L’Enclume has two Michelin stars, and naturally I personally take a great deal of the credit for this. The French hasn’t got one yet, and neither has Manchester House. Some people think that the TV series, didn’t help, alienating the aloof and inscrutable Michelin judges with its reality telly brashness and naked human-interest angle. I watched a couple of them. I loved the moment when the hard and unyielding Mrs Best, determined not to like the new gastronomy at The French, snarkily asked her sated and smiling husband over the dessert he was clearly loving, ‘Well, would you come here again?’ ‘Not with you,’ he replied, his eyes liquid with delight, his mouth full of something obscenely pleasurable.
A word about restaurant critics. Apart from the ones who are my friends, and until such time as someone sees fit to employ me as one, I generally regard restaurant critics as scoundrels who in any decently organised society would be put to work on collective farms, or shot, depending upon my mood on the day (the day being ‘the glorious day’, obviously). This will seem harsh to some, but I fancy others will be nodding sagely in agreement and perhaps even unlocking the gun cabinet. Brian Eno once said to me that he could never be a critic, as he couldn’t imagine spending his time ‘trying to persuade people not to like things’. I coloured and winced at the time as I think he probably meant rock critics. But rock critics are creatures of Solomon, with wisdom and fairness and Mother Teresa levels of patient saintliness, compared to food critics. Effete, indulged fops of no use to anyone, these spiteful cry babies, having never known true hardship, will ruin some poor sod’s livelihood over an underdone blini or a thin jus. They are nearly as bad as motoring journalists, and that is saying something.
Yes, I’m joking. But only a bit, and through gritted teeth. Reading the weekend papers, especially the thin, glib magazines that fall from them like snow sliding from a winter roof, I am always suffused with the same very particular emotions. I imagine that the fashion advice and tips on which cocktail bar ‘to be seen’ in and reviews of small, implausibly exclusive, St John’s Wood trattorias, are meant to make one feel aspiration and chic, or faintly dissatisfied and imbued with what we now call ‘FOMO’ or fear of missing out. They have a slightly different effect on me, in that they make me want to form a UK branch of the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist Guerrilla Group and institute a brisk form of workers’ dictatorship in which London-based restaurant critics toil on giant treadmills to generate electricity for the city of Doncaster.
Harsh I know. But in so many other ways, fair. What really bugs me about them, and I fancy you may know what’s coming here, loyal reader, is their pride in their cosseted and blinkered London metrocentrism. A football writer who wouldn’t come to Anfield or Old Trafford because he didn’t fancy the train journey would soon be given his or her marching orders. A theatre critic who didn’t bother with Stratford or the West Yorkshire Playhouse or Hull Truck or the Royal Exchange would soon find himself or herself similarly underemployed. Food critics, though, for whom a trip to Streatham is like scaling Annapurna without oxygen, wear their laziness and prejudice as a badge of honour, which is why, from my experience, most general readers outside the M25 despise them.
So my interest was piqued when the restaurant critic of The Times gave a rave review to a tapas bar in, astonishingly, Halifax. I had to check the page several times in case it was in Halifax, Nova Scotia; it’s far more likely that a North London based foodie would head there on expenses than West Yorkshire. But no. Obviously the trip had taken it out of the poor thing, since he wrote as much about the various train changes he had ‘had’ to make, as he did the food. But the latter he did find grudgingly good, and his review was admirably positive, if littered with watery and patronising asides in the vein of Samuel Johnson’s ‘like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’:
Mini chorizo cooked in cider were a bit old-school, in the sense of Anglo-Spanish cooking before the London tapas boom, but the tortilla of the day was nice and sloppy … and a juicy slab of garlic-roasted ibérico suckling pig was more good value at only £7.90 (it’s cute to see pence at all on a menu, frankly, when you’re used to London menus which have been rounded up to the nearest pound for years, and lately to the nearest five).
Nonetheless credit where it is due. Our fearless epicure (who later claimed that all the best restaurants in England were within half an hour of his London home and he only ventured further to appease his editor and the darkly muttering troglodytes beyond Potters Bar) had actually made the effort, even if he had never stopped going on about it. If he could manage the impossibly difficult, fraught and possibly dangerous trip from London to Halifax, surely I could manage to cross the Pennines, if clearly always on the lookout for brigands around Rochdale.
The approach to Halifax at dusk from the sprawl of Manchester, over England’s highest motorway, the fabled, feared M62, and into the chill blue gloom of the Pennines, will either put you off your dinner or whet your appetite on the blade of your senses, depending on your temperament. For me, it was the perfect hors d’oeuvre.
Of course, no one from the north passes over Saddleworth Moor without an involuntary shudder, as this is where the Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley buried their young victims, and their last, Keith Bennett, lies here still, undiscovered but not forgotten. Before and beyond these sorrows, though, this is a beautiful if bleak place, and for centuries a place for the people from the nearby towns to come and stretch the legs and ‘blow t’stink’ of the factory off them.
Tonight, snow lies pale under a cold moon, and the moors rise dark like waves behind each ridge. In the gloaming, I pass one of the north’s most treasurable oddities, and a Calderdale landmark – Stott Hall Farm has stood 1,100 feet up on this exposed Pennine flank near Scammonden since 1737. For two centuries, all there was to break the upland silence was the cry of birds and the bleating of sheep, the howling of the wind and the whisper of rain.
Then, in 1972, the men from the ministry of transport came, with their retinue of bulldozers, to clear a path for the new motorway. But the doughty farmer Ken Wilde refused to budge. Wilde had lived there since he was five and refused to move or accept the value which had been placed on the land under the terms of a compulsory purchase order. Eventually, the engineers decided it was possible to divide the east and west-bound carriageways and leave the farm intact between them on the high Lancashire–Yorkshire border. Tunnels were built underneath the motorway, allowing Wilde and his dogs to reach the open fell and tend the flock. And though Ken has gone and there’s a tenant farmer now (who sometimes acts as unofficial service station to stricken drivers), Stott Hall remains a working concern, proudly marooned on its thin strip of grass while on each side the traffic roars on.
Past the farm and there lies Halifax, cast like a sparkling electric net across the landscape, like a web of silver light left by some giant spider across the Calder valley. Like Carlisle, Halifax is a border town, but like Carlisle disputation and proximity to ‘the other side’ has made it even more partisan. Halifax is as Yorkshire as Yorkshire gets, as Yorkshire as curry and wool. I tried googling for Halifax and Lancashire, hoping for some dissent or debate, but all I got was page after page about the wonderful Sarah Lancashire, one of the stars of Last Tango in Halifax, one of the acclaimed TV dramas of recent years and set in the town.
Maybe, like nearby Holmfirth and the long-running Last of the Summer Wine, this will become a TV tourist draw for the town like another recent development, the Eureka! science park. The Calder Valley may not be Silicon Valley, but it has claims to scientific and engineering fame. The man who discovered Uranus, William Herschel, was church organist here, and Halifax boasts the tallest folly in the world, the 275 foot Wainhouse Tower. It was designed by Isaac Booth for John Wainhouse as a chimney for his dye works. But this seems to be the last part of the story anyone agrees on. Some accounts say it was never paid for, so Booth kept it for himself. Others say Booth quit and Wainhouse got someone
else to finish it, putting on the decorative cap with an observation platform reached by an interior spiral staircase containing 403 stairs. You can still go up there, if you have the puff, but only on public holidays.
Wool made Halifax rich, rich enough to have a handsome town hall built by the same man, Charles Barry, who built the Houses of Parliament. There is, literally, nothing like wool. No other material, natural or synthetic, can match its range of attributes and qualities – its warmth, durability, texture. Human ingenuity though can tweak and improve and fashion it, and we have been doing that since the Bronze Age. Wool-making took hold in West Yorkshire due to the terrain of the Pennines; too tough and coarse for crops or cattle but perfect for those hardy little buggers, sheep, and the steep streams of the Halifax hills meant plenty of water and steam power for the mill machinery. But then, the twentieth century brought steady decline and the mills fell into disrepair and dereliction.
Over the last few years, though, things have changed. Quality is ageless and British wool is popular once more with designers and rich customers. Even when the mills themselves no longer spin, no longer ring to the clatter of looms, they have found new purposes and are now lit again at night, great edifices of stone and light in the Yorkshire gloom.
Dean Clough sounds like he should have played for Bradford City or Leeds United in the early nineties – a small, stocky midfielder, quick and skilful but prone to rash challenges and indiscipline, and now running the youth team at Sheffield Wednesday or a bar in Fuengirola. In fact, Dean Clough is a part of Halifax (a clough being a sort of stream), and here in 1802, John Crossley, his brother Thomas, and James Travis started a mill. It boomed, employing 5,000 people by 1900 with a Kidderminster branch and warehouses in London and Manchester.
But times change and it closed as a mill in 1982 to be reborn shortly after as a successful commercial and cultural hub, watched over by a giant aluminium sheep by artist Frank Darnley, which wittily reflects the grand old building’s former life. Now it houses the brilliant Northern Broadsides Theatre Company and some 150 other companies, studios, art galleries, a radio station (Phoenix Radio 96.7 FM!) and a couple of restaurants, one of which is so alluring that it can apparently even tempt the plump-lipped gourmands of Islington down the west coast mainline or the M6.
I get to Dean Clough Mill and Ricci’s early, nearly an hour early, and, before I kick my heels around the bars of Halifax in the sleety rain, I pop in and see if they can fit me in. The tiny waitress fixes me with her huge brown eyes in a look of cod-exasperation that suddenly blooms into a smile. ‘Oh I think we can fit you in and get you sat down, I’m sure,’ she says, vowels rich as the smells from the kitchen, and she points me to one free table in the place.
I’m the only bloke here, except for a chap nursing an early evening cerveza at the bar. The place is packed with Halifax ladies ending or beginning their day or night, bags of shopping and big white wines to hand. Over the coming hour, it will fill and flow with other diners of every kind; nervous couples, laughing families, old friends, cute kids, change-jingling businessmen, clusters of tipsy, happy girls.
I like the fact that, in the teeth of economic adversity, and Michelin starred or not, the north eats out, shows it face, dresses up, flashes a bit of cash. I love that story about Nye Bevan, who when challenged that his taste for good wine and champagne sat uneasily with his supposed allegiances, said ‘nothing but the best for the working class’. I will raise a glass to that, Nye.
I’m seated next to a couple of nice, garrulous, late forties women – one blonde, gritty, severe in that Yorkshire way that normally hides a lovely disposition; her friend more Beatrix Potter, twinkly in glasses and a lemon fleecy cardie. They shoo me towards the menu, and I fancy everything on it, except maybe the spicy lentil and cardomom dahl. Who orders lentil dahl in a Spanish restaurant, eh? It turns out my blonde neighbour has done just that. ‘It’s lovely,’ she asserts and her friend explains, ‘We’ve just been to see that film, The Second Best Marigold Hotel, and it’s all set in India and so we fancied something like that, spicy, you know.’
We fall further into conversation. ‘Have you come far?’ asks the sharp, blonde one. Hmm, a little way, yes. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘you saw the review then? How far?’ When I reply ‘Manchester’ she asks, ‘Do you know Noel Gallagher?’ Well, yes, a bit but that’s not important. Tell me about you. What do they do in Halifax? The other lady replies, sheepishly, ‘We own a tapas bar.’
If they have come to check out the competition, the menu must have made daunting reading. Aside from the maverick non-Iberian stuff, the spicy lentil dahl, spiced cauliflower fritters with rosemary, thyme & garlic roasted tomato & lemon chutney, there are tons of alluring riffs on classic tapas and chicetti, its Italian cousin – ox cheek spring roll with cauliflower purée, cooked Italian rustego ham marinated in wild herbs, with watercress and walnuts, whipped goats cheese and jamon Iberico stuffed piquillo peppers … In something of a daze, clouded further by a bloody lovely if totally unseasonal chilled Amontillado, I order pretty much at random and watch the sleet pulse in over the hills and the roofs of Halifax.
I quite like the ad hoc, even random, nature of the choreography of courses in tapas restaurants; you are never quite sure what will come, if it will come and when. I sat once getting gnawingly hungrier in a tapas bar on the Carmarthenshire coast with the poet Simon Armitage for an hour, and got through a couple of bottles of wine with nary a pitted olive emerging from the kitchen when, all at once, scurrying legions of small children arrived at our table laden with plates of food, most of which we hadn’t ordered but fell upon like starving men, which we were. Later recounting the tale Simon said, ‘The food came with all the suddenness with which it previously hadn’t’, which I thought was a rather beautiful gnomic haiku.
In Ricci’s it came quickly and kept on coming; a dish of powerful, almost disturbingly porky pigs’ head croquetas, scallops on a lemon quenelle, zingy green beans. But best of all, and still haunting my dreams weeks later, is a pork and chorizo scotch duck egg with celeriac remoulade and apple puree draped in strands of saffron.
My young waitress came back to check everything was alright, perhaps because I was lying under the table sobbing. I imagine she gets this all the time. When she finds out I’ve come over from Salford way, she’s excited and curious. She’s 18 and headed to Salford uni in the autumn for a degree in psychotherapy and counselling, and you can see in her face the anticipation of embarking on life’s great adventure. I tell her she’ll have an ace time and I mean it.
Because of some very minor mix-up with the order, the owner – transatlantic, young, on the case – is hugely apologetic and insists it’s on the house. Minutes later our brown-eyed future psychotherapist announces, a little disturbingly, ‘Grandpa’s balls!’ as she proffers pudding, two spherical churros-type offerings served with an espresso cup of bitter chocolate and orange sauce, the lovely comforting fattiness undercut by a rapier swish of citrusy orange. Blissful. I couldn’t manage more than about eight though.
In line with Simon Rogan’s observations, the kitchen, glimpsed at the end of the long bar with circular stools – my favourite kind – seems calm and breezy. ‘Not on a Saturday, it isn’t!’ she tells me. ‘They’re queuing up from five to get a seat to eat at the bar. Even worse on bank holidays … well, I mean better of course.’
Those bank holidays come six times a year, as Blur sang on their track ‘Bank Holiday’, ‘Days of enjoyment to which everyone cheers. Bank holiday comes with a six pack of beer … then it’s back to work AGAIN.’ If I was going to write about work and leisure, then I would need to write about this institution. These, and a handful of other red letter days, were how we plot the passing of the working year, how we mark it, in charcoal briquettes and multi-packs of lager, in trick or treat bags and gift cards, in traffic jams and record fairs, in lie-ins and days out …
CHAPTER 6
MAKING A DAY OF IT
Bank holidays in Silloth a
nd Southport and a trip to see the ‘Lights’
Only virgins and generals keep diaries, they say. Samuel Pepys, Adrian Mole, Alan Bennett, Michael Palin, Bridget Jones and other diarists of note notwithstanding, that may still be true. But everyone used to have one, if not keep it. Nowadays, when the future is swiped into view with a finger, giving a child a ‘day to day diary’ for Christmas would maybe seem a little weird, like buying them a cummerbund or purchase ledger or a book of log tables; an oddly adult, formal gift, a queer relic of an era before phones were smarter than their owners.
Back in the days before Apps and Apple, schoolkids even had their own diaries, little leatherette volumes in burgundy or green, crammed with stuff which the stern implication was would surely come in handy one day though it never did: avoirdupois and troy weights and the differing grains thereof, chains and furlongs, pecks and bushels, nautical miles and the Beaufort scale. Its tiny printed pages told you that today was the second Sunday after Septuagesima, whatever that was, and how many more weeks of Advent and Lent, or more importantly chocolate and no chocolate, there were.
To a child these markings meant little. But once they had been signposts to navigate the year by. Before electric light and fridges and central heating tamed the seasons, smoothed out the jagged edges and rising ridges of passing time, this was how we charted our progress round the sun and round the working year, from pole to festive pole. Wakes and Whitsuntide, Candlemas and Michaelmas; a kid nowadays would probably assume that they were minor characters from Game of Thrones rather than old red letter days. In Macclesfield, they have their own special holiday for the silk workers called, fabulously, Barnaby.
High days and holidays; even in our sleepless 24/7 world, we still keep them though we give them different names. What my mum calls Whit Monday is now Spring Bank Holiday but the meaning holds. It’s a day away from the normal round, one of those six times a year Blur identified that we refuse to let the toad Work squat on our lives. The need for days like this, days when we lie in, kick back, slope off, dress up, have fun, can be seen in the enthusiasm with which we cultivate and embrace new ones; Halloween and trick or treat, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, Red Nose Day, Pudsey, Wogan and baths of beans. What is the fuss about Transfer Deadline Day by Sky Sports if not the childish need for special days dressed up as news?
The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play Page 20
