RSS

Contact us

Saturday 22 November 2008

Diary

Diary

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane.

On my own recent European soft-core tour I devoured The Islamist by Ed Husain (always good to have your prejudices confirmed) and Arkady Babchenko’s quite extraordinary memoir, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya (it’s published here in November). Drafted as an 18-year-old conscript, Babchenko turns from naive recruit to brutalised soldier in the space of months, and his book is truly shocking — Catch-22 in slo-mo, as vivid as modern unedited TV news footage. ‘The commander orders us to do a sweep through the village. All the men who could be found are herded into the square. They are thrown down in piles and then our soldiers start to hack them up. One guy pins a Chechen to the ground with his foot, while a second pulls off his trousers and with two or three hefty slashes severs his scrotum. In half a day the whole village is castrated.’ I read parts of it open-mouthed, as you will.

If Babchenko isn’t your traditional holiday airport read, then El Bulli doesn’t offer your typical holiday fare either, unless you happen to be holidaying on a space station, that is. Ferran Adrià’s Catalonian eatery is the epitome of the destination restaurant, second only in the critics’ eyes to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck. This is Dalí food, where an olive will be anything but — Aha! Caster sugar! — and a typical dessert is a po-mo banoffee pie. With knobs on. Molecular cooking has been copied by every jumped-up chef with ideas above his work station, but the bulldog is the real deal. After all, where else are you going to eat salty chocolate with cases, yogurt and pistachio, gnocchi of polenta with coffee and saffron yuba, eel–veal bone marrow with mustard leaf or a parmesan airbag? For me this was a repeat (read greedy) experience — I went last year, too — but still got goosebumps as I walked in. El Bulli is so difficult to get into that even when you’re inside, you still think there may have been some hideous mistake with the booking. But no, the razor clams, tangerine bonbons and acid milk mousse were all ours.

Next week we hold our annual GQ Men of the Year Awards, our tenth. The accompanying issue hits the streets the following day (the fifth) with a brilliant cover by Simon Emmett and many of the portraits of our illustrious winners taken by David Bailey, still Britain’s most famous, and grumpiest, photographer. Bailey — only an idiot would call him David — likes to test people when he meets them, either by swearing at them (and Bailey can swear like no one I’ve ever met) or by treating them as though they’ve come to collect the bins. He tried this on me when we first met, but I gave him such a mouthful back he stopped immediately (a word to the wise: never use dressing-room vernacular unless you’re match fit). His other trick is to hold your forearm or your hand in public; not fleetingly, but for five, ten, 15 minutes, a sign of affection that most people (especially men, and especially in front row places like Le Caprice) just can’t handle. Me, I love him, and these days we hold hands wherever we go.

More articles from: Dylan Jones | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved