My educated readers: I was fortunate
enough to experience the last few hours of last year and the beginning of this
year in a restaurant with culinary offerings of sufficient quality that they
have been differentiated from my homemade risotto by a star from a tyre
company. Unfortunately however, what prevented La Food in Londres from receiving the lesser-known but in certain
circles equally-coveted Rex black-hole, was that the admittedly un-complicated and
primary experience of inhaling, tasting, and swallowing the food in question,
was, for me, served on a base of already-digested and almost sexual third-party
reviews, dripping with waiter-condescension, and garnished with the
unnecessarily energetic trialogue of Yolanda, Anthony and Portia, whose
opinion-solicitations on classically dull, yester-year subjects such as the economy, the leader of the opposition and Anthony’s recent holiday to Barbados overpowered the more subtle
conversation taking place between my chicken livers with red onion and mango
marmalade, baby leaf salad and soft dough bread. I resorted to drowning the
entire episode in three bottles of Château
de Chatelaine (1997) and sought further relief by pressing Yolanda et al on
subjects as varied as whether vegetarians could, and should, eat road-kill, the
probability of one of us being the messiah, and who indeed was afraid of the
big bad wolf. As one year ended and the next began, and, having decamped to
Anthony’s flat, my by-now-offensive pretension caused me somehow to become
furnished with a whisky and a cigar, shortly after the lighting of which - as I
struggled to produce a smoke-ring and a voice in the external world commented
that I resembled a goldfish having an asthma attack – I settled on the unusual
New Year’s resolution of ruthlessly down-sizing my friendship group, a
resolution that may in fact have been too-quickly-achieved, as my perceived distaste
for the evening - and, I will admit, slight inebriation - was shortly
thereafter signalled by a re-releasing of the mango marmalade onto Anthony’s
chaise longue and a loss of consciousness to the sight of Portia vacuuming a
small portion of vomit.
Rex
