We can’t do much about it, except get depressed (which does help). Gatsby, Prufrock, Ozymandias, King Lear. Quietly going about their business, and then suddenly it’s the day after tomorrow, and they can’t quite believe it: Daisy’s married the polo player; you wear the bottom of your trousers rolled; near them, on the sand, a shattered visage lies; and your daughters shaft you because you’ve lost your marbles. Time is not money. Time is rubbish.
I went to Oxford last weekend (three years pissed away, that was – which is just as well, because if I had liked it I would regret its passing even more than I do) to watch my oldest friend play cricket. He used to make a lot of runs, did Edward. He was out for a golden duck.
He lives in America now (bigger, brasher continents soon take your friends away – time sees to that) and comes back to visit in the summer. I suggested we drop in on his parents in the old house in Belsize Park where he (and sometimes I) grew up, and where we played football in the summer of 1976, for a drink and a kick around. He said they’d sold it. Without so much as a by-your-leave.
At least I still see Edward (once a year). Most of the others from that time are gone for ever. Occasionally, they pop up in my inbox, and we go for lunch. One, a couple of years ago, noticed the e-mail address in the paper, and dropped me a line. I hadn’t seen him since we were ten and we took turns to say what had happened to us, year by year (“in 1982 I got some pubes, in 1983 I was sent away to boarding school”). Mostly, though, he wanted to know if I had known he was gay, back then.
“I didn’t know you were gay now,” I lied. His e-mail had said he was into body-building.
“Well, I am. And the thing is, I can’t decide whether I was born gay or became gay. You and I shared a socio-economic background, a neighbourhood, a school, we were both mad on Superman comics and yet somehow…”
“…I escaped,” I said.
“…you surrendered,” he said.
I told him that, no, I had not been able to tell, then, when we were eight.
“Even despite the Judy Garland posters?”
“I thought of them as Wizard of Oz posters.”
Now, if I was surprised that Edward had lost the ability to bat, and that Saul had become gay, I was even more surprised when I heard from James Harding. He was a redheaded left-arm medium-pace bowler, about 4ft 6in, who was prone to nosebleeds. And now, apparently, he’s to be business editor of The Times.
There’s time for you. One minute the business editor is Patience Wheatcroft – another generation, another species, another world. And the next minute it’s James Harding, who broke Alex Bach’s front teeth accidentally in a game of French cricket (or was it the other way round?) and cut his knee open so you could see the bone on an orienteering run across Hampstead Heath.
And so out we went for a meal, with Nicholas Fox from the year below (which means, these days, that he’s only 35, rather than only 10), who was out for the only diamond duck (first ball of the match) that I have ever seen, in the home fixture with Arnold House in 1981.
We went to the Horseshoe, a Hampstead pub newly worked over by Jasper Cuppaidge, who used to be general manager at the Century Club in Shaftesbury Avenue (used to be, used to be, used to be…).
Seeing the place, all bright and white and sparkly at the top of Fitzjohn’s Avenue (where my father used to drop me at school, shouting, “red light on, green light on, go go go!” when he was younger than I am now), one’s first thought – well, mine – is a twinge of sympathy for the strawberry-nosed old boys who used to drink in here in the old days, asleep with their faces against the windows, their features squashed against the glass, resembling plates of sausages.
But one’s second thought is, “sod those old drunks, this is the best restaurant for miles around!”. And it is. And would be even if Hampstead were a better place for restaurants than it is.
There’s a big bright bar at the front with a bar-top hewn, like the tables, from a single Israeli cedar trunk at Honeysuckle Bottom Sawmill in East Horsley (the old bar has been turned into wooden steak plates – very sustainable). At it, they serve (among other things) a gorgeous, light, golden beer called McLaughlin’s Summer, which is adapted from a recipe of Jasper’s grand-father, who was a brewer back in Australia (in the good old days), whence Jasper fled relatively recently. They also serve food in the bar in a casual, gastropubby way, while at the back, in nooks and crannies and up stairs and round corners, are bookable tables of a more restauranty kind.
At the top of the menu is a bull, a horseshoe and the words “quality produce from farm to fork”, and it just is. It so is. Jasper went through the details of the Saxmundham butcher and his local farms so often with me that it seems almost superfluous now to pass on the information to you, so I won’t. But it’s all good.
Harding and Fox (we used surnames back then, and so I use them now) laid in rock oysters and a half-pint of prawns, and they were excellent. I ordered three more starters because I am a restaurant critic and cannot review a thing whose only preparation was its death, in one case, and in the other not even that.
The result was beautiful Cornish scallops with a big slab of light, spicy black pudding (made by someone called Doreen) and pea purée; elegant, dense, woody, smoked eel, with crispy bacon and a top-notch horseradish relish; and a plate of lamb sweetbread and Jersey Royal fritters, which was not a combination (obviously) but three soft, gentle, lamby beignets and three firm, nutty potatoes trussed up and deep-fried in the same way, with a ravigote sauce.
Wild mushrooms on toast with a fried duck egg being scoffed at a nearby table looked wonderful brunch stuff, but I had a stunning Red Poll T-bone steak, grilled only briefly, as tender and rich with flavour as you could possibly ask for.
Harding took the roasted crown of chicken (a new phrase to me) for two, because the “for two” was in inverted commas which meant, I explained, “for two if you’re a woman, a child or a vegetarian”, and got most of a chicken, bar the legs, on a big wooden board. Very sweet, very relaxed meat – corking I thought.
Foxy’s twice-cooked Blythburgh belly pork with baby squid was the sort of combination at which the Spanish and Chinese do not bat an eyelid (indeed, they wink knowingly) and worked well treated relatively simply here, with Jersey Royals.
The main thing here for me is the meat – old-fashioned meat, farmed with a bit of respect, that tastes like yesterday, but sweeter. They marry this to some really good simple ideas in the kitchen, presented with care and attention to detail rather than the lumpy ineptitude that so often passes for old-time rusticity, a fantastic wine list, a bubbly atmosphere and charming service.
It can’t last.
The Horseshoe
Heath Street, NW3 (020-7431 7206)
Meat/Fish: 9
Cooking: 8
For Hampstead: 9
Score: 8.67
Price: starters, £4-£6; mains, £9-£15
Nice Nosh
Trentabank Car Park (by the rangers’ station), Macclesfield Forest, Cheshire (weekends only)
Janet Fife writes: “This is a mobile café with a difference. The proprietor cooks and serves only food which is local (Peak District) and/or organic. Among the specialities are black-eyed burgers (minced sausage, bacon and tomato, with a round of black pudding in the middle); Staffordshire oatcakes; chickpea patties with mushroom sauce; and a superb bap with local (Derbyshire) flat sausages. He also does a selection of home-baked cakes and biscuits, some of which are traditional recipes he has researched and revived himself. There are picnic tables for customers, and a bird table. When I was last there on Saturday a jay came down for his lunch only a few feet from us.”
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for lunch
