Vogue -part 2

Ever since I saw the film ‘The September Issue’, I’ve wanted to pick up an issue of Vogue.

‘The September Issue’ is a documentary about putting together the September issue (duh!) of American Vogue. It’s like ‘The devil wears prada’ but impossibly more glamorous, cruel and wonderful and it left me thinking that with a few more perfectionists, the Earth would be a better place, or a smoking cinder.

Essentially the editor of the magazine has to try and crush the defiance of lots of creative people while simultaneously bringing out the very qualities that make them creative. The whole place is like a beehive – full of poison, manufacturing something sweet and everyone serving the queen.

Favourite scene? The model wolfing down a tart. I have no love for any woman who is an anodyne waif…but the second she attacked that jam tart with gusto…bloody ding dong, you’re telling me she’s beautiful and real too? (And has access to free food? I mean it’s free right, and she could bring it home and it’s not like she’s going to eat all of it.)

Deal time…when they launch the 1,000 page issue – I’ll buy it. If only because I want to see what the writing is like. If they can firehose money on photo shoots then they should emulate Playboy in terms of writing. If Mailer and Hemingway used to write for Playboy, why aren’t Amis, Ford and Coe write for Vogue.

What I particularly liked about the documentary was the obvious passion that everyone had for the subject. But let’s not think that this is isolated to the world of fashion. Among the many magazines at the news stand are modelling magazines, not magazines with models being skinny women but rather the models being 00 scale. That’s right ‘Model Village World’, the rest of us might think that it’s ridiculous but these people have a passion for documenting an unobtainable beauty, like a 1950s perfect chocolate box English village (complete with sleeping cats and sleeping murder) but it’s less furiously ridiculous than seven pages of a glossy magazine devoted to the snood. Scale modelling. Remove the ‘scale’ and is there any difference? Come to think of it is there any difference even if you leave in the ‘scale’ – the models in Vogue are size 0 (if not scale 00) and real women are, what, size 16?

In establishing the fashion model industry we have created a breed of people who would otherwise perish in the wild or have to serially shag Premiership footballers.

Vogue - part 1

Like many men, I have never looked inside an edition of Vogue.

Not even American Vogue because, apparently, there are many international editions and like McDonalds trying to appease the local market by introducing the McBlubber (Iceland), the McAntelope (Namibia) and the McSpitinyourbunyourcapitilistdog (N.Korea) each has its own take on fashion. American Vogue I imagine as glitzy and dizzy, like a cheerleader just about to stop vomiting because she has drunk too much and starting to vomit through an eating disorder. European Vogue has lots of little black dresses (apart from Italian Vogue, which has lots of big black dresses as worn by your mamma). Japanese Vogue probably has some totally weird manga shit happening and British Vogue is, basically, printed on tweed.

Not that I’m a stranger to a woman’s magazine. Oh no! I remember well one time at an ex-girlfriend’s place, chuckling to myself as I leafed through her Cosmo and noting that she had scored very low on the ‘are you ready for a relationship with somebody who still insists on playing Dungeons and Dragons with his mates one night a week’ quiz.

The next week, suddenly single, it wasn’t so bloody funny.

There are two reasons to love women’s magazines, the first is the personality quizzes (and the first question should always be ‘if you think this quiz will help you get through life, you need a) a dirty martini…NOW! b) a ride on a fairground ride, of any type, but one that pulls more Gs than NASA rate as safe is recommended and c) self-esteem). The second reason is scent strips.

Ever wondered why women always smell so good?

Men smell of the world. At least that part of the world that appears to be inhabited by rutting animals, scared animals, scared rutting animals, industry, steam engines, athletics, locker rooms, discount soap, teenage angst, laundry, fried food and, my own particular scent, a heady mixture of Star Wars and tears.

Women smell like…well…you know men are always doing that thing when they shove their nose in their loved one’s hair and just…inhale…the way that women do with laundry? Well, it’s not because we’ve got this thing for shampoo and it’s not because we’re weird (unless he’s a stranger). It’s because we can’t believe a human could smell that good.

I mean, if you saw a flying saucer having a space battle with a swarm of cyborg dolphins, on fire, you’d stare, no? That’s how alien the concept of smelling good is to men.

If we can drag enough of that smell into ourselves then maybe we can somehow purify ourselves – like that time you thought you could cure that hangover by sticking a garden hose in your mouth and trying to flush you hangover out of your pours through pressure (thank you, Harry Harrison for putting that thought in my head, ever since I’ve been soooooooooo tempted to see if it works).

But women’s magazines give some of the secret away and that secret is…scent strips! That’s right – scent strips. That stuff you buy your girlfriend or wife once in a while to make them smell purty, apparently they have people on magazine production lines spraying that stuff on pages and then gumming them shut at the factory, like camp umpa lumpas.

Christ, imagine that for a job – the guy that spritzes the scent strip? How long would it be before you wondered if that CCTV camera was a dummy and if it was time to do something fun, yet evil?

But that’s why women smell so good. An average woman buys what, forty or fifty glossy magazines a week? (She must do; I go to the news stand and there are THOUSANDS of the f**king things, so somebody must be buying them). So they have all of these scent strips. OK, so you start with some in the knicker draw, then the sock draw, then the…er, whatever draw (do women have things in draws, most of the women I know keep stuff on the floor or, judging by the errands I run, at the dry cleaners). But then you have more of them so; handbag, glasses case, anorak hood, purse, ipod keepie thingie, pockets, desk draw, gym locker, composter, CD case that was supposed to contain the original cast recording of ‘Oliver’, I mean, WTF! and, my personal favourite…sellotaped to me.

So that’s why women beguile. They smell nice because they surround themselves with strips of paper impregnated with musk. That, and they are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Which I guess means bacon?

Currywurst

Like many Premiership footballers, I enjoy taking pictures of my sausage with my 'phone.

Ever since I saw a ‘close up’ feature about currywurst on the BBC’s news web site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8408716.stm), I’ve been excited to a degree best described as ‘juvenile’ about the prospect of trying this exotic new dish.

Apparently the Germans have the same enthusiasm for curried sausage as they do for lederhosen, beer and war. The origin of the dish is that a German Housefrau in 1940s allied occupied Berlin obtained some curry powder from British troops and created the curried sausage and the lucrative sex-for-food trade at the same time

Currywurst is available in London at Kurz & Lang, 1 St. John Street, Smithfield, London (www.kurzandlang.com). They are, apparently, a German sausage importer and the shop has a small café attached. And by café, I mean griddle in a room.

The café itself is a monument to white tiling, like a better class of public convenience. There is a shelf running along the front windows and at this you can sit up on stools, watching the world go by while passers-by look in end envy you your hot sausage and cold beer. Those having their wurst inside get it on a china plate, those who wish to sit outside at the small tables on the pavement and fag up get paper plates.

Inside it’s a cosy and warm place to be on a winter’s evening. The hiss and sizzle of sausages cooking on the griddle complete with the banging tunes coming out of the radio, more commercial rock than oompah. It wasn’t in the least crowded but there was an atmosphere, which by my reckoning was never less than about 70 per cent pork fat and occasionally took on an almost solid appearance not unlike one of my more enthusiastic weekend fry-ups.

There are a variety of sausages on offer, all cooked by an authentic German chap sporting a rather unfortunate beard. I went for the posh end of the wurst experience; currywurst, sauerkraut, fried potato and a roll. In truth all you need is sausage and sauce and roll.

The currywurst is a sausage, smothered in a spicy brown sauce and then sprinkled with curry powder. Seeing curry powder shaken over sausage and sauce was truly a cultural shock and something of a taste sensation. Curry powder in British cuisine has the reputation of being used timorously by housewives in the late 1970s to bring a touch of the exotic to the dinner table. But not too exotic - lest one inflame passions that, in an era heavy on man-made fibres and material, might lead to chaffing, or tremendous static discharge. No, you used just enough to have you reaching for your glass of blue nun.

It was quite a surprise to see that it’s curry powder that gives the currywurst its kick, not so much a curry sauce, Curry sauce is, of course, a staple of after hours cuisine in the Midlands where, smothering chips, it is often the last, desperate throw of the dice to try and head off a hangover. It’s probably possible to work out where you are in Britain by what people put on chips, curry sauce means Midlands, chips and gravy means t’north and chips and cheese is, of course combined with a glass of white wine to constitute the ‘ladies special’ at the Café Piccante in Edinburgh. (www.cafepiccante.com). God knows what they serve further north than that; maybe the national dish of the Shetlands is chips and sheep dip.

To drink? An excellent lager – pauliner in this case, but there was quite a selection. It was such a shock not to be grossly overcharged for decent German beer that I quite forgot to steal the glass as a souvenir.

Also on sale was Jagermeister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister). This was sold in a bottle (from which you pour a shot), a little bottle (from which you pour a shot), and in a test tube (and if you’re drinking from that, it’s time to go home). I’m wary of drinking anything from a test tube as a search of literature shows this inevitably leads to transformation into Mr Hyde. Unleashing an inner beast without conscience usually happens when I drink stella anyway.

In addition I’m made aware that there’s a practice called Jagerbombing, surely the preserve of somebody hell bent on self-destruction, you drop a shot of Jagermeister into a glass of red bull and end up hammered but unable to sleep it off. It’s exactly this sort of behaviour that makes you hellish grumpy and sets a nation down the road of fascism.

Fast food, convivial atmosphere, with booze! Surely this is the way forward.

Kraft Korner

Kraft, the 'food giant', has bought Cadbury, the chocolate company. Any quaint notions you may have of a Willy Wonkaesque set up to make chocolate...is probably not that far off the mark. The Bourneville estate in Birmingham was built by Cadbury in Victorian times so that the workers would have somewhere decent to live. The visionaries at Cadbury realised that rickets-wracked workers consumptively coughing their teeth into the fruit and nut mix was probably A Bad Thing and so built a charming housing estate for them.

I don't know much about Kraft except that they make processed cheese. Processed cheese is one of those stealth phrases that only seems odd when you stop to think about it. What the hell is there to process about cheese? Cheese is, essentially, milk plus time.

OK it's apparent that there's a little more to it than that, and I suppose the magic of processed cheese is getting it to look the same after you peel the cellophane from the slice as it did when it was still in the packaging. Cheese slices (that is, pre-sliced cheese (presumably for people too stupid to be trusted with a knife), individually packaged (presumably for people who are on a mission to convert landfill pits into mountain ranges)) are designed for one purpose only, to go onto the top of a beef patty and make a cheeseburger.

After Kraft bought Cadbury and essentially either sacked all the Umpa Lumpas or sold them into slavery, I won't be buying Cadbury again. Which is a shame, because at Easter, you have your Cadbury cream eggs. At Christmas, you have your Cadbury selection box, with a game on the back and about 7 billion calories in the box itself, best consumed immediately on Christmas morning, giving you the energy to rip off all the wrapping from the presents. And at all times you have a bar of Dairy Milk or Fruit and Nut in the glove box of the car. On the M-Way feeling drowsy? One bar later and you are hard on the bumper of the Porche in front, whooping and honking for him to move over!

So Kraft are, essentially, all about the calories – presumably that’s why they are a ‘food giant’, or at least a food-lard arse. Cadbury are all about love.

Because Cadbury chocolate is love. It's what love tastes like, smooth, creamy and delicious and, just like love, it can lead to funny sensations in the pit of the stomach and induce nausea if abused.

Europeans mock our chocolate. Made with vegetable oil instead of the coca powder it means that Cadbury chocolate is a melt-in-the-mouth luxury sensation, rather than the grudging, bitter excuse for a snack available on the Continent. British chocolate is chocolate for lovers. Foreign chocolate is chocolate for masochists. Aztecs used to use lots of coca in their rituals. A bad bunch who made a habit of gruesome ritual sacrifice, some of this has to be down to eating all that bitter chocolate. If they had access to Dairy Milk they would probably have been a bit more placid. With a diet containing bitter chocolate and coffee, no wonder they were always so bloody bad tempered.

Bloomin' marvellous

Well, Valentine's day has come and gone for another year. A forest of trees has been felled to provide the cards while the pollen count in supermarkets has gone through the roof thanks to the amount of cut flowers for sale.

An anonymous message of love sent to somebody you have amorous feelings for! On the fourteenth of February, this is considered romantic; any other time of the year and it's stalking.

This weekend was also marked with a trip to my local megamart, a shop so vast that it has its own tribe, called shoppers or, to give them their common name, Chavs. They even have their own language - the snarl. Such as 'yer, well, like, that's what I'm looking for innit, follow-on crisps for toddlers'.

I was taking the opportunity to purchase some flowers and, for reasons to far-fetched to explain, was paying for them at the 'Digital Counter'. This is not, as one might expect, a huge clock but is instead where you might, for instance, purchase 'Medal of Honour' while also indulging in some blooms.

The chap behind the counter expressed shock at the cost of the flowers and suggested that I could get a value bouquet for a couple of quid.

Looking at a bloke who works behind the computer games counter at the supermarket, advising a customer who was spending thirty quid on a console game to go with a cheap bouquet, one had the feeling that cupid really has his work cut out sometimes.