles, cook with butters, lard and the light olive oil of Genoa and have the youngest veal. I’d have to stretch it a bit to Parma, to take in hams, cheese and ice-cream, but that would do me. This is the origin of the Slow Food movement that grew to become the Slow City movement and now has a slow university where presumably they don’t care much if you turn up for lectures or not and you can take your exams over three or four hours or perhaps three or four weeks.

  Second is the food of the North West Frontier, the mountainous tribal lands of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan: the very best lamb curries, biryanis, pilaus, apricots and quail, Peshawari naan, yoghurt and pomegranate juice eaten with gusto and arguments and your fingers on the roofs of mud-brick houses, in a confusion of power lines and washing, the smell of charcoal fires and the call of the muezzin.

  And in first place is Vietnam. I love the food in Vietnam. I love it so much I’ve invented new meals. It is an ideal combination of delicacy and panache. It has enormous variety of flavours and textures without being irredeemably twee. It’s refined but it’s also assertive. It has tiny little finger food and dog. But what really did it for me was breakfast. When you consider a cuisine for life, you have to start with breakfast. Your home style is the most difficult thing to give up. I defy anyone but a Japanese person to enjoy the breakfast of the rising sun. My sub-continental Afghan breakfast of dhal, curry and chapatti is difficult to swallow. Italians don’t do much more. They have a minute syrupy coffee and perhaps a bad bun. But in Vietnam, they have a pho. The divine broth with do-it-yourself additions of coriander, mint and chilli. It’s perfect. Actually, if you’re going to have a perfect food retirement, it would be Vietnam for breakfast, northern Italy for lunch and then alternately south-west France and the North West Frontier for dinner.

  But if you want to start a real food fight, just ask your next dinner table which of the three great staple carbohydrates they would choose forever, to the exclusion of all others. Wheat, rice or corn, that is the decision that formed empires, made history and grew civilisation. So take your time.

  For the love of money

  Muscovites have taken to capitalism like pigs to swill. You can see and feel the white-hot energy of the free market, a kind of economic Darwinism.

  Here’s a hypothetical question for those moments of awkward silence in the pub: what would have happened if, during the Cold War, Russia and America had changed sides? When the dam of the Berlin Wall had come down and capitalism flooded into the Soviet bloc like cold water and drowned 100 million people in the unquenchable desire for 50 varieties of doughnut, T-shirts advertising Hard Rock Cafés in crap cities, reality TV and fantasy porn, designer everything, and things that cost more if given English names; what would have happened if, at the same time, a wall had gone up on the 49th parallel and along the Rio Grande and, overnight, America had become a centralised command economy devoted to the promotion of the common wheel and the negation of personal gain? If all the shops had been full of the same suit and loaf of bread, and if there was one television channel, one newspaper and a thousand 19th-century classics in the bookshops but no 20th-century ones. Who would’ve coped better? In short, are some people more suited to collectivism and some to individualism?

  You may not think that a fair swap. You might think that the point of the Cold War was not a struggle between competing economic systems but a more romantic arm-wrestle between good and bad, or perhaps right and wrong. That’s the assumption that most of us who grew up with the phantom of choice and the scion of liberty believe. You don’t have to be any sort of ologist or an expert in isms to know that the Americans would’ve been crap commies. Not that they couldn’t have managed all the authoritarian secret police bits perfectly happily, or that they wouldn’t have gotten used to censorship and the absence of adversarial politics in a week or two.

  It’s the working for the collective good that would’ve stymied them. The land of entrepreneurial individualists – where ‘runner-up’ is a long-winded way of saying ‘loser’ – simply wouldn’t have been able to pull together for no noticeable individual advantage. It’s just not the American way. The waves upon waves of immigrants who went to America didn’t make the gut-busting slog to be team players.

  I was in Moscow a couple of weeks ago and was astonished at how naturally and enthusiastically they’d taken to capitalism, like pigs to swill. You might say, well, that’s the nature of the free market. As P.J. O’Rourke so neatly put it, capitalism is what people do when you leave them alone. (Democracy, by the way, isn’t.) But that’s not necessarily true. Many of the other communist bloc countries have had real problems with multiple choice. Albania, for instance, really didn’t get the hang of it, imagining that capitalism was some sort of giant pyramid scheme with free money. The central Asian ’stans, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova have all had problems adjusting. But in Moscow you can see and feel the white-hot energy of übercapitalism, a reductive market fundamentalism.

  I was shown around town by a rich, young entrepreneur who had made a tidy fortune from dozens of businesses, from frozen food to publishing to gas to restaurants, and even a company that made $5000 ornamental fountain pens. He’d started by importing Dutch shampoo and was a millionaire within a year before he was 20. Moscow isn’t a pretty city, but it certainly is an impressive one. What it lacks in looks it makes up for in power. It’s not built on a human scale. It’s supposed to dwarf the individual to proclaim the sovereignty of the masses, but now it looks like the great barracks of Mammon. You can buy everything, Dmitri told me with excitement. Everything is for sale. You can buy a judge, a priest, drugs, women, guns, caviar, children, a panda.

  You can buy Boy George and Bill Clinton and the Berlin Philharmonic and 500 Uzbek virgins for your birthday party. You can buy silence and history and the truth, and you can buy any rule, regulation or restriction anyone else can come up with. This is capitalism. You can buy anything, he said excitedly. What do you want? Girls? Drugs? Food? Drink? Gold? A football team?

  The story of competitive acquisition in Russia is eye-bulging and heroic. The rich like to collect, but they don’t like to wait. So they buy lifetimes’ expertise in one week with one phone call. They have the largest holdings of Ferraris or jukeboxes or small jade frogs with ruby eyes. It doesn’t matter; ownership is everything. I realised a salutary truth: in Moscow, they understand the lesson of capitalism, the true nature of the market, in a way that we have never dared. It is unrestrained economic Darwinism.

  The press here is full of stories of foreign businesses being taken to the cleaners, fleeced, robbed down to their Calvins for not bribing enough, for not being frightening enough. The new Moscow marketeers laugh Slavicly: how stupid Western businessmen are. One of them I know went to a large Russian utility that he’d made a loan to, and owned a chunk of, and asked for his money back, as agreed in the contract. The Russians said no. They didn’t say, no, sorry; no, maybe in a month; no, can we make a deal; or, no, the accountant’s locked the chequebook in the desk and gone away for the weekend. They simply, boldly, unsmilingly said no, they wouldn’t give him his money back. Because he wasn’t big enough or strong enough to make them, and if he ever mentioned it again, they’d have his children killed. And, added the chairman, they’d use his money to do it. He we
nt home.

  Moscow airport is full of green-looking Western businessmen with white knuckles, holding back the tears because they have to go home and tell their boards and investors that they’ve lost the lot. And then they’ve got to go and tell their wives that they’ve got to sell the house, and try to explain this as a net gain because they’ve still got the kids.

  Moscow capitalism is unencumbered by rules, aesthetics, manners, hypocrisy, taste and morals. It is the real thing: naked and toned, priapic and ravenous opportunism. Rich Muscovites have taken every Western excess and doubled it with amoral glee. The comforting snobberies and polite avaricious indulgences that took the West thousands of years to discover and refine are consumed and improved by Moscow’s new entrepreneurs. Of course, all this two-fisted consumption only applies to a tiny epicurean sliver of Russia’s population; the vast majority remain huddled in lives of relentless emptiness. There is precious little trickle-down. This is the truth about capitalism in its purest form: most people lose out so that a very few can overdose.

  But they also seem to understand. When it was time for me to leave I fretted as ever about missing the plane. Moscow roads are gridlocked with the second-hand nicked motors of entrepreneurialism. Don’t worry, said Dmitri, my driver will take you. Thanks, but he still has to use the same communist roads as everyone else. No, I’ve got a police car. How can you get a police car to take me to the airport? I’d buy one, he said, as if explaining an obvious and simple fact to a stupid child for the umpteenth time. Five hundred dollars to buy a police car – it takes you to the VIP lounge in the airport. Of course you can buy a police car. They’re capitalists, too. The only Western snobbery that Moscow seems not to have taken on board is charity. I never heard the word mentioned once. All things considered, it would’ve been in bad taste.

  Eye of the beholder

  Recollection and emotion are inextricably linked. Even for a seasoned traveller, this means the most memorable views were captured by someone else.

  A questing reporter has just asked me for my favourite view. Well, at the moment it would have to be that a woman’s breasts are in direct inverse proportion to the size of her dog. I promise you, check it out: strange but true. Some sort of Darwinian deal, survival of the tittest. ‘I’m sorry, you’ve misunderstood,’ she said with an aridly unapologetic tone. ‘What we want is your favourite vista. The view from the bridge, the window, the mountaintop.’ Ah. Oh. Right. Yes.

  I should’ve said, a tall blonde with four chihuahuas, but I didn’t. I looked onward, and discovered with a shock that everything was black. Ah, I’ve gone retrospectively blind. I can’t see a thing. Perhaps I’ve been robbed. My disc’s been wiped. I can’t remember anything I’ve ever seen. ‘Oh dear. We’re being a little overdramatic, aren’t we?’ No, honestly, my eye is empty. ‘Perhaps you’ve just mislaid your album. Let me see. What about the Taj Mahal? You remember strolling through the garden, looking up at that majestic white dome, sitting on that little bench where the Princess of Wales was photographed? And Venice. You must’ve seen Venice, seen from the lagoon, rising out of the mist, the most romantic city in the world. And the Great Pyramid at Giza, you’ve seen that from the swaying back of a camel with the golden early dawn light and the muezzins’ call to the devout?’ Yes, yes, I like that. That’s beautiful. ‘Okay, so shall we put the pyramids down as your best view?’ No, I’ve never seen the pyramids. ‘You’re being very annoying, you just said …’ No, I said I liked the sound of that. I liked what you told me.

  I added that I’d have to call her back after I’d had a think, and I’ve been putting off calling her back ever since. I have seen lots of miraculous things, I’ve seen Hong Kong from Kowloon. I’ve flown low over the Grand Canyon. I’ve stood on a mesa and looked out over the Navajo’s painted desert. I’ve seen Mayan citadels on precipices in the rainforest. I’ve seen a humpback whale turn and regard me with a huge and mysterious eye off Cape Cod. I’ve seen herds of wildebeest streaming across the Serengeti. I’ve seen a coral reef thick with fish like the luxury Christmas sweetie selection. I’ve seen the Indian Ocean sparkle with phosphorus, and glow with a million iridescent jellyfish. I’ve seen autumn in the Appalachians, I’ve seen the summer night sky so clear that the shooting stars look like celestial taxis. I’ve seen lots and lots, from Cape Town to Reykjavik, and they were all amazing in one way or another, but they were not the thing.

  I rarely travel with a camera. It’s like picking and pressing wildflowers. A pressed flower is not an accurate memory of a living flower. An image of a place is not a re-creation of that place. Pictures owe more to other pictures than the thing they’re of. The memory of the view of Hong Kong, for instance, leads me to the view of New York, and then of Rio. And I can’t remember if the view I can remember is the one I saw or the postcard I bought or the magazine I flicked through last week. So I’ve been trying to attach feelings to pictures. I’ve been trying to remember moments of high emotion. Places and times, things that made me laugh or cry or gasp, and this is my top five, in no particular order:

  • The waiter finally coming with a tray full of curry, when you’re really, really hungry for a curry. This is a generic view because curry-hunger is like no other hunger. It’s completely omnivorous. It’s like gastro-demonic possession, foodie ebola. Sating it is the most important thing in your life for about five minutes.

  • And then, actor Iain Cuthbertson. Now I understand that though he was a fine man, few people would think of Cuthbertson as one of their top five views. And it’s only the faintest view of him, appearing through the steam as Jenny Agutter’s father in The Railway Children. He has been the cause of more of my tears than any other view on earth.

  • Waiting for someone who’s late on a second date. I know there are all sorts of emotional, and frankly sticky sexual views you could put in here, but I think the second date is seminal. A first date is luck, charm, chardonnay. But the second is choice. And the beginning of something, and waiting for it is the most blissfully agonising moment. The sight of them coming through the door is … well, it’s never that good again. That’s the peg that all love affairs hang upon.

  • Then your bag first on the carousel after a 12-hour flight. That’s almost as good as the second date.

  • Your name on a list: it’s a great satisfaction to come across your name on a list. Obviously to find it on a Colombian death-squad to-do list wouldn’t be that great, but for most lists, from school teams to wedding dinner seating plans, there is a peculiar pleasure in being included in a crowd and finding yourself there. And the greatest list pleasure of all is finding yourself in a book index. Unless, of course, it’s a book of war criminals.

  But none of these will do for the lady travel editor, and I really have to say that the most incredible views of my life were, well, they were the Twin Towers coming down. We saw that how many times? Hundreds. Until the television stations agreed to stop showing it. And it never lost an atom of its shock. The Berlin Wall coming down. For my generation of Europeans, that was a defining – no, redefining – moment. Then that guy in Tiananmen Square, playing chicken with a tank. Kennedy dead. Diana dead. Martin Luther King dead. That Palestinian man trying to protect his son, dead. Churchill’s funeral. Nelson Mandela walking out of jail.

  You’ll know most of these images. You could add as many again that I’d know. And in them, there is a salutary lesson for travellers and seekers of experience. The great moments, the burning images of our lives, are things we’ve never seen, and we are the first generation that ever lived who can say that. The greatest image, the best view ever, the most moving, awe-inspiring, memorable image was that most famous picture of earth-rise. It was so startling, so heavenly; none of us could know – how could we? – that the world was blue. How perfect. And it’s still a view that none of us has actually seen. It only exists as a photograph and as a collective memory.

  Behind the gloss

  Italy, with its upside-down notions of vice and virtue, is truly
spellbinding.

  It was always said that the most brilliant piece of national PR was put about by the Austrians. They managed to convince the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Austrian. That’s very well, but still, nobody likes the Austrians very much. It’s not as if you hear girls sighing, oh to be in Salzburg and meet a tall, dark choirmaster who’ll teach me to waltz, and we’ll have an idyllic life together breeding white horses that curtsey. No, Austria may have fiddled Adolf’s passport, but it’s still mostly zither music, boiled wool and the Von Trapp family to the rest of us. Ronald Reagan, during some White House junket, stood up when the band started playing ‘Edelweiss’, because he thought it was their national anthem, and to be perfectly honest, I thought it was, too.

  No, for real global PR, the title of non-stick nation goes to Italy. Aww, I hear you say, as if looking at an orphaned puppy. Aww, Italy – what has it ever done wrong? Loads of girls sigh about wanting to meet a tall, dark Italian and doing anything he wants. What’s Italy done wrong?

  Well, forget Hitler – fascism found fertile ground in Italy. It invaded Ethiopia three years before the big war began. There, like most other colonisers, Italians committed cruelties. And then, when it was all over, everyone thought they were the victims. The Lombards invented interest rates, the Venetian Empire was venal and immoral, the Genoese were mercenaries. They may have given the world the Sistine Chapel, but syphilis took root in Naples. They could put that on travel posters, and we’d still flock there. After all, they said see Naples and die – and we went.