Beacon? A name so bland it inspires neither contempt nor enthusiasm
IAM not, and never have been, a member of the Colston fan club. I wrote articles in the 1980s and 1990s calling for the statue to go and for the Hall to be renamed. I may be a miserable old white bloke with high blood pressure (I believe this qualifies me as a “gammon”) but no-one can accuse me of climbing on a bandwagon that I actually helped to build.
And nor will I take lessons in political correctness from any historical illiterate who’s just blown into town on a student railcard. But Bristol Beacon? Really? OK, we need to understand the problem here. We can’t name it after Cary Grant (because Dead White Male I guess); it’s not the Concorde Hall (because carbon emissions?) and it’d be madness to name it after any living local musician or artist because six months down the line they might be fingered for arson in an orphanage, or be caught on camera saying they fancy Hitler.
Perhaps Bristol Beacon will turn out to have been a really clever wheeze. A name so bland that it fails to inspire either enthusiasm or disdain might be just the thing, but it’s committee consensus.
So until – and this is perfectly possible – it gets rebranded again in a few years’ time, one of our principal performance venues has a name that makes it sound like a drop-in centre for the unemployed. We must consider this a small improvement.
The Cultural Cringe
Australians used to have a term describing their feeling of inferiority to the mother country in terms of art, education and manners - “the cultural cringe.”
Back in the postwar decades, the embodiment of the cultural cringe was Barry Humphries’ character, Sir Les Paterson, a drunken, lecherous boor. The big joke was that Sir Les was Australia’s “Cultural Attaché” to Britain despite being a complete Philistine.
But in some ways the Australians got it wrong, because just as they had some lingering inferiority complex, Britons themselves suffered from cultural cringe in relation to some other countries. Arguably it still does.
At some time or another almost every British teenager since the 1950s has wished s/he lived in America. Perhaps a few still do, though the numbers have probably dropped off a cliff in recent years thanks to the grotesquely inhuman idiot Americans elected their President. Besides, being an American teenager nowadays involves a significant risk of being shot by whichever twisted creep in your high school class can’t get a girlfriend.
Meanwhile many older Brits have, for decades, considered themselves inferior to their French counterparts when it comes to art, cookery, sex or simply getting dressed.
This particular cultural cringe was a special burden of the educated middle classes. I well remember how in the 1970s, people from Clifton would pile into their elderly Citroen 2CVs (if you owned one of these it was mandatory to have a ‘Nuclear Power – No Thanks’ sticker on the back) and splutter down to the Arnolfini cinema to watch subtitled films.
Some of these were, of course, superb, but many, however, were not.
Stroking beards (imaginary or otherwise) they would sit through the most arrant rubbish, peaking with the later work of Jean-Luc Godard, a brilliant filmmaker in his early days who later turned into a pompous old Marxist fraud churning out impenetrable trash which the rest of us were too stupid to understand.
It was also axiomatic that foreigners in general and the French in particular, were far superior to us when it came to cooking. In this context it’s worth noting that there was a point in the 60s when the Arnolfini had the money for a brand new building which was to be on part of the Castle Park site, and that it would include a cordon bleu cookery school. (Chickens abused with garlic, basically.)
(Here ends the Arnolfini-bashing. It’s an extremely important local institution which puts Bristol on the national cultural map and I officially love it.)
Brits may have been in thrall to foreign cooking at one time, but they certainly aren’t now. The humblest British restaurant or cafe nowadays serves up food that’s infinitely better than even two decades ago. Much of this is of course thanks to immigration, whether from Europe or the wider world.
Even the processed food and ready meals you get in supermarkets are far superior in quality than they were in the 1970s or 80s.
(If you beg to differ, then ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present Exhibit A: A cardboard box containing a Vesta Chow Mein. Which you can still find in the supermarket, by the way. Regular readers of this column will know of my own fondness for Old People’s Food, but Vesta Chow Mein crosses a line.)
For all their sins, the big supermarket chains have quietly and steadily improved our living standards. Competing with one another, and usually working on tiny profit margins (which is OK if you count your profits in hundreds of millions), they feed us all increasingly good quality grub at prices which most (though, scandalously, not all) can afford.
]Monsieur and Frau Foreigner
If you want to know how good UK supermarket food is, just visit a few foreign supermarkets.
(Happy days! Wonder if we’ll ever be able to do it again between the ravages of the ‘Rona and the broken promises of Brexit.)
If you’re staying in some foreign land, you must visit the local supermarket. Even if you’re eating out every night you still need things like coffee and some bits and pieces for breakfast.
And guess what? Monsieur and Frau Foreigner eat just as much processed crap as we do. This is no great surprise, but to truly understand, you have to visit supermarkets in Spain, Germany, Italy and – oh yes! – France to experience the full horror/delight of processed foreign stuff.
If I am a good person, then when I die I will go to Germany where the supermarkets have rows of fridges containing the most bewildering selection of processed pork products.
This will also happen if the Almighty judges me to have been a bad person.
(Look, my relationship with processed meat is a complicated and neurotic mixture of guilt and gluttony and it’s my problem and my digestive system and I live with it one day at a time, okay?)
But the one place where I have been truly appalled by the local junk was on a trip to Amsterdam a couple of years ago, though this particular experience did not take place in a supermarket.
In the Netherlands, they have vending machines selling hot food at railway stations and other public places, and much of this muck appears to be various things fried in breadcrumbs, though it might be sawdust.
I bought one of these things (I guess we’d call it a croquette in English), which turns out to be full of molten grey tasteless cheese laced with bits of what might once have been a distant relative of ham. It was so awful I had to eat a second one just to be sure.
So never let anyone tell you there’s no real progress in human affairs. Assuming you can afford it, you can eat very well in the UK these days and shouldn’t feel any sort of cultural cringe when it comes to foreign food. Least of all Dutch fast food.
It was kind of disappointing, because of all the nations of Europe it’s probably the Dutch that we all like the best. They are lovely, smart and thoroughly good people and I am sure that proper Dutch cooking is splendid, but their native junk food is ghastly. Oh, OK, just one more then ...
Your Letters
» Yes, another edition of BT with no letters. This is due to slight technical issues as I’m on sort-of-holiday in North Yorkshire without proper access to the BT inbox, though I can see that BT is back on the naughty step for a schoolboy error last week.
BT’s letters section will return as per normal next week and I hope – hope! – that the other recent problems will be sufficiently conquered to allow us to have a proper letters section every week going forward.
After all, it’s not like any of us will be going anywhere anytime soon, so mail us your reminiscences and historic questions as you wish. Letters by post are still off for the time being, mind.
I’ll be back as soon as I’ve nipped up to Barnard Castle for me eye test.
Cheers then!