OOOH, tonight marks the climax of National Dinner Party Week! So chop-chop, no time to waste; gather together all your competitiveness, insecurities and envy, abandon all hope of fun and GET COOKING!
Be honest, how many times have you laughed behind your napkin at the sort of bread- baking bullshitter who says with a straight face: “Feeding someone is the most loving, nurturing thing you can do for them”? What, including giving them such a good seeing-to that their eyes roll back in their head? Whoever it was who first said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was obviously rubbish in bed.
The idea that people feed others solely out of fond feelings is one of the great minor lies of modern times. Some feeders do so aggressively, to get power over others and to gain control, Sadly, some do it because they are so uptight or frigid that they find it impossible to show affection any other way; some because they are so stingy that they refuse to put their hand in their pocket for the price of a restaurant meal.
People who make a fuss about food are often dysfunctional in ways that may or may not be their fault, or to make up for personal tragedies; one thinks of poor, lovely Nigella Lawson, baking herself into exhaustion to escape the whiff of death — mother, sister, husband — which turned her into a self-described “Typhoid Mary . . . I seemed to bring ill-fortune to anyone I was close to”.
Or Mrs Beeton, the original domestic goddess, dead at 28, cursed with a string of miscarriages and the syphilis she caught from her prostitute- patronising husband. Gordon Ramsay seems to live in a ceaseless state of barely controlled fury. And Nigel Slater’s last words to his mother before she died were “I hope you die!” — because she had forgotten to buy the mince pie filling.
See what I mean? Foodies are weird, full of stunted sexuality and misplaced desire. And it’s not just an individual problem but a collective one — there’s a lot of rubbish talked about families eating together, but I must say that the vast majority of bulimics and anorexics I have known got that way because of table-top power struggles at a formative age, wherein foul fathers, more often than not, sought to dominate their naturally rebellious children by forcing them to eat things they didn’t want. God forbid that people should eat what they want, when they want — that way lies anarchy!
You have to ask yourself about the myth of the Holy Table as the source of all grace and serenity, looking at the state of the two countries that are always held up as such examples to us junk-grazing Brits. If home-cooked family meal times are such a civilising influence, how come the French have registered such high votes for their fascist parties since the end of the Second World War — which you’d have thought might have taught nations not to vote for fascist parties! Doh! So much for brain food. And if the French way of doing things is so appropriate, how come they have the highest rate of cirrhosis in the whole world?
The Italians, the other half of the Holy Table, are of course nowhere near as irritating as the French, but they do consider themselves the unhappiest people in Europe and they also have the lowest birthrate. Could one or both of these be because they’re sick of being surrounded by screaming bambini at mealtimes, and crave the simple serenity of a solitary TV dinner? Whatever. Suddenly the view from Maccie D’s doesn’t seem half so bad.
ALLOW JUNKIES TO PAY FOR THE FREEDOM OF AFGHAN WOMEN
DID David Cameron inhale or not? And so the drug debate continues. But I often think that the biggest gap in society, drug-wise, is not between those who take drugs and those who don’t — all the more for me! — but between those who take drugs and those who let the drugs take them. The latter, the Loser Users, are bitterly resentful of the former, the Happy High, and rarely miss a chance to snipe at us.
But a world away from the squabbles of privileged Western dabblers are dreadful hardships experienced by those people in the Third World prevented from growing and selling their drug crops to us people with more money than sense.
Cocaine users are often lectured by green-eyed player-haters on the shameful path that their toot of choice takes from sod to snout, but what is less talked about is how drug crops are often the only way people in certain regions can make a decent living.
In Afghanistan, following in the vile footsteps of the know-nothing, hate-everything Taleban, Britain has gone all out to eradicate the opium poppy harvest, which traditionally makes up 60 per cent of the country’s income. In the past year, cultivation has fallen by 96 per cent as the ban gets tighter; this means that men who earned £2,000 for an acre of poppies now get £80 for an acre of wheat. The loathsome tribal tradition of the country has it that a man can pay off his debt by handing over his daughter to his creditor, and that is what a good many of them are reluctantly doing.
What is the point in the West promoting civil rights for Afghan women with one hand while with the other taking steps that lead to their enslavement? Don’t get me wrong, this is in no way a piece in praise of heroin; the only time I took it, it bored me out of my skull — it was like standing in a long queue, never moving up, and liking it. But if someone actually enjoys this feeling, and will work to overcome the sickness that the first few doses of heroin causes then: (a) they are actually choosing to be a junkie; (b) they are working at it; and (c) they are already ruined.
I dislike junkies not for any “moral” reason, but aesthetically, because of the fun, creative, energising drugs that a person could choose to take to enhance their work, rest and play, they have chosen one that turns you into a zombie. And because of this choice, I don’t believe the lives of a hundred self-destructive Western junkies are worth the freedom of one Afghan girl with her life — education, emancipation, hopefully immigration — in front of her. Let a thousand Afghan poppies grow tall once more!
