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Oliver Cross: Cats, rats and carpets
Read the latest scribblings from Oliver Cross.
Let me eat cake
At this time of year, with the days shortening and Christmas approaching, I like to change the subject. So this week, it's tea and cakes.
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Although that's tea and cakes in the context of a wide-ranging discussion of multi-culturalism because what do you think this is, Women's Own?
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My most recent experience of rampant multi-culturalism was in Turkey, where Europe meets Asia and Christianity meets Islam and, while eating a kebab in a cafe, I found myself rather alarmed by the background music – a recording of Peruvian pan-pipers playing The Skye Boat Song.
(It was also in Turkey, at a rather posh restaurant which might have been trying to establish cool jazz vibes, that I heard a background album of Louis Armstrong singing country and western from the Jim Reeves era. I now use it as my definition of 'hopelessly misguided').
But all this mixing-up is, I think, generally to be welcomed and is anyway unavoidable in Britain, where people embrace other cultures to an extent bordering on the insane.
A few years ago, somebody (not a Mongolian, I would wager) started a Mongolian restaurant chain which everybody flocked to, having been through all the Indians, Italians, Americans, Thais, Vietnameses, Chineses, Japaneses and don't forget to wash your kneeses (sorry, force of habit) in town.
It sold (and may still sell) pleasant meat and vegetables on a barbecue-it-yourself basis but it turned out to be about as Mongolian as Wayne Rooney and JMW Turner aren't, because Mongolians live almost entirely on bits of meat you wouldn't want to investigate and any attempt at authenticity would be commercial suicide.
But the point is that the story of popular British food over the past 50 years has been one of British people avoiding popular British food at all costs.
So when I found myself taking tea and cakes at the Wrens Hotel in New Briggate, Leeds, on Saturday, I couldn't help but reflect that, with the distinguished exception of Nash's Tudor Fish Restaurant over the road, the Wrens was the only place within a Brian Blessed shouting distance where people might find distinctively English food.
This meant, on Saturday, salmon or cucumber sandwiches (in triangles with the crusts cut off, how else?), scones with cream and jam, and lovely home-made carrot cupcakes (which were, wrongly I think, described as muffins) with splodgy icing, all served on two-tier cake stands and in proper teapots.
I know all nations have cakes, but in Europe they tend to be grander and neater and called pastries and in America they are enormous and lack all elegance. I think this was England distilled.
Incidentally, the Wrens, which is the sister pub of the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, was launching the first of a series of 'Tea for Two' events (at 10 a couple) but I won't tell you when the others are because it's not my job to advertise pubs.
I think they're on to a good thing though because, shortly after my Wrens tea, I heard on the radio news that the Staffordshire potteries are enjoying a boom, due mainly to rapidly rising sales of cake stands and teapots.
Cats, rats and carpets
Cats and rats, eh? Peas in a pod, as I concluded this week after buying a new stair carpet.
Cats didn't get where they are today by being trusting and cute, like soppy and (of course) endangered water voles.
When my two cats saw the new carpet, they approached it in cat fashion, assuming it was a plot. They pussyfooted on it, which means they walked on tiptoe, as if on an uncleared Cambodian minefield.
But, like rats, they are also bold
and curious so after overcoming the imaginary explosives, the cats turned their minds, if that's the word, to thinking how they could take advantage of the new carpet and within minutes had recognised it as a claw-sharpening opportunity.
This must have pleased them because the great puzzle for cats is why humans should do anything at all which doesn't directly advantage cats. That's why, when you unpack the shopping, their faces range from boredom to disgust as you haul out the vegetables and cleansing products.
Rats have the same survivalist mistrust of new or apparently useless things, such as stair carpets, as cats.
There was a great scare once because it was thought that rats had become immune to rat poison. They hadn't but they had evolved to be cautious and pussyfooting about it, so that when they saw a particularly inviting new pile of food, especially when accompanied by a 'Caution – rat poison' sign, they simply didn't eat it.
So cats and rats, both empowered with a potent mix of caution and adventurousness, are worthy enemies and perhaps the only thing that might save the human race is that cats also have an extraordinary capacity for stupidity.
My ginger-and-white cat Tassos once went missing for five days and came back looking like he had spent the time blacking up for a minstrel show.
He had probably blundered into the only remaining working coal cellar in North Leeds and got stuck there, but we'll never know for sure because Tassos cut short all our enquiries by using that haughty cat expression which roughly translates as 'So?'
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
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Temperature: 0 C to 5 C
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