Dusseldorf, by all accounts an elegant city nestling in an elbow of the Rhine, has been home for three days now, but I’ve not seen much of it.
What I have seen plenty of is the interior of Mercedes taxis – invariably driven by heavy-set, grouchy Turks who abuse me when I question their choice of route. Trilinguality and tranquility are out the window when confronted by their dishonesty, and they revert instead to some threatening hybrid of German and Turkish. Perhaps I shouldn’t care – someone else is paying for it (ultimately, the customers of a certain British mobile phone company.) Not a good attitude to take, but I don’t need any additional stress.
Yes, all I’ve seen so far are taxis, boxy offices in IT Departments and this hotel room – though as hotel rooms go, this fairly futuristic one is quite interesting. It’s centred round a clear glass and chrome pod containing the shower. Not the sort of room to share with someone you don’t know too well.
Had a good run on Monday evening, repeated yesterday morning. Through the neat suburbs, alongside the cycle path and tram tracks. Past the Garten Center, whatever that is – some place with lots of plants and plastic furniture – then onto the park with the “Green Sea”. The grünes meer is a large lake, around which a forested path runs. About a mile and a half, and an ideal place to run.
It’s been unseasonally hot here this week, as everyone keeps telling me, including the taxi drivers, before the conversation switches to their creative route planning. Then all small talk is off the agenda, and it’s into the heavy duty abuse. But I’ve been there already.
Today I finished my main work just after lunch, and returned to the hotel to change and run. But it was just too hot and humid. Instead I grazed at the salad bar for an hour or so, before tackling some written work to waste time before 3 o’clock, when my colleagues in the US finally decide to get up and get to work. I don’t know how they get away with it.
A couple of hours of emails and reports and updates, and it had to be time for a run. But it was still so hot out there. So I waited some more. And some more. Eventually, at 7 o’clock, sitting in the hotel room, the fan at full blast, gazing out towards the hazy horizon, listening to the church bells clanging lethargically, I knew that I’d lost the game. There would be only one winner here. Beer.
So I went wandering into the local town of Ratingen, managing this time to track down the centrum that had eluded me on previous walks. It’s a large, pedestrianised circle containing dozens of pavement bars and restaurants and ice cream parlours. On a long, baking evening like this, nearly all seats on the street were full, but I eventually found a spare table in the town square, where hundreds of locals had gathered to eat and drink and gossip over alt beer and snacks. Interestingly, not a sausage-wallah in sight. Hamburg is deeply sausage-centric, but over on this western fringe it’s more middle of the road: pasta and steak and fried fish and wiener schnitzel.
Jacques Chirac’s recent comments about the quality of British food puzzled me. I don’t make any great claims for British cuisine, but when I visit a place like this, I really don’t understand what is perceived as being different about the Great Elsewhere.
Take Belgium. An interesting place to visit, but their national dish seems to be anaemic chips coated in mayonnaise. Not much wrong with that, but hardly exciting cooking. In Germany you have your schnitzel – veal deep-fried in breadcrumbs, and you have your bratwurst and frankfurters – pink processed meat boiled in a plasticky skin – and we are supposed to regard this as exalted cuisine? Danish national dishes are variations on one theme – cold fish pickled in vinegar. OK I suppose, if you like cold fish pickled in vinegar. Holland? Pretty much the same as us though their cheese isn’t as good. Greece and Turkey? Hard to dislike slabs of grilled meat and rice and bread, but it’s hardly innovative. Seems to me that only Spain and Italy have truly distinctive cuisines. Think of paella and tortilla. Think glasses of sherry and tapas. Think pasta and pizza (even if pizza really is a New York Italian dish rather than a Milanese one). Think truffles and wild boar and glasses of rich Barolo and Barbaresco and Amarone.
So let’s admit Spain and Italy to the top table.
But what of France itself? It’s undeniable that the best meal I ever had was at a Michelin three star restaurant in Rheims, a guest of Jean-Baptiste Lanson. (The wine business did have occasional perks.) And I can think of a couple of other occasions when I ate really well in France. But it’s equally undeniable that some of the worst grub I’ve ever been confronted with has been in French restaurants lower down the accolade league. Execrable food that I wouldn’t have fed to a dog unless I was trying to kill it.
So this sets you thinking… when Chirac and other haughty Gallic food critics talk about “British food”, what British food are they referring to? A decent plate of fish and chips in Whitby or Brighton, or a standard home-cooked steak and kidney pie on the average high street, would knock most average provincial French restaurant food into a cocked beret. Very fine French restaurants are great places to eat, but I doubt they are that far ahead of their very fine British counterparts. In other words, compare like with like, and the differences are not as great as Chirac might think. And let’s face it, what does he really know about British food? How often does he pop into an ordinary British pub or restaurant for le nosh-up? Or come to that, how often does he use bog-standard French restaurants? Probably never.
Hurrumph.
Er, where was I? Ah yes, in the town square in Ratingen, supping a couple of glasses of Pils, nibbling nuts and occasionally feeling indignant. And reading Simon Armitage’s excellent “All Points North”. Seems like a long time ago that I used to see him at those poetry readings in the George in Huddersfield. A shame I never bothered getting to know him. He’s become quite the celebrity these days. He could have opened doors for me, that lad.
I am very bothered
I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.
O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn’t shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.
Don’t believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me.
Simon Armitage
The book is a fascinating celebration of the north of England – or supposed to be. What it’s really about is your existence in Huddersfield in the mid-nineties. It allows you to feel enormous relief that the day of escape arrived. You’re also struck by the way the book is written entirely in the second person, which you don’t often come across. It gives it a strangely compelling, if slightly unsettling, tone. You. It’s as though he’s addressing me directly.
Interesting to be reminded of bizarre phenomena like the summer of 1995 when all the Pennine reservoirs dried up north of the town, and for months on end we had a never-ending stream of water tankers arriving to tip their loads into Scammonden and Blackmoorfoot and Swellands, allowing the nasal townsfolk to top up the tin bath for Friday night’s traditional ablution. I’d often drive back from some folk club in Halifax or Todmorden, or from the late show at the Rex in Elland, past midnight, and marvel at the spooky sight – the eternal caravan of tankers parked up on the hard shoulder of the M62, waiting for their turn to traverse Ainley Top and hit the narrow moorland road to the reservoirs.
I hated that life, though I don’t think I realised it at the time. Things are better now.
Tomorrow, I must run again.
