Real Meals: Christmas dinner

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Here’s the latest Real Meals column in the New Statesman:

Well, here we all are – this is the last Real Meals of 2011 and I for one would like to go out with a bang, rather than a whimper. My charming editor at the Statesman suggested that I might like to write something “Christmassy” but why would I want to do that? I made my feelings about Christmas dinner perfectly clear in this column at about this time two years ago and they haven’t changed one jot during the intervening months. Frankly, I’m about as likely to set out on the highways and byways of Albion as a sannyasin as I am to begin at the age of 50 rhapsodising about a meal I’ve never ever enjoyed or even seen the point of.   More...

Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

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The Independent has given Walking to Hollywood five stars in its paperbacks of 2011:

“The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the ‘psychogeography’ columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman.

“But here the tone is markedly different, the author’s usual Technicolor exuberance tempered by a monochrome melancholy. It is significant that Steadman’s illustrations have been displaced by the sort of black-and-white photographs beloved of WG Sebald; Self’s writing seems to have taken a darker turn under the German writer’s saturnine influence. Not that this book entirely lacks the old scatological mischief. Sebald, after all, is unlikely to have described car exhausts as ‘turbofarts’.”

My cheeserimage or How I fell in love with cabrales

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A bulky parcel arrives at the door of my house in south London, and as I tear open the wrapping – first thick transparent plastic, then a padded envelope, then bubble wrap – the courier looks on uneasily: What is this, his expression says, some as yet respectable-looking crackhead who’s heading way on down – and fast? Sensing his mounting opprobrium, I scribble with the stylus on the hideous little grey screen of his hideous little handheld computer and gesture him away. Alone, I head for the kitchen … and the knives.   More...

The madness of crowds: Big art exhibitions

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I wonder what the collective term is for a crowd of aesthetes. There must be one, although I’ve been unable to find it – answers on a card but make sure there’s a work of great art on the obverse. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? The idea of appreciating the beautiful and the specific in an ugly mass of people who become, inevitably, similar – if not indistinguishable – purely by that act alone. Yet, given the vast crowds that the top art exhibitions attract, there ought to be some way to make the collective appreciation of art enjoyable.   More...

On the death of Russell Hoban

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“A few years ago, charged with writing a new introduction to a 25th-anniversary edition of Riddley Walker, I called the author, Russell Hoban, at his behest. A frail-sounding voice answered the phone, and when I explained who I was, Hoban fluted: ‘Would you mind calling back in half an hour or so? My wife and I are about to watch Sex and the City.’ I put the receiver down chastened: here was a man in his 80s who had more joie de vivre than I could muster in hale middle age.   More...

Real meals: The Terminus

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I meet Francis Kerline for lunch at the Terminus Nord, opposite the Gare du Nord in Paris. Francis, who is himself an accomplished writer, has been translating my books into French for 18 years now – and peerless work it is, too, taking my flocculent verbiage and shearing it into beautifully coiffed French. Back in the day, I always felt he looked at me much as Salieri does at the puerile and scatological Mozart in Amadeus: as if he couldn’t quite believe he was spending his time on works produced by such an idiot. Still, as we’ve grown older together, I detect a certain mellowing.   More...