August 2018
Even with a head brimming with syrup and abject sadness, I need to go back out to work. I need the cash.
Maybe that is, after all, the true meaning of being working class.
For the last twenty-one days I have wandered around bra-less, in leggings, hollow-eyed and despondent, but this won’t get the bills paid. It’s impossible to review restaurants from under a duvet in a back bedroom in the remote Lake District.
So I’m back on the West Coast line from Penrith to Euston, stood in the toilet of Coach K. At Penrith I have red eyes from crying; by Oxenholme I have attached false eyelashes to my lids and let the glue dry, and swooshed myself thoroughly with a lint roller. As we pass through Lancaster, I have a packet of hair pins out and have the beginnings of an up-do. By Milton Keynes I am 60 per cent the person I once was, give or take the silver flecks in my hair that I hide clumsily with mascara. In a taxi at Euston Station I slip on a pair of heels, spray myself with Issey Miyake perfume and paint on a smile. Nothing is perfect, but I have definitely established a light veneer of London Me.
I’m off to review a totally ridiculous restaurant. It’s not ridiculous in the eyes of the London food scene or the Michelin-star people, but it’s certainly ridiculous if you’ve become accustomed to dining out in a garden centre.
This is a multi-million-pound-renovation West London dining experience. It involves a stark open kitchen where, as you arrive, a squadron of chefs are moving micro-fungi around plates intensely with silver tweezers. Many of the plates will be less like lunch, more like a Jenga game of shards and textures.
The restaurant’s £50,000 Bose stereo system is playing The Joshua Tree by U2. The atmosphere when I arrive is tense. Really bloody tense. My attempt to book anonymously has clearly been thwarted. Most London restaurants use one of the same half-dozen reservation platforms these days, all leaving trails of electronic cookies wherever I leave my false names and phone numbers.
This has certainly happened here, as everyone from the door people to the chefs to the kitchen porter are being that kind of ‘normal’ where they bump into each other and smile with faces that look sore. Their hands wobble as they try to take a coat. Sometimes in these situations I see younger ones being taken aside and slapped down verbally for moving my glass too quickly, or too slowly, or not moving it at all. Sometimes waiters disappear in the middle of my dinner and I cannot decide whether their shift has ended or they’ve been taken outside and executed. Sometimes I sit on the loo in newly built restaurants and hear the kitchen crews through the MDF wall being shouted at by chefs because my plate went out without garnish, which was the final straw in a terrible week, in a terrible year, for a chef who has not seen his wife or baby for weeks. In these cases, I’ll act like I’ve not heard and one of the front-of-house staff will meet me outside the bathroom and escort me straight back to my seat to get me away from the noise. We will both discuss the recent weather and pretend everything is normal.
This is all normal.
It is normal that there’s a picture of my face on the wall of every kitchen, with added notes on my likes and dislikes and more than likely with Satan’s horns drawn on my forehead. On the days you’re in the mood for all this, being a restaurant critic is an absolute blast. But the downside is that sometimes you’re not and the cavalcade must go on. Off you must trot into another heavily staged room with freshly painted walls where everyone is smiling and oh so normal but also insane, to eat the very long tasting menu.
But first, as I reach the front desk, I must remember to put my shoulders back and tilt my chin semi-upwards and stick a swish in my step, just like my Aunt Frieda, and try to just ride the crackle of invisible chaos. The trick is to show them that here, exactly here, is where you’re supposed to be.
The problem with this spanking new multi-million-pound restaurant is that it has absolutely zero buzz. Newly opened, millions frittered, big-name chefs, Michelin inspectors enraptured, previews in all the papers – but the word on the street is that it’s as flat as a fluke. This is the cruellest of all scenarios. Everyone in the food scene respects you deeply, but the restaurant is bloody tedious and no one wants to hang out there.
The manager walks me over to a booth in the corner; a high-backed, deep-purple banquette worth the down payment on a small flat. It is the most comforting thing I have felt for a long while and I remember momentarily how tired and hungry I am, and that I am running on fumes. I’m haunted by Dad’s face as we put him into the car to go to the care home, and tormented by how much I actually now miss him roaming the house, looking, always looking. I remind myself that by the time Dad went I had lost the ability to pacify him. I was just another face – sometimes his little girl, but sometimes just another gatekeeper to his peace. I was just the woman stopping him from finding that razor, in a drawer, behind the boots or at the bottom of his bag.
Matt appears, flanked by three front-of-house staff who are ensuring his path from the front door to the table is efficiently stage-managed and filled with effervescent small talk.
‘Princess!’ he cries. ‘You look marvellous. A million dollars.’
True friends politely ignore the fact that you have aged at least ten years in six months and have begun cutting your own fringe with all-purpose kitchen scissors. That’s proper friendship.
‘Are you hungry?’ I say, slightly mischievously.
‘Very,’ he says, unfurling his napkin.
This is a shame, because we’re sitting down for a tasting menu that will not be a meal, but more a random collection of the chef’s ambitions, presented with seventeen verses of Vogon poetry from the staff as they dole out tiny plates of his life story. These tomatoes remind chef of his grandmother’s allotment. This eel is a tribute to his uncle’s fishing prowess. I will pull the requisite faces to cope with all of this. The lunch will be purposefully challenging, at times confusing and served ritualistically in a manner that requires the diner to behave like a congregation member of a really obscure sect who knows specifically when to bow her head and when to pass the plate and what lines to utter when.
The menu is on a single sheet of paper. It doesn’t feature names of dishes, but instead ingredients. For example: whelk, loganberry and whey.
These ingredients – either alone or in combination – won’t even sound very delicious. They’ll sound mysterious, puzzling and often downright off-putting.
If whelk is the first name on the list, it will almost definitely be course number one – unless the chef sends out three or four unadvertised courses beforehand, boosting the eight-course lunch up to twelve. I realise that nowadays almost all five-course tasting menus are actually around eight courses, because the chef will send ‘palate cleansers’ and ‘amuse-bouches’ and ‘snacks’ and ‘extra courses’. This will seem generous but is actually just the restaurant buying time – a bit like when you go to a Beyoncé gig and three of the tracks are videos of her daughter at a family party, which is really cute, but it’s just filler so Beyoncé can sit down and change her wig.
On being handed a menu like this, the acceptable reaction is to scan it with a sphinx-like gaze and say, ‘Thank you, this looks wonderful.’
Secretly, you probably have some questions. Most normal human beings like to know what they’re agreeing to eat and are dying to say, ‘Whelk, loganberry and what? I mean, what even is that? What does it look like? Is it, like, the whelk in a jammy sauce? Or is it stewed berry with chopped whelk? And I don’t even know what whey is in this context … Will that be, like, milky or is it a powder?’ For God’s sake don’t do this. The chef is a genius. This restaurant is his cerebral playground. Your role is not to reason why.
Being allergic to the whelk, however, is permittable. At that point the poor bastards in the kitchen will need to begin fumigating and scrubbing down surfaces and finding something even more ridiculous to swap it for.
A lamb’s ear.
A carved artichoke.
A rare edible sedum cultivated in a Lancastrian polytunnel.
Fancy restaurants attract a lot of the sort of people who are convinced they’ll bloat up into a spherical mass and then evaporate in a puff of pale-blue smoke if they were to so much as set eyes on a Weetabix. We begin our tasting-menu odyssey nibbling through plate after plate of grated bottarga, squid ink and aquilegia petals. We have one glass of wine, then another, then one more, then a sweet, sticky one just to celebrate being together.
On the train back to the Lakes I begin writing 700 words but find myself remembering a trip to London as a child in 1983. Me in a rainbow bomber jacket from the Littlewoods catalogue. Mam buying David and me bird seed in paper cartons to feed sparrows in our hands in St James’s Park. Eating our first McDonald’s on the Edgware Road; baulking at the gherkin and trying our first American-style root beer. Making Mam take me to Carnaby Street so I could find the Smash Hits office and pleading with her to let me wait for half an hour in a doorway while she and Dave went shopping so I could see the editor, Mark Ellen – the man responsible for amazing writers like Black Type – come out of the building to buy a coffee. I wanted to write and reach people and make them laugh like that. I put my forehead against the train window as it speeds through the Shap fells into the Lakes and try to take stock of the present. Regardless of the fog of ambiguous grief that makes every day twice as hard, I am now one of the most widely read restaurant critics on the planet; hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visit my reviews weekly as I deliver small slices of joy or glorious schadenfreude. The reviews appear for free, pinged directly to their phones or their tablets, to be read on the loo, perhaps hiding from their children or even taking a breather from their own parent who has dementia. I think again of the little girl in the rainbow bomber jacket. She would be really chuffed.
November 2018
‘We need to take some measurements,’ she says.
The Guardian Weekend magazine’s art team sound highly frazzled on the phone, as magazine folk always do when it’s their job to make cover photoshoots happen quickly. It’s late November and I have agreed, or at least not refused, to dress as a Christmas pudding on the front cover of the magazine, which we all agreed would be ‘fun’ three weeks ago but then swiftly forgot about, and now we have little time left to make a costume that fits me and try to shoot me in it, which isn’t fun at all. And certainly not fun for the poor art-department person who now has the godawful task of calling a woman to find out the girth of her arse and boobs. The top section of the pudding is to be made of skin-tight white spandex to represent the brandy cream, with a white pelmet that will fall down from my waist over a brown puff-ball ‘plum pudding’ skirt.
‘I don’t know my measurements exactly,’ I shout back, trying to cross the road outside Hamleys toy shop where a fake snow machine is in full gust and many stressed people who made less wise choices on contraception than myself are queueing with kids beside a live, dancing Santa’s-little-helper display.
‘OK, what dress size?’ she asks gingerly.
I feel truly sorry for her having to ask. Dress sizes are shameful. She knows this, I know this.
‘Dunno, ten, twelve, maybe? Or fourteen if it’s made out of silk by a designer. What is the plum pudding bit made of?’ I say, catching sight of myself in the Starbucks window on Regent Street and feeling short-changed by God yet again.
Why do I not get up earlier and run five miles a day?
Why have I started ordering pommes aligot again as a side on reviews?
Why have I lapsed and begun letting that delicious GAIL’s Bakery olive bread into the house on weekends?
‘You were size eight to ten on the cover shoot last year, Kanga – the stylist – says.’
I instantly feel worse.
I was good then.
I was better.
No, actually; I was slightly mentally ill with ambiguous grief, but my arms looked slim and amazing.
‘I go up and down … top half thirty-four to thirty-six maybe? Depending on fabric. About a twenty-nine waist … Don’t make anything skin-tight over my arse, for God’s sake … Actually, hang on, can I call you back? I’m going into the BBC and I can’t find my pass. Oh, I’ve got a call coming through from my brother, I’ll have to take it.’
‘He’s gonna need all new clothes,’ David says.
Dad has cut all of his clothes into narrow strips – all of them; all his underpants, all his trousers.
‘What the fuck …? What did the nursing home say?’
‘They say we’re going to have to take away his scissors,’ he says.
‘How the hell did he get scissors?’ I shout as I whisk along Regent Street. We both can’t help laughing. It is awful but darkly hysterical. It feels good to hear each other’s laughter again.
‘I know – what else has he got, a set of nunchucks?’ says my brother.
‘I’m sorry, we’ve had to confiscate his shuriken throwing stars,’ I say.
‘We’re sorry, he is no longer allowed his flamethrower.’
It feels amazing to laugh. Even if the world is burning.
‘But why is he shredding his clothes?’ I sigh as I walk into the BBC docs department and nod to Laurence and Georgia, my producers, and collect my script for a Radio 4 show about real-life dramas I’ve been working on called The Untold.
‘Dunno, maybe he’s going to a fancy-dress party as Robinson Crusoe,’ my brother says. Sometimes Dave sounds exactly like Dad. Scouse tones lilt in his Cumbrian accent.
We both crack up laughing again. It is welcome. Cleansing.
And later, at midnight, I will remember that a Christmas pudding costume featuring a holly crown is being crafted using skew-whiff measurements for a size-ten-to-twelve woman, which I am almost definitely at this point not.
I’m the restaurant critic for the Guardian newspaper; I’ve eaten hundreds and hundreds of dinners, up and down the country this year alone.
The only tried and tested way to keep a steady weight in this job is to place sensitive electronic scales within two metres of my bed, stand on them every morning and then starve myself (sorry, fast – we call it fasting now) while power walking for several hours. And to continue this until the very next time you are contractually obliged by your newspaper to eat a six-course meal. I realise now that life is really too short to worry about these things.
Two days later, in the back of the studio in Islington, I’m squeezing and heaving into the Lycra brandy-butter top for the photoshoot, inwardly reminding myself that being a national newspaper restaurant critic is one of the greatest jobs in the world.
And I should never complain.
Not a word. I’m going to cling on tight and love every minute and be ready at any point to fight off all other contenders until gout finally carries me off.
The pudding outfit fits. Just. I breathe in as the stylist zips it up. We make space by hoisting my boobs up higher by tightening the bra straps. A stylist’s trick, although you can end up with your nipples up by your tonsils.
We hide one of the trickier zips at the back by rearranging the nylon brandy-butter pelmet. I walk slowly in 180mm diamond heels to the set and the stylist gingerly hands me a prop to hold.
It is a three-feet-long ‘match’. The biggest match in the world.
If Darlene Phillips from Brownies could find the box, she’d have a field day.
Now, as a plum pudding, I can pretend to set light to myself. I crack open one of the prop bottles of champagne with a pop and pour it into a coupe glass. This gets some quite solemn looks from the twenty-somethings on set who are rather straight-laced, but if you’re going to spend the entire day looking like a berk with everyone staring at you, it pays to do it a little bit tipsy.
Also, I’m 45 – bloody ancient compared to them; my years of growing old atrociously have begun.
As the photographer shoots, I pose upright, brandishing my match, toasting the camera, holding a cute dog, swishing my skirt about, leaping in the air, drinking my champagne. Looking ecstatic. Looking pensive. Looking scared and confused by the match. Looking happy, looking knowing, looking crazy, looking smouldering – or more likely as though I have wind. As the camera snaps, a crowd of strangers stand around a laptop as the photos feed through onto the screen, saying nothing at all or sometimes yes, yes, no, that’s good, no, these aren’t working, are they?
And the photographer says, ‘This is good, but less teeth – no, more eyes.’ The best of these images are sent immediately through to the paper, who offer more feedback and begin laying out the front cover.
In December, the image of me as a human Christmas pudding is on the front page of the Guardian Weekend’s Christmas Food Special and also across the front of the main broadsheet paper. It is on newspaper stands and discussed on Sky News and beamed all over the world. I wish Dad could have seen it.
And I don’t look too fat in the photos. Plus, at least the festive season means that the majority of restaurants close and there’s no column to file for a fortnight.
I can use those days to peel off some pounds again.
Reset my clock.
Relearn how to feel hungry.
Cumbria, December 2018
Depression comes back like a bullet for Christmas. None of us can really be bothered with tinsel or carols in these circumstances, but we’re all too polite to say it and try to make all the right sounds in front my niece, Lola, who is consumed by Snapchat so hopefully hasn’t caught on. David says maybe we’ll get a turkey tomorrow. Mam demands we take her to Workington ASDA to bulk-buy cut-price mince pies, but her brain is more ambitious than her body.
‘I can walk! I’m fit enough to push a trolley,’ she says. ‘That woman with the sticky gun will be reducing all the good stuff and I’m missing it.’ Ten minutes later she’s asleep in a chair.
Feeling sheepish, I try to begin the gathering, the planning, the wrapping, then get back into bed and sleep too.
We’ll begin … when we get time.
Maybe tomorrow?
Maybe we’ll go out for Christmas lunch on the twenty-fifth? But no one makes a booking.
The fridge sits awkwardly empty right into the final week. By the 23rd of December the barren shelves feel downright weird. Tam puts up a small plastic tree with a few silver baubles. I shove a box of unwritten Christmas cards under the bed. I want the whole bloody season to just pass by and dump me in February. Watching cosy, jingly TV ads in every advert break feels like an act of self-harm.
At 2 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Dave and I look at each other and feel guilty.
We drive to the Penrith Sainsbury’s.
‘Give me one hour,’ I say to him as he heads off to find last-minute gifts.
Something peculiar is sweeping over me. A feeling as old as time. I walk into the Christmas Eve chaos of a busy supermarket with a double-fronted trolley and begin. Almost on autopilot.
Parsnips
Spuds
Carrots
Cream – double, single, squirty
Butter
Cartons of custard
Brandy butter
A turkey
A nut roast
Sausage meat
Bread sauce
Gravy powder
24 eggs
Hellman’s mayo
Cranberry sauce
Pack of sausage rolls
Coleslaw
A ham
Trifle
Christmas pudding
Box of Paxo
Mint Matchmakers
Plastic tub of Quality Street
5 Mars selection boxes in a stocking shape
Bottle of Bacardi
Bottle of whisky
Bottle of Smirnoff
Bottle of Malibu
6 bottles of fizzy white
2 bottles of Liebfraumilch
6 bottles of red
12 cans of full-sugar Coca-Cola
5 types of cheese
Cream crackers
KP nuts
4 loaves of bread
24 white rolls
Big box of Christmas crackers
Heston Blumenthal croquembouche tower
Large full-butter stollen
24 star-topped mince pies
3 bags of satsumas
Smoked salmon
Crumpets
More bread
More packs of butter
A jar of mincemeat
I shop and shop, on and on, slightly demented, but high as a kite on the thrill of making the festive season happen, until the trolley is full to the brim and mince pies are falling out when I turn corners.
When we get home I begin to distribute the items around the house.
I have strategically vomited Christmas into every room and we are having it, whether everyone likes it or not.
I knock back a strong Bacardi and Coke, eat two Quality Street green triangles, lie down on the bed at 5 p.m. and fall asleep fully clothed, with my coat on.
Something has shifted.
Christmas Day, 2018
I’m standing in the kitchen in the bungalow in the Lakes drinking Cava and placing chipolata sausages wrapped in bacon onto a sheet pan, wearing felt antlers that jangle as I move. We had sourdough crumpets with smoked salmon for breakfast – very fancy, just like they do at Balmoral – and now Christmas dinner is going to happen. Mam is having one of her good days; she feels strong.
She’s watching Jane McDonald’s Christmas special and wowing at the glittery frocks as Jane croons through a festive special of contemporary classics in a red Hollywood-starlet number.
‘’Ere, you should have this show!’ Mam says. ‘You could do this.’
‘I can’t sing, Mam,’ I say.
‘You sang a lovely song once in a Bishop Goodwin assembly about a horse who lived in a lighthouse,’ Mam says.
‘I was seven, Mam,’ I say.
‘You’re still seven to me,’ she says, grabbing my hand. ‘Well, more or less.’
Our entire home smells of turkey fat. Paul O’Grady is on Radio 2 chatting between Christmas classics. As the poppa-poppa-poms of Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop the Cavalry’ begin, I feel my eyes fill up. I take a deep breath and distract myself with a box of Paxo. My iPhone beeps. It is a message from a lovely man I’ve been seeing called Charles. He has been at least one very good addition to my curious world.
Dave’s car pulls in to the driveway outside the kitchen window.
He gets out and winks at me, then walks around to the passenger seat and leans in with his strong body-building arms. Then, carefully, he walks up the drive carrying a very small bundle of coats.
David is enormous; the body inside the coats is small and frail, but I can see its face laughing.
Mam appears beside me at the window, laughing.
‘He’s got him!’ she shouts.
We all shout, ‘Hello!’
Dave carries Dad gingerly through the house and plonks him down in the lounge in a big chair next to the telly.
Dad sits blinking, trying to get his bearings.
He is just a skull with a little bit of hair and a very thin body.
I crouch by his chair and say, ‘Hello. Hello. It’s Grace. It’s Grace, Dad. Hello.’
He says, ‘Oh! Throw. Throw. Throw.’
He splutters on his teeth, then stops, as if that made perfect sense.
I say, ‘Yes!’
I know from the intonation that, if Dad had any of the words left, he’d be making a joke. My sister-in-law hands him a small glass of port. Dad uses my face on the front of the Guardian Weekend magazine as a coaster.
I say, ‘How are you?’
He says, ‘You here train? Train?’
I say, ‘Yes, train.’
I sit down. We sit in silence, staring at each other.
I say, ‘I love you, Dad. I love you.’
I hold his small, bony hand. He starts to cry.
I say, ‘It’s OK, Dad. Come on. No cry. Best dad. Best dad.’
He says, ‘Sometimes I feel like – am – I am – ppphhh.’
I say, ‘Shall we have a bit of chocolate?’ I take the bar of Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut we got him for Christmas.
His eyes light up.
‘My chocolate,’ he says, and he pretends to take it off me.
We both laugh.