Here and There (3 page)

‘Wait for me 'round the corner,' said the Sicilian I was working with. ‘There's a bar, you may know it. They made that film there.' And indeed I did know it. This is the bar from
The Godfather
, where Michael meets the girl that he will briefly marry. It's one of the great scenes, one of the great locations, in all of the short history of movies. Coppola used it to stand in for Corleone, a real place with long mafia associations but which has become too modern.

Film tourism has now become big business, and I sat in the park opposite, where Michael had his wedding reception, and wondered why there was not a single intimation of what this place had once briefly been. My friend found me. ‘Do you recognise it?' he asked.

‘Yes, it's exactly the way it is in the film, isn't it?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' he said. ‘I haven't seen it.'

‘You haven't seen
The Godfather
? Everyone's seen
The
Godfather
.'

‘Not in Sicily,' he said. ‘Why would we?'

Battle of the bulge

Budgie-smugglers, apple-
catchers … call them what you
will, there's no doubting there
are strong cultural ties that
bind us to our more extreme
swimwear choices.

I spent my first holiday in Spain for years. Andalusia. I'd forgotten what a vast business holidays are here. What Seattle is to computers, Bangladesh is to T-shirts, and Guangzhou is to small plastic toy cars with cartoon drivers, so Spain is to getting your bits burnt. Spain invented tourism. Obviously people had to go places before Spain came up with sea, sun, sex and sangria, but tourists tended to do what it said on the package: they toured. They went to look at things. Tourism was cities and ruins and self-improvement, not snoggery.

It was the Spanish who had the uncharacteristically blue-sky idea of taking the interest out of travel, of removing the place from the destination. At the moment when aeroplanes got to their destinations more often than they disappeared into oceans, and working people thought it was safe enough and cheap enough to go away for a couple of weeks abroad instead of staying in Torquay or Bournemouth, the Spanish realised that the one thing that had been putting most Europeans off being tourists was the touring bit, the self-improvement, the churches and the ruins and the guide with the raised umbrella saying, ‘This way please – we have half an hour to do six centuries of frescoes, so no talking.' The Spanish brilliantly discerned that what really attracted people was each other. The dons heard a mysterious disembodied voice saying, ‘Build it and they will come.' (He probably said it in Spanish.)

So they built Malága, and come they did, in their hundreds of thousands. They came because of the sun, and the bit of water, and the cheap wine and the paella, but mostly just for the sun. And the Spanish also realised that if the tourists wanted to go and see something exciting or edifying, then they'd just look at each other. And it turned out that most people would far rather look at each other than some old statue without arms. And to those who pointed out that they could have stayed home and looked at each other on the bus, the answer was plain: not in this colour, and certainly not wearing that. Where else could you see that particular swatch of human colouring range from deep-flayed puce to wizened-sideboard teak, and wearing such spectacular attention-seeking clobber?

It is no accident that both the British and the Germans so often find themselves rubbing peeling shoulders as guests of the incredulous Spanish. The Poms and the Krauts are the two most dowdy dressers at home, but when it comes to packing for the summer, then some pantomime switch is flicked on in their heads, some exhibitionist pheromone perhaps contained in suntan cream. The astonishing ability to throw caution, taste, sense and decorum to the breeze is particularly strong in both the Germans and the British.

It has always been a matter of mutually fond embarrassment, but now something has happened on the beaches and lidos and swimming pools of Europe, and of course it's been precipitated by the French, who are people who wear more casual clothes on holiday than they do formal ones at funerals. Nobody looks quite as uncomfortably creased, polished and preened as a French man trying to look relaxed. A French woman has just been turned away from the municipal swimming pool dressed in what they're calling a burqini, which is essentially all her clothes and a headscarf. This is the accepted sharia outfit for mixed bathing. The pool guard turned her away for being unhygienic, a swimming hazard, unfavourable and a fashion disaster. At the same time, it transpires that it is illegal in France for men to approach swimming pools unless they're wearing Speedos. The shorts that most of us wear are apparently unhygienic. In response, an English holiday camp has banned Speedos. Europe is now bristling and pouting and posing its particular pet intolerances about what you should wear to go swimming.

A tracksuit with three headscarves is a bit of a red herring, or perhaps a shoal of kippers. If you're that modest, most women don't want to swim with men at all. The Speedo thing, though, is interesting. The bits of Europe where they're still popular generally coincide with places that still elect Communist mayors, where the most popular occupation for women is either housewife or prostitute, and where the local drink is made out of distilled plums or potatoes. So very tight budgie-smugglers, as I think the Australians call them, being the home of budgies, or apple-catchers, as they're known in England, are generally popular all the way down the Black Sea, on the right-hand side of the Adriatic, and on the south side of the Baltic. So it's Ukranians, Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians, and very, very small costumes are very, very big in Albania and in Hungarian spas. Germans, of course, adore them and always have. They wear them wherever possible. The Brits, the Italians and of course the Americans wouldn't be seen dead in nylon girl pants. As far as I remember, Australia is pretty much split down the middle. A lot of them wear very baggy board shorts, but there's also quite a lot of muscle Marys in lifeguard-style tanga.

The point of this argument in Europe is, like most arguments in Europe, not about what it says it's about. It isn't about swimming trunks. It's about comparing versions of liberal intolerance. So the French banned women in burqinis because it's an insult to women. Muslims complain it's intolerant of faith. The Brits banned budgie-smugglers because they're offensive to women and children. Very brown Polish men say it's an infringement of their right to wear whatever they like. And actually we're having this row because we're so fed up with and frightened about having to argue about the things that really matter, like unemployment and house repossessions.

What no one has yet asked is: what's worse in Speedos? A very little one, or a very big one? I mean, if your budgie-smugglers contain, say, a day-old chick or a cockatoo, which is worse?

What's also interesting about Europe at the moment is that naturism is declining. Its particular sexless, healthy and rather dull image of hiking and caravans and woodland clearings is disappearing under a new Puritanism and the fear of paedophilia and sexual impropriety. The French, also, contrarily, have given up going topless on the beach. Again, this Bardot-esque symbol of equality and freedom has been usurped by so many plastic breasts and Ukranian students on the Riviera. It's been a weirdly Calvinist summer here. Europe's existential chickens have come home to roost. Or perhaps that's budgies, or maybe cockatoos, or kookaburras, and the occasional albatross.

Food for thought

With the rapid devolution of
fast food and the Darwinian
drive of bastardised dishes
around the globe, croissants and
cappuccinos just aren't what
they used to be.

I just went out to have coffee. Normally I just go to the kitchen to have coffee, but today there are two Poles in the kitchen, and if I have to make coffee for me, then I've got to make it for them, too, which would involve the international mime of beverage-making, and searching under dust sheets for the fridge and biscuits. Poles, I've discovered, are quite fussy about biscuits, so I went out. I always associate going out for coffee in the morning with New York. It's a ritual lots of American writers have: you take your
Times
and the
Post
and you do coffee. Some take their computers and sit in Starbucks and work. There's a whole school of Starbucks journalism, movies and television, all frothy profundity and witty banter. A chance romantic meeting between two writers, one serious (her), the other sporty and not serious (him), in a coffee shop is the leitmotif of the Starbucks school.

So I went down the road and had a cappuccino. Like eggs Benedict and unhygienic sex, it's one of those things that received wisdom says you never get at home. Everybody has a cappuccino thing, but whoever uses them twice? It takes hours, it coats the ceiling in watery milk, and finally you get cold coffee with scum. I rarely drink cappuccino. The waitress asked if I'd like a croissant (she was Polish, incidentally; Britain is now run entirely by Poles, and frankly they're doing a far better job than any of the other people who have invaded us for the last 2000 years) and I said yes. I said yes because there is an old connection. We think of cappuccino as Italian and croissants as French, but actually they're both Austrian. Precisely, they both originate with the siege of Vienna, which was the high water-mark of the Turkoman invasion of Europe, and the beginning of the slow withering of Ottoman expansion. The croissant was made to celebrate the defeat of Islam by a grateful Viennese baker; it still comes under the heading of Viennoiserie in France. The coffee was discovered in a Turkish camp and mixed with milk and named after the monks in white hoods. They have since gone around the world.

I expect a cappuccino and a croissant are the two things you can pretty much get in every country on the globe. Mine came and the coffee was a pneumatic effluvium, not unlike cavity wall insulation. It was striped like a zebra's bandage with a thick layer of cocoa. Finding the actual coffee in it was a trepidatious business; at last a grey liquid seeped from below. It was mildly coffee-flavoured warm milk. But the croissant was the real surprise. A lump covered in almonds and a shake of icing sugar that mice could've skied on, it was a fat, corpulent thing, like a croissant python that had swallowed a doughnut. As I tried to pick it up, it fell apart under its own adipose cholesterolic weight, spilling its guts of a slidey mousse made of fat and ground almonds and sugar, like a six-year-old's cake mix. Together the coffee and the cake were to their original inspirations what a pantomime dame is to Elle Macpherson. It isn't that they were horrible. It's that they had descended so far from their template.

I spent 10 minutes just watching them, half expecting that they might continue to metamorphose on the counter, slowly becoming a united sweet sludge. And I began to think about the worldwide eugenics of food. There is a set of international dishes that have shed their national origins and, like rats, pigeons, fleas and boy bands, become ubiquitous. Freed from the scrutiny of their families, they grow degenerate, spoilt, sloppy, lascivious, foul-mouthed, inconsistent, amoral, slovenly bits of mouthy comfort.

Take pizza. It started as a simple ascetic crisp stretch of dough, frugally flavoured with tomato and mozzarella, perhaps with the addition of a sliver of local ham, a sprig of rosemary. Away from Naples, into the fleshpots, it became a bloated painted whore. Anything can have a go on a deep-crust pizza, and anything does: pineapple, caviar, smoked salmon, cheddar. It's been cosmetically enhanced and coarsened. And Caesar salad – a simple and clever piece of serendipity that married cos lettuce, egg, parmesan, garlic, anchovies and croutons – has grown into a soppy cold stew of chicken and bacon, smothered in mayonnaise, invariably without anchovy.

The list of things that grow wayward when they leave home is the longest lamented menu in the world. From dim sum to chicken tikka, there is a Darwinian natural selection in these fast food international dishes. Recreated without chefs, unencumbered by recipes, often with their constituent parts, their DNA, mass-produced by technicians with degrees in engineering, this is food that has become its own master, and to survive in the competitive stuff-throat world of cheap catering, it has to adapt to attract the humans who are needed to consume it as part of its natural life cycle.

We all think that when we pick up a menu we are the predators, we are the hunters, the grazers and browsers, but have you ever considered that you are in fact also the prey, that the hamburger needs you quite as much as you desire it? The memory of its taste, its coarse smell, the dribble of nameless juices, is what it uses to lure you in. Without millions of victims worldwide, the hamburger would go the way of the Cornish pasty, the posset, salmagundi, sops; the list of extinct dishes is quite as long as the list of wayward ones, a list of extinct dishes that couldn't adapt to colonise new palates and markets.

I sat looking at my cappuccino and croissant and considered that in their instigation these two simple things represented a triumph, not just of the West against the invading hordes, but of taste and culture, craft and civilisation. The delicate lightness of the croissant with its wonderful chewy heart, the coffee the result of a combination of trade and discovery from Africa, Arabia and Europe, a synthesis of curiosities, each to start every new morning. In their inception, they were the best of us. In their mass production, their sweet, unctuous, stupid, slurred, caloried, careless flavours, their toothless textures, they appeal to the worst of us. There is, in the descent of fast global grub, a moral, and also a warning: who do you think is consuming who?

Bombay dreams

Ultimate enlightenment lies in
the collective will, intelligence
and glamour of civilisation, and
the bustling city of Bombay is
the perfect place to find it.