It’s a fine sunny mid-spring Sunday afternoon. I’ve exhausted the dog with a walk over Cofton Common (look it up) along a human-free public footpath, Upper Bittell Reservoir looking like a grand lake, in the distance, to my left the not-too-far off Cotswolds and straight ahead the close-by Lickeys where Tolkein’s and his fiancée used to meet each other (and if you can see behind them) the two-humped Malverns.
The perfectly warm sun made lunch in my rather old-fashioned garden (more neglected than it deserves but with camellias still in gay blossom, the fruit trees in flower and the first of the bluebells making everything as Tory as it should be) the only acceptable option. There’s a robin tweeting harmoniously in one of the damson trees and the dog is dozing comfortably despite a rival barking a few gardens away.
Lunch is not what Sunday lunch should be - a finely crafted Tanqueray Seville orange gin with Mediterranean tonic and microwaveable Sainsbury’s Singapore noodles. This is not an easy dish to prepare - do not trust the instructions, if you microwave the meat and prawns for anywhere near the time the manufacturers tell you to do then nothing but unhappiness results. Prawns of the consistency of bullets may be acceptable to the dog, a labrador who will eat anything whether or not it is unspeakable, but no human could derive pleasure from them, nor for that matter from the desiccated chicken and duck which results from following the instructions.
So, lounging in the sun, who to sit round your garden table with? Today it was Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic and television presenter (though he has acknowledged openly as a middle-aged white man he is unlikely to ever be employed by the BBC again). Coren, who annoyed so many people in 2015 (Blog 6) by announcing his dislike of eating in any English restaurant outside London, wrote a splendid book published in 2012 by Hodder and Stoughton titled How to Eat Out Lessons From A Life Lived Mostly In Restaurants which I have enjoyed before and now returned to. Perhaps it was the Seville orange gin which enhanced the pleasure of reading the opening chapters over lunch. It also had something to do with his reminiscences of his earliest love - Chinese restaurants - and the fact that I was consuming a faux Asian dish at the same time but I enjoyed a few guffaws and kept wishing that society had not taken a turn to ensure that Coren’s book, with its hilarious pokes at all sorts of foreigners, would surely not be taken up by a publisher today, almost 10 years on.
His foody memoirs are a delight this second time around. There’s a sentimentality mixed up with an honest telling of how eating out was then and at earlier times. For those relatively new to dining out this is an education. My own tale goes back a further generation when children rarely ate out with their parents and it made me slow to observe what was going on in restaurants of which Coren twenty years later was all too aware. But our food experience of the 1950s and 60s when British food is said to have dived to the lowest depths it could is worth knowing about if only to appreciate what we have now. I can not however but feel a little envious of Coren and his earliest experiences which were unimaginable to children of one generation before. He was so aware as a child of his visits to restaurants and what was going on in them you know he was destined to be a food critic. Now if only I’d been born 20 years later. But as a dining companion, if only in print, it has been a tasty lunch eaten on a fine spring afternoon enhanced by his tales.
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