Simplicity, thought Evelyn Waugh, was an overrated quality. Questioning whether “the whole business of civilised taste is not a fraud put upon us by shops and restaurants”, he nonetheless concluded that delicacies are not merely luxuries which we have been taught to prefer because they are exclusive, but “a far from negligible consolation for some of the assaults and deceptions by which civilisation seeks to rectify the balance of good fortune”.
Waugh would have been unimpressed by his friend Diana Mitford’s concoction of a frugal beach lunch on the Sussex coast during the period when her in-laws, the Guinness family, were building Bailiffscourt, their house at Climping. Before the astonished eyes of the company, the Hon Miss Mitford fried eggs on a portable stove. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, it’s too clever,” commented Mrs Guinness. Little has happened gastronomically in Climping since, but the café in the car park is reputed to do a good crab sandwich.
It’s a peculiar place, Climping. Witchy. A curiously etiolated village on the border of East and West Sussex between Bognor and Brighton, stretching flatly from Ford open prison to the blank tan of the Channel. The beach is bordered by the storm-tossed concrete remnants of World War II batteries, improbably mangled.
A whitewashed, boarded-up pub lends an air of cosy desolation and nasty things have certainly happened in the woods. Naturally, after the hottest summer England has ever known, it was tipping with freezing rain, and the café was shut. Bailiffscourt is now a very charming hotel, but we were too scruffy for tea
with Diana’s ghost so we set off through the icy mist to Littlehampton.
like many british seaside towns, Littlehampton is encased in a penumbra of joyless sin. We staggered through the torrent past an unusual number of funeral directors into the grateful vitality of the East Beach Café. Much has been written about this extraordinary building, constructed by the brilliant Thomas Heatherwick in 2005. Externally, the overlapping steel-shutter construction gives it the appearance of a hermit crab, hunkering down for shelter amongst the pebbles, an unobtrusive curiosity which conceals an astonishing architectural sleight of hand.
Inside, the space seems to double in size, opening into a fluted white arch, a stripped-down play on an eighteenthcentury grotto. I thought I couldn’t love it more until I looked up the studio construction notes and discovered the Eeyore-ish observation that the “bleak and exposed” site for the café was further challenged by the presence of a high-pressure sewage line.
The daytime menu is divided between seaside staples — a fish burger with tartare sauce, hake with new potatoes, and more elegant offerings, such as crab linguini with n’duja and spring onion. The latter looked marvellous, but after pots of tea to thaw out we began with tiger prawns in chilli and garlic and soda bread, then fish and chips with mushy peas.
Tiger prawns can be a dubious treat — a former delicacy which has become unethically ubiquitous — but these were so delicious, their generous sauce so perfectly balanced and the soda bread so expansively absorbent that we decided they were certainly sustainably sourced.
I’m not sure whether tea with fish and chips falls on the simple or civilised side of the spectrum but after tramping over several miles of slimy pebbles it’s brilliantly evocative — all the damp, sandy chill of English summer childhoods recalled in a single glorious, scalding bite.
The batter was crisp and fluffy, the chips were the proper crisp kind that call for drenching in Sarson’s vinegar, the peas a bright, bouncing green with just the right equilibrium between bite and soothing goo. The tartare was spiked with proper nubbles of cornichon and caper, ideal for smashing into robustly-flaking fishcakes.
Salted caramel tart with clotted cream sounded Mitfordly divine but we felt obliged to take a bracing swim before yet more tea and an extremely acceptable Bakewell tart from the café’s kiosk, which did away with the last of Climping’s malevolence.
Lunch at the East Beach Café is definitely a compensation for the tribulations of adulthood. Huddled under Mr Heatherwick’s awning in our streaming cagoules, salt brattling on our skin, chomping through tooth-wincingly thick icing and buttery almond crumbs, we were filled with Blyton-esque glee.
What makes the East Beach Café work so well is the combination of its bravura setting and the humility of the kitchen. The building is so extraordinary that they could get away with deep-fried cardboard. Conversely, the architecture might incite overambitious, overpriced foamy fiddling.
Instead, they offer exactly the food you want to eat at the seaside: breezy, jaunty flavours that sparkle even when the weather doesn’t. On Friday and Saturday evenings you can have dinner, and there’s a short, jolly breakfast menu. Deft, accomplished cooking which is truly sophisticated in its confident simplicity. Civilised indeed.
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ur pepper grinder’s like the mills of God,” said my wife. “It grinds exceeding small. So what implement can you use…” [The question started badly. My Señora knows I’m a hands-on cook: that is, I use only my hands and wield only the simplest pre-industrial technology: knife, spoon, fire, pan, plus the occasional skewer, hammer and thread. The ill-starred question got worse as it went on,] “… to crush the peppercorns roughly enough?”
Steak au poivre caused the marital rift. A concession allowed me to make it: my wife usually excludes me from the kitchen when we’re together, partly to show contempt for the gastronomic prizes I’ve unjustly won, and partly because, as she says, I make too much mess. But of course in steak au poivre, like every intelligent, informed cook, I use only whole peppercorns. I said so, markedly, with an affectedly injured air.
i believe in freedom and one of the reasons for my hatred of recipes is their peremptory, commanding tone, as if the writer knew the only way to fashion the dish. Variants from the inflexibly regimented columns of most cookbooks are made to seem like heresies.
Recipes are typically officious and pettifogging, treating readers as idiots, who don’t know how to suit their own taste or adjust traditions.
Many read like nursery-school arithmetic: add x amount of flour and y of milk to z of butter to produce a predictable outcome. Creativity and adventure get no badge. By specifying quantities, the teacher robs cooking of its status as art and turns it into drearily certified schoolkid-science.
Doctrinaire cuisine is dangerous. Friendships founder and marriages crash over differences about whether — for instance — to put onions in Spanish omelette or chillies in curry, or disputes over whether eggs are better scrambled in a deep or shallow dish. I’m happy to leave chacun à son goût in almost everything.
If you want to marmalade your kippers or make mayonnaise with sunflower oil, I’ll despise your mind and denounce your taste, but I’ll defend your right, as thoroughly as if you wanted to vote Republican or learn line-dancing. I’ll tolerate tinned tomatoes in ratatouille, as long as I don’t have to eat it, or rose veal in Wiener schnitzel, or even honey instead of molasses in baked beans.
But there are some abominations that are destructive of happiness, because they deprive eaters of opportunities of enjoyment, or turn wonderful ingredients to waste. Most of them occur in recipes exposed to the internet, where nannies write for nincompoops.
On steak au poivre I will not compromise — not even with my wife — or resort to the pluralist platitudes with which I evade political hatred and religious crusades. The steak must be a thick fillet. Though I deplore the way the mavens of dietetics demonise lipids, there must be no exposed fat: it would ruin the sauce.
Rubbing the meat well with olive oil helps contrast caramelisation on the outside and melting dissolution
within. Unless you work a few peppercorns into the marbling it is a mistake to season ahead of cooking.
The heavy, ribbed pan must smoke with heat before you cook. The meat’s à point when a clear ribbon of pink, a chubby finger’s width, shows around the sides. Resist the temptation to turn the steak early: side one must be thoroughly seared before you flip.
While the steak rests, be quick with the sauce to maintain the cuisson. Brandy must sizzle in the pan while you fling in a crushed garlic smidgeon and plenty of peppercorns.
At this point, on the occasion of my wife’s offensive question, drama set in.
There were green peppercorns in the larder. But they were dried.
Steak au poivre demands pickled peppercorns. Peter Piper, evidently, was on his way to cook it in quantity. Only the green berry, preserved with the squelchy consistency it had on the tree, can take the eater in imagination to heroic histories of Vasco da Gama, il cavaliere Pigafetta and Pierre Poivre, risking death, defying oceans to pluck the precious condiment. I favour olive oil or brine for pickling, but vinegar is the commonest medium.
In any case the peppers must be rinsed and dried. If they still taste acidic, a sprinkling of muscovado sugar in the brandy restores balance.
Remove from heat to stir cream in gently but quickly. The sauce must be slightly viscous; really thick cream is indispensable. Butter for thickening cloys what is always a luxuriously pinguid dish.
What could I do without the right kind of peppercorns? I kept the whole, hard kernels simmering for a few moments to cut their pungency. I tasted, fearing the unaccustomed crunch. The result, I am ashamed to say, was delicious. Doctrines be damned! I turned to my wife and reluctantly grovelled: dried peppercorns work. But let them be whole!
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Where should you watch your first bullfight? I hope, by next season, to have persuaded you to give it a go. Spanish towns hold their ferias between March and October, and a big part of being an aficionado is plotting routes that will allow you to cram in as many corridas as possible. So here are some of my favourites, listed in calendar order.
valencia. Spain’s curiously undervisited third city holds the first major feria of the season in March. It is arguably too early: the weather can be cold and the bulls sluggish. But if we consider the entire festival, rather than just the bullfights, it is hard to beat.
There are exquisite fireworks every night, as well as a deafening daylight display, the mascletà, which slams its soundwaves through you. The streets pulse with bands. Then there are the fallas — huge fantastical wooden carvings displayed in parks and on street corners during the week and torched at the feria’s climax.
seville. Seville’s bullring, the Real Maestranza, is an eighteenth-century baroque masterpiece. Locals have no doubt that theirs is the true taurine capital, and feel a commensurate sense of responsibility.
In the rest of Andalusia, crowds reward thrills, drama, near-misses. But Sevillians hold themselves to a higher standard, and visiting toreros know it. The feria spans most of April, and bullfighters attempt feats on the yellow sands they won’t try anywhere else.
madrid. I wouldn’t recommend Madrid to the newcomer. For one thing, Las Ventas, its gorgeous Moorish-style bullring, is too big. Everyone knows it, but no one says so because the dimensions were proposed by Joselito himself. For another, a chunk of the Madrileño crowd, gathered in Section Seven of the stands, likes to impose its taste by shrieking and gibbering to protest at what often, in the event, turn out to be splendid bulls.
Still, Madrid is recognised (except by Sevillians) as the spiritual centre of toreo, and no matador is considered qualified until he has appeared in its May feria. Just as the wise bullfighter first finds his aesthetic in the provinces, though, so should the wise aficionado.
pamplona. During the July week of San Fermín, the normally staid northern town becomes like Mecca in the Hajj. At night, every cashpoint foyer is filled with snoring bodies, clad in regulation white with red neckerchiefs. Many northern Spanish towns stage “encierros”, where runners scarper before bulls through the streets; but only Pamplona’s is a national event, carried live on TV. Like Mecca, it should be visited at least once.
bilbao. The August feria in the Basque city is famous for its exigent and grimly silent crowds. “El toro de Bilbao” used to be a byword for fierce aggression. As your taste veers towards the tougher castes of bull — and, trust me, it will, at least for a time — you, too, will be pulled to the old port city.
ronda. Hemingway proposed Ronda as the perfect place to take your
mistress. The clifftop setting is spectacular, and the September feria — called a “goyesca”, because the toreros dress in a style inspired by the artist — is a romantic celebration of toreo.
arles and nîmes. I wrote here last month about the depth of afición in the Midi. French spectators have the advantage of not thinking that they are born with expertise in their blood, and so are prepared to read and ask and look with open eyes. France’s other chief bullfighting towns — Bayonne, Béziers, Dax, Mont-de-Marsan — also run ferias of Bayreuth-level intensity. But only Arles and Nîmes have Roman arenas, and there is something
director of Peta, had struck a fiery tone with her view that such an experience can “desensitise children to the suffering of animals”.
The words made me think of an evening the previous week, when I’d stood in the pouring Dumfriesshire rain, casting a fly out across the Nith in the hope of catching a salmon. For three hours I fished but as the river rose, growing peaty with water running down from the hills, it became clear I was out of luck.
In the final pool, about halfway down, I had a last couple of casts at the mouth of a small tributary. On my third or fourth attempt as the glistening orange fly swung round beneath the surface, the line tugged taut. It was only a small trout but the feeling of the cork handle quivering against my palm made me feel more alive than I’d felt in weeks.
When I got the fish up onto the bank, I ran my fingers over its iridescent scales dotted with sombre tartan spots before knocking it on the head. At £60 for a fishing ticket, my breakfast the following morning, filleted, dipped in flour, and fried, was one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had. But it was worth it.
Whether it’s fish or fowl, far from being “desensitising”, hunting puts you back in touch. To catch a salmon or shoot a walked-up grouse, a person must learn to read rivers and interpret landscapes. The truth is that desensitisation happens closer to home when you reach for those flaccid chicken fillets in aisle six or for the avocados just off the plane from Mexico, planted where great pine forests once grew.
Like Ruth and Mimi, we should all feel sad when we think of the little future king standing among the heather, chasing birds for his supper. Not because it’s going to do him any harm but because society would be so much richer and more environmentally conscious if hunting were a privilege afforded to all our children.
cthe houseplant’s lot is often a desultory one. Overwatered,
indestructibility), and Kew’s Palm House opened in 1840. (Today it houses the world’s oldest potted-plant, an Eastern Cape giant cycad nearly 250 years old.) As it turns out, the concept of “plant parenthood” isn’t a millennial invention, either. In Flora Domestica, an 1823 primer on how to look after plants in pots, Elizabeth Kent confides: “Many a plant have I destroyed, like a fond and mistaken mother, by an inexperienced tenderness.”
There are plenty of reasons to resist scoffing at a new cohort’s embrace of gardening. After all, this is Generation Rent and houseplants offer a way of reconnecting with nature when home is urban, cramped, transient. In some ways, all that Instagram showboating isn’t entirely dissimilar to signing yourself up for the National Open Garden Scheme.
Likewise, everyone expects some return from their green-fingered labour, whether it’s food for the table or succour for the soul, though the “plant parents” don’t much help their cause with books bearing titles like How to Make a Plant Love You. Ultimately, it’s hard not to conclude that a window box might offer a fuller form of gardening, more generous to passersby and pollinators alike.
As for my Crassula ovata, I don’t need it to love me but my parenting has perhaps been a bit remiss of late. It’s easy to forget that even indoor houseplants are affected by the seasons. At around this time of year, for instance, as heating gets switched on and days dim, a plant will often need moving to another room for a more level temperature or better light.
Then again, you might also look to Barcelona’s Liceu opera house, which in July staged its first post-lockdown performance for an audience of 2,292 potted plants seated in the auditorium, who were aptly treated to the Uceli quartet’s rendition of Puccini’s Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums).
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The majority of the public is probably happy with street closures. A poll in Islington found widespread support and the council is rather cannily mobilising nimbyism to help it gets its way. It has set up an interactive map online where residents can say what they’d like to happen to their streets. As few want to live on a rat run, thousands are asking for their streets to be blocked off.
But it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, as the Americans say, and in normal times the anti-closure protests would force many councils to back down. Inner London is a one-party Labour state. Its rulers know they will retain power whatever they do.
But what about Tory councils, who may sympathise with the demonstrators, or councillors facing a tight election who don’t want to alienate motivated minorities? Across the country, they are backing down.
As with so much else, government communication has been appalling. It ought to say no one wants to ban cars; all we want is to make it easier to walk, cycle and run reasonably short distances to the workplace or shops. And if that means some roads are jammed, well look around you: they’re jammed anyway.
cWhy do we wear clothes? The mundane answer runs “for protection against the elements”, pointing to the succession of Ice Ages to which homo sapiens was subjected, forced to borrow fur from more hirsute species.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The ancient civilisations that grew up in the fertile valleys of the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, were more tropical than a Wham! video, and clearly using their outfits to signify status, occupational, sex and gender differentiation.
Some may even have wanted to be regarded as individuals — despite we modern types imagining we invented all that — cutting a dash with a tufted Mesopotamian fringe here, or supple Egyptian weave there.
I raise the question because the issue of why we dress is feeling modish again, and not merely because the great grounding brought about by Covid has made comfort king.
The costumes of both genders had been heading in this direction already
— what with normcore, athleezure, and the lemming-like “casualisation”. But, I’m talking about something else here, a resistance to the at-one-time uncontroversial notion of what is “flattering”, a term now considered oppressive by the young.
To quote the Guardian’s Jess Cartner-Morley, never backward about coming forward in identifying a zeitgeist moment: “For Generation Z — roughly speaking, those born between 1995 and 2010 — ‘flattering’ is becoming a new F-word.
“To compliment a woman on her ‘flattering’ dress is passive-aggressive body-policing, sneaked into our consciousness in a Trojan horse of sisterly helpfulness. It is a euphemism for fat-shaming, a sniper attack slyly targeting our hidden vulnerabilities. ‘Flattering,’ in other words, is cancelled.”
Or as one young whippersnapper puts it: “The issue with the word ‘flattering’ is that we instantly associate it with looking thin and therefore looking ‘better.’ It suggests your tummy looks flatter, or that your waist looks smaller. I find it’s a phrase older generations use. Girls I speak to from Generation Z tend not to use it. Those girls see a diversity on social media that older generations didn’t. Celebrating your flaws is considered cool.”
To Gen X-ers and above — schooled on Trinny (Woodall) and Susannah (Constantine) seizing breasts and hoicking them skyward, while fretting over the most slimming knickers — this is enough to strike fear in the soul.
“You have to suffer to be beautiful,” we were taught, “No pain, no gain.” Only these days, “looking good” means looking old. Instead, clothing must be about (a specific type of ) joy, (shrouding oneself in) self-care, and — in practice — a new type of conformity.
Icame across this phenomenon when I was taken in hand by a Gen Z stylist: a size-16 twentysomething, dogged in her attempt to ignore my actual body. Where I asked for v-necked, waisted numbers that exposed a bit of ankle, so she presented me with garb I deemed dreary, bland and shapeless.
Where I had demanded looks that were “retro, witty, feminine, full of bold colour — a real fancy-dress element” so she delivered the saddest sackdresses, jeans and trainers, informing me that “Women want to blend in, they don’t want to stand out.”
Reader, I was chilled to my very marrow; as counsels of despair go, I have rarely heard a more doom-laden one. Can looking shit ever be considered fashionable? Alas, as we know, the answer is “Yes”. And, this form of sartorial self-harm is lamentably au courant: tentdresses, sweats, and fugly trainers included.
Not so long ago, “flattering” was considered feminist, an index of female fashionistas designing on the body as opposed to their gay rivals designing on paper for the boyish figures they found beguiling. Now amorphous androgyny is the thing, the concepts of womens- and menswear collapsing into something relaxed, inclusive and body-resistant. Cheers, Weinstein.
I’m not saying we should be decked out like dolly birds or boys, or don the hooker chic celebrated in Netflix’s La-la Land estate-agent hit Selling Sunset. That said, its standout star, 31-year-old Christine Quinn, is the embodiment of the no-pain, no-gain axiom.
Quinn is said to spend $1,000 a day on hair and make-up and be beset by constant migraines from her hair extensions. For a low-ley office supper she sported a goth Tweetie-pie outfit that rendered her barely able to sit, chains braided agonisingly into her ponytail; for a viewing, she was resplendent in platform stilettos so stratospheric she was forced to descend stairs backwards, clinging to a rail.
Asked about the theme for her engagement party, our heroine answered: “It’s just gonna be, like, casual, like, I just want stuff going on, like, no big deal, like sexual Phantom of the Opera.” Think: S&M bodycon while leading a zebra. I like this woman. I admire her fash-attitude. Sexual Phantom of the Opera is where I’m at. It’s who I am.
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Myearn to be James Bond, not because they want to be spies and shoot people but because they want to be considered sexy. It is a peculiar thing the number of times dealers have said to me without irony, “People do say I am the James Bond of the antique trade.”
The real trouble with buying and selling a mahogany George III chest of drawers is that it is hard, nigh on impossible, to make it into a sexy experience. There are also innumerable aspects of an antique dealer’s life which are very not sexy: early-morning markets, carrying heavy furniture to a top-floor flat and back down again when the client has decided against it, VAT, getting your van serviced. All of these things James Bond does not do. But that is the dream. In Dr No, Bond’s flat is full of antiques. It wouldn’t be now, but it made an indelible imprint in dealers’ minds.
There is equally a tendency for dealers in their early sixties to wear their hair long and their shirts out, display a lush chest of grey hair, and be supported on flamboyant trainers. This is faded rock star rather than our man from MI6, but the ultimate direction of travel is the same: the dealer wants to appear gorgeous.
Another problem is the language of furniture. There are a lot of body part names: legs, arms, backs, knees. This is a notorious trap for the antique dealer. These parts can be described to potential buyers as being sexy. Cor — look at the shape of the legs on that side table — isn’t it sexy! This tendency was particularly prevalent in the 1980s, when antiques were at the apex of their popularity.
These days, when antiques are significantly less popular, the term sounds ever more ridiculous but you still hear it. The replacement vogue is to lay claim to an object’s modernity. Objects from centuries past are described as being modern or contemporary-looking. I have often succumbed to this nonsense myself.
some dealers actually are sexy. There are people in this business who have made it their life’s work to charm and seduce. The ability to persuade people to buy a piece is not enough: they want to be personally and physically adored themselves.
Then there is the sexual crackle of an Art Fair, especially abroad where the restraints are off. A lot of dealers go a bit nuts chasing and being happily chased. The confluence of dealers seems to engender a sort of crowd friskiness.
We were exhibiting at the antique show in San Francisco. After dinner we were walking back to the hotel when one of my colleagues announced that he was not very sleepy and fancied popping into town for a nightcap. We did not see him until the next day; he was looking a little the worse for wear.
The next night it was the same story, and the next. In the end I had to tell him that he should get some sleep and freshen up. He said he felt in some way he was living his dream as an antique dealer.
But there are times and moments when somehow the S-word does seem appropriate: you might even call it love. It is not always obvious, such as when a piece is exaggeratedly curvaceous or eye-wateringly expensive. It is a strange and indescribable moment when a piece is just totally perfect and at the same time unusual and rare. When you see it, you know.
Of course, tastes vary but the feeling is one that all dealers have experienced. I met a client for a drink at his New York apartment. He had a small tripod table on the coffee table in front of him. He sat admiring it with a glass of whisky in hand. As we chatted, every few minutes he would rotate the table a tiny bit.
He explained that he had bought the table a few days earlier after chasing it for nearly a year. He was trying to see if it had any flaws, an awkwardness from any angle. He had been looking at it all day. He had taken the day off work. He had yet to find a fault. You could well gasp at the pretentiousness of it. But it was desire fulfilled and, as I saw it, a love that was totally sincere.
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During pre-covid times, my commute took me between Mortlake and Waterloo — and the train was invariably packed at rush hour, all seats taken.
So I found myself early one evening, squashed in the middle seat of three, facing three other office toilers, one of whom sat diagonally to my left and took out his phone. He dialled a number and began the most inane, loud conversation I have ever had the misfortune to overhear.
“All right Keith?” he began. “How are things?” Pause. “Really?” Pause. “Hmmm.” Pause. “Anything else?” Pause. “The weather’s not so good today.” Pause. “Hmmm.” Pause. “Yes, I’m on a train. I went to work today.” Pause. “Hmmm. Yes, the train is busy. Did you go to work today?” Pause. “Hmmm. What are you going to eat later?” Pause. “Hmmm. Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow.” Etcetera, etcetera, right from the off.
By Wandsworth Town, I had had enough. All five of us in the section of six seats in the otherwise silent carriage were listening. So were other nearby passengers. I could see that a few of us were struggling to read our papers and books.
What to do? I had had a long day and wanted to relax. So I said: “Excuse me, could you please end your call as it is disturbing us?” To which he ignored me, continuing his conversation with a note of petulance, asking Keith about his car. I sensed a twitchiness among my fellow passengers. I also saw red.
“Excuse me, I think I can speak for us all in saying that your conversation is incredibly boring and we would all like you to end it now,” I said. Within earshot, all attention was now on this “showdown”. The man looked at me as though he would like to kill me, and with great reluctance finished his call, upon which there was a small round of applause. A sweet moment of victory on the 18:31 to Mortlake.
altercations on trains can happen. When you are squashed together, good manners help. Lack of consideration for others can cause flashpoints — sometimes when you are not quite sure why.
On the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing, a drunken Russian with a crewcut and a bowling-ball belly almost attacked me. He looked ex-military and had been drinking vodka steadily for many miles, occasionally patrolling the corridor. Unfortunately, one of these patrols coincided with my return from a bowl of borscht in the dining carriage.
His face was full of rage and his eyes like bullet holes. He muttered something in Russian, which I took to be an attack on Western geopolitics, for which I was to blame. His fists were clenched. He looked as though he would like to strangle me and throw me from the train.
Fortunately, at this precise moment, a provodnitsa with spiky dyed-red hair stepped in. Provodnitsa is the name given to the mainly women (very few are men) who attend carriages on the Trans-Siberian. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said in English. “He drinks too much.” And so my life was saved by a spiky-haired provodnitsa, somewhere north of Mongolia in the middle of Siberia. I will be forever grateful.
Agatha christie hit a rich seam with Murder on the Orient Express. And she would have had a field day with the Indian Pacific service covering 2,720 miles from Perth
in Western Australia to Sydney. Partially this is due to the free drink in the gold-class lounge carriage and the length of journey: 65 hours.
I took this trip during my train travel book, Ticket to Ride: Around the World on 49 Unusual Train Journeys. Part of the style of this book involved getting to know fellow passengers, hearing stories as we clattered along the tracks.
By the bar in the gold-class lounge, the drinks and the tales merrily flowed.
It’s not unknown for juries to send notes to the judge after they have been sent out to consider their verdicts. Sometimes they want advice on a point of law. Occasionally, they want to check a piece of evidence. In 2013, a jury at Southwark Crown Court asked a more basic question: “Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and has no facts or evidence to support it, either from the prosecution or defence?”
“No”, said Mr Justice Sweeney. Can we speculate, the jury then asked, about what was in the defendant’s mind? “The answer to that is an equally firm no,” the judge replied.
How about a couple’s wedding vows? Would those justify a wife obeying her husband’s orders? That was not an argument the defendant raised, Sweeney patiently explained. “Does the defendant have an obligation to present a defence?” Again, no.
If you remember any of this, it’s because the defendant was Vicky Pryce, ex-wife of the former LibDem energy secretary Chris Huhne. Unsurprisingly, that jury failed to agree. A second jury convicted Pryce of perverting the course of justice by telling the police that she, rather than Huhne, was the driver of a vehicle caught speeding. He admitted a similar charge and both served prison sentences.
i was so alarmed by the jury’s questions — there were ten in all, including “what is reasonable doubt?” — that I wrote a column for the Guardian suggesting it might be “time to consider whether we are right to entrust the most serious criminal cases to the hands of unqualified lay people”.
I qualified this outrageous suggestion by saying, “It would be wrong to change our legal system just because one London jury appeared to be utterly at sea.” But I should have known that expressing the slightest doubt about trial by jury would lead to public opprobrium — though fortunately not, in my case, imprisonment.
In that sense, juries are sacred cows: people will not hear a word said against them. Because the version of Magna Carta that remains in force says “No freeman . . . shall be imprisoned . . . but by lawful judgment of his peers” — or perhaps because Tony Hancock famously asked his fellow jurors, “Did she die in vain?” — some people imagine that trial by jury in its present form goes back to 1215. Far from it. In the Hamlyn lectures he gave in 1956, Sir Patrick (later Lord) Devlin explained how the jury changed its character over the centuries from a body of witnesses to a panel of adjudicators. “It was not until the sixteenth century,” he said, “that the jury had to be considered as a body of reasonable men exercising a rational function.”
When Devlin was speaking, most jurors were male property-owners under 60. Those called to serve could be removed by peremptory challenge but their verdicts — usually delivered after no more than five hours’ deliberation — had to be unanimous.
Juries used to decide civil claims too, though these had “diminished enormously” over the first half of the twentieth century.
There was still a right to jury trial in defamation cases; but that was
abolished, without any public concern, at the start of 2014.
The main problem with juries is that they do not give reasons. That tends not to worry us when they find defendants guilty: we simply report the prosecution case as true. For all we know, the jury may have convicted the defendant because they were sorry for the supposed victim and thought that somebody should carry the can.
Wrongful acquittals are even more of a problem. We can’t imply that the defendant is guilty without the risk of a libel action. Devlin saw perverse acquittals as one of the strengths of the system — but he admitted that jurors sometimes identified too closely with the defendant. “It may be,” he said, “that the jury system means that some good and necessary laws are only weakly enforced.”
When I interviewed Lord Devlin to mark his eightieth birthday in 1985, we discussed the case of Clive Ponting, a civil servant who had been recently acquitted of charges under the Official Secrets Act — even though there was no doubt that Ponting, who died this summer, had leaked secret documents about the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands war. Devlin told me a jury had a right to be perverse in the exercise of what he called its legal and constitutional spirit. “If it’s asked to enforce law which it really feels is against its conscience, it says no, and it acquits. And that’s to my mind our proudest constitutional achievement.”
It’s Devlin’s characterisation of juries as a protection against tyranny that has made us so uncritical. That’s so even when reforms are proposed by radical lawyers such as Geoffrey Robertson QC
— who thinks that defendants facing jury trial should be able to choose, as an alternative, a judge’s fully reasoned decision — and the late Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, whose last book was called Unreasoned Verdict.
We are particularly suspicious of suggestions that defendants charged with middle-ranking offences — ones that can be tried either by magistrates or in the Crown Court — should lose their entitlement to jury trial, at least while the backlog is so bad that defendants in custody may be held for up to eight months and those on bail may not be tried before 2022. The lord chief justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, and the lord chancellor, Robert Buckland, were both shouted down during the summer for suggesting that jury trial could be replaced by a judge sitting with two lay magistrates.
Scotland, by contrast, is making no change to its unique juries — 15 members, simple majorities, not proven verdicts. But the Scots are coping with the need for social distancing by making imaginative practical adjustments. Instead of sitting in cramped courtrooms, jurors will work from spacious Odeon multiplexes in the suburbs of Edinburgh and Glasgow with secure video links to traditional courtrooms. Digital projectors will beam remote hearings onto the big screen.
Maybe that’s what Devlin had in mind when he described trial by jury as a beacon — the lamp that shows that freedom lives.
cJoshua Rozenberg’s latest book is
University Press) (Bristol