‘Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall…’

With the hot weather now upon us, chez Smith we have started sleeping with the windows open. Not too wide, because our mischievous cat has a tendency to try and climb out, but wide enough to convince ourselves that the paltry breeze will cool us and our house down in the evening. The other morning, with bleary eyes I staggered to our bathroom to ready myself for work, and discovered that the eggs a spider had laid in the casings of the window had hatched, and because the window had been left open all night, the little spiderlings had found their way into our bathroom, leaving us with an infestation of money spiders not only in every corner, but in the toothbrush pot, medicine cabinet and on the shower head; not only did I find several hanging from my shaving mirror, but one clever chap had made a little web inside the head of my razor. One of the window panes alone was home to around one hundred of the tiny black arachnids.

Without thinking I swept a few handfuls into a tissue and flushed them down the toilet, before suddenly remembering the superstitions that my mother had instilled in me about killing spiders, and money spiders in particular. She always told me not to kill spiders because of the bad luck that such killing would bring, especially if these were money spiders. Money spiders, she informed me, should be allowed to crawl on you to see if they moved toward your heart – if they did, you’d be rich. By my reckoning, my spider killing spree early that morning will have put me in chronic debt for the rest of not only my life, but my daughter’s and likely the next three generations to follow her.

I’d like to think of myself as someone who is not superstitious, but like the next person will find myself sucked into believing such things just in case they are in fact totally true. When especially confident, I do walk under ladders, but find myself wondering anxiously afterwards whether something bad will become of me; such a preoccupation with what might happen could easily force me into falling under a bus for all I know, in which case the old superstition would have become true.

My mother has given me plenty of novel superstitions, most of which I no longer heed, at least not consciously. One that I do recall is that you should never tell anyone about a dream you’ve had on a Friday night until after lunch on a Saturday. I have my doubts about this one, I have to say. A suspicious part of me thinks that this one was invented, perhaps by my mother, to make sure I didn’t spend ages on a Saturday morning explaining the dream I’d had on a Friday, thus making us late for our weekly trip into town. The frustrating thing is that I used to have my most vivid dreams on a Friday night, and by lunchtime would have completely forgotten them. But to this day I consciously stop myself discussing a really weird, nonsensical dream on a Saturday morning, just in case.

It wasn’t just my mother that handed down slightly dubious things to avoid if you wanted good fortune. My friend Steve is perhaps the most superstitious individual I've ever met, and the two superstitions I recall most vividly from him were both bird-related. The first was that if you see a hearse you need to hold your collar until you see a bird flying overhead. I don’t know who invented such claptrap but nevertheless, because it’s connected to death I do find myself obeying this one on the rare occasion that I see a hearse on the road.

The other of Steve’s was regarding magpies. Seeing a solitary magpie was, according to wherever Steve inherited this one from, terrible luck, unless you saluted it. This one never really bothered me too much, because the three previous towns I've lived in evidently had very small magpie populations. However after moving to Milton Keynes three years ago I think we must have moved to the UK’s largest concentration of the black and white scavengers. They’re absolutely everywhere. It does occur to me that they should – rather than the concrete cows MK is infamous for – become our town’s mascot; or perhaps they are like the ravens of the Tower of London – if the magpies leave then the town will collapse in on itself. Nevertheless, despite claiming not to be superstitious, if you ever should come across me in Milton Keynes and find me saluting quite involuntarily like some war veteran who can’t acclimatise back into civilian life, you’ll know why.

From someone else – possibly Steve, possibly some other superstitious individual – I learned a rhyme about magpies. It goes like this

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy

Now, this has to be complete nonsense, of course it does: unless magpies are the ultimate deciders of fate or the purest essence of God on earth, how can the simple act of seeing a certain combination of magpies determine whether you’re going to be happy, or decide the sex of your baby? More importantly, what happens if you see three but a fourth is just slightly out of your view? What happens then? You’ll merrily enjoy the childless years thinking that fate has already decided that you’ll be blessed with a girl only to discover, after painting the nursery pink that in fact you’re being handed a boy in the hospital. And what if you see five or six or more than that? I’ve seen twelve at one time in Milton Keynes – are there other lines in this rhyme that further decide your fate? Does seeing a dozen magpies mean perchance that you will win the lottery this Saturday?

While I await the answers to these questions, I don’t entertain this one for a second. Well, maybe I do a little. Okay, every time I see a magpie I’ll either salute or recite said poem to myself. And actually, after having paid for a private scan to determine whether my wife was expecting a girl or a boy, I did find myself paying more attention that usual to the combination of magpies I would happen across on a normal day. We’d come away from the scan feeling of course elated that the consultant had confirmed we were expecting a daughter, but a niggling doubt remained that – despite his assertions that he’d not got one wrong yet – we were going to fall into the 1% of the claim that these scans are 99% accurate; the small print that if the scan confirms the foetus to be a girl, there is a greater degree of probability that the result could be inaccurate didn’t exactly put our minds at ease either. So we found ourselves turning ever more to the traditional means of determining whether a baby is going to be a boy or girl by the position of the bump, the cravings etc. And the number of magpies.

Perhaps I am more superstitious than I claim not to be. For example, faced with a difficult client meeting today, I chose a red patterned tie – ostensibly because I thought it went best with my suit, but deep down because a tiny part of me considers it to be a lucky tie, because when I was previously faced with a tricky client I handled it well while wearing that tie. Back further, when revising for my GCSEs I found that I worked best with music on, specifically Depeche Mode’s double live album 101, which was the perfect length for a good session of concentration. After getting above-average GCSE results, when it came to A-levels, and later still with my degree, I found that I still needed to listen to this album when revising, just in case it was this – and not my hard work and memory – that gave me the grades I’d achieved.

In a way a part of me is quite drawn to the simplistic means of making sense of natural and sad events, just by avoiding certain actions. Superstition is borne out of a need to rationalise things that cannot be rationalised, sitting between Darwinism and religion, and to this day I still don’t know which side of that controversial fence I belong on. Having a baby has made me question my beliefs about creation, because I can’t see how life could have been created out of nothing; but neither can I believe that some ethereal being implanted another being inside my wife’s womb. Therefore, until I can resolve my own beliefs I’ll continue to salute magpies, keep my Friday dreams to myself and hope that my single-handed spider extinction programme from the other morning has not ruined my chances of being able to provide for my daughter and has at least blessed us with a modicum of good fortune (fingers crossed).

Lasagne Soup

Gordon Ramsay and I have something in common, but it's certainly not that I'm a Michelin-starred chef with a chain of smart restaurants and a successful TV career. No, we both went to Stratford-upon-Avon High School. I can only assume that he was significantly more successful at Home Economics than me. And I might be wrong, but I suspect that Ramsay would not entertain the idea of looking at, let alone eating, a toasted cheese and raspberry jam sandwich, which - courtesy of my mother - is one of my favourite, if frowned-upon, lunches.

I got to thinking about food recently after Big Brother contestant Glyn revealed – on national TV, like an idiot – that, at the ripe old age of eighteen, he hadn't ever cooked anything, and hadn't even made a sandwich.

Since our daughter was born a month ago, I have cooked the evening meals in the Smith household. I don't say this from a 'look at me, the New Man' standpoint, nor am I frustrated by the additional domestic chore which typically means we won't sit down to eat until past 8.00. I've never really had any old fashioned views on the respective roles of men and women, and so I've always done my fair share of things around the house. Moreover, I actually really like cooking, so maybe Gordon Ramsay and I have more in common than I thought.

It wasn't always so; when I lived at home with my parents I can't think of a single time that I cooked, either for myself or my family. That's just the way things were in our house, the way we were used to things; the norm. My sister went through a phase of being... a vegetarian, whereas the rest of the house wasn't, so for a while she would make her own meals - generally pasta with tomato sauce and chopped onions. By dint of shiftwork alone, my father cooked his own meals every other week, and once made me McCain's cheese and tomato pizzas and chips while my sister was in hospital having her tonsils out - when he served them, he'd burnt them so badly that a piece of barbecue charcoal would have been nutrionally superior.

So perhaps it wasn't so much that I didn't like cooking as I didn't know how. Certainly my experience of Home Economics at High School validates this. I recall being quite good at simple things like fruit salad (ingredients : one carton orange juice, one can mixed fruit in juice), fruit flan (ingredients : one readymade flan case, one can orange segments, and the really hard part - some jelly), and once made some really good beef burgers; but on the whole my culinary qualifications peaked with some cheese scones - all simple things that would unlikely be served in anything other than the most amateur restaurant.

Once Home Economics became an optional rather than compulsory subject, I enhanced my rudimentary cooking skills by customising Pot Noodles, or 'pimping my noodle' as those crazy MTV kids would probably say. To do this, simply make up your Pot Noodle as normal, but - and here's the genius - before giving it that final all-important-but-easy-to-forget final stir, add herbs and spices; anything will do, really just anything you fancy. If you're lucky, your added ingredients may just tip the potted snack closer to being real food; get it wrong and you'll be left with Pot Ruination.

Knowing that university and self-sufficiency beckoned, I decided that drastic corrective action was required. As if by magic, there among the random General Studies options was a term-long course entitled 'Bedsit Cookery', and begrudgingly - despite all manner of really random General Studies options that would have been much more of a doss - realised that I needed to take this course. Part of my reluctance possibly stemmed from the Soft Cell song 'Bedsitter', which hardly painted the rosiest portrait of life away from home.

At the start of the class, the overbearing and highly intimidating teacher, Miss Hawkins, asked each of us A-level students why we thought we were there, Alcoholics Anonymous style. The course consisted of students from Stratford-upon-Avon's three local schools, the comprehensive (my school, and the location of the course), and the separate girls and boys grammar schools. Cynically, despite their assertions that it was because they were off to Oxford / Cambridge / LSE and needed to know how to jolly well cook, I knew it was because courses at our school finished 25 minutes before the ones at either of the grammar schools. Me, I replied that I wanted to complete the course because I kept burning soup. This is totally true - I still don't understand how, but burning tinned soup had become my then-latest cookery disaster. It did get a laugh, though, even if it was perhaps slightly condescending.

The course was to provide me with many useful tips, such as how to correctly chop an onion, but also yielded two notable trainwrecks of dishes from me. The first was a lasagne which looked, smelt and tasted perfect, except that I'd only included one layer of pasta; thus I invented lasagne soup, but at least I didn't burn it. The other was designed to be a meal for a loved one, wherein I made chicken in a white wine and cream sauce and mixed three times as much water into the sauce which required cornflour to thicken, thus yielding a sauce that tasted of flour. At the time I didn't have a girlfriend, so no-one was offended.

For the first time in the history of my school's General Studies programme, I requested that I sit the course again when it finished, and I did much better. That summer, my last before university, I cooked for myself for a whole week while my parents were on holiday and coped well. At university I ate pretty well, but did consume a lot of cheap doughy pizza. But I generally cooked either a pasta or rice dish with proper vegetables three times a week, and I never once - nor since - ate a kebab. In my first year I also became a vegetarian, though not on grounds of principle; it just meant I had more money available to spend on records. I did lose three stone in my first term, and have only ever gained half a stone since, but these are mere details. By the end of university I was pretty competent at cooking, and I'd even started eating a really well-balanced diet; if you'd said to me on day one, term one, year one, that by my final day I'd be eating loads of fruit and veg, I'd have laughed in your face. But it was true.

Since then, with many trips to expensive hotel restaurants courtesy of my wife's conferencing business and the advent of entertaining clients at lunches, my interest in food - and therefore cooking - has flourished; on a Saturday my first port of call in The Times is Giles Coren's witty restaurants column, followed by Ramsay's recipe section.

I'm not an expert; I still overseason things and as an overhang from my Pot Noodle pimping days, still throw in too many conflicting flavours. But I can follow a recipe and present it well. I find it a really relaxing and enjoyable past-time and never find it a chore. But from time to time, when I'm not paying attention, I'll still burn soup. Only now I'll have made it from scratch, not just opened a tin. And if anyone tells you that grated cheese and raspberry jam toasted sandwiches aren't the tastiest damn sandwiches in this world - you detractors, you non-believers, you know who you are - then you've never tasted perfection...

London Loves and Oxford Street Blues

I have written here previously about my love for London; it is, if you will, a muse that I believe I have inherited from my father, himself the son of a true East-ender. London never ceases to amaze and intrigue me, but I appreciate that I’ll never know everything there is to know about this most intricate of cities, yet I seek out and absorb masses of information on London’s history, architecture and geography in much the same way as I have collected various things over the years.

One of the things I find most intriguing is that I can take a gentle stroll around the City at lunchtime and literally will never need to follow the same path twice; there will always be a hitherto undiscovered alleyway or lane, invariably leading to a hoary old boozer tucked away from all but the most learned City worker. Even treading my regular walk into work can yield surprises; even though you think you know every single footfall, metre and mile, a glance above a familiar shopfront could introduce you to fascinating, beautiful buildings that you feel you could not have failed to notice before.

A few months ago I met a colleague at Paternoster Square, a beautiful open space adjacent to St. Paul’s Cathedral with modern offices butting up against this familiar London landmark; the landmark which had for centuries – until very recently – dictated the maximum height of City buildings so as not to obstruct views of Sir Christopher Wren’s magnificent construction. The current Paternoster Square was completed in September 2003 after 17 years of planning, revision, numerous architects and delays due to the recession. The square, built on the site of Paternoster Row, a medieval street along which the clergy of St. Paul's would walk whilst reciting the Paternoster prayer, has been redeveloped many times over and was bombed during the Second World War, in destructive Blitz activity that mercifully missed St. Paul's itself. The design of the square is in many respects sympathetic to the cathedral and, via the straight alleyways dividing the outer offices, actually creates stunning views of Wren’s cathedral, albeit of a ‘peepshow’ variety – looking straight ahead you will see the familiar white stone profiles between the buildings, prompting you involuntarily to raise your eyes skyward where the immense lead dome renders all of Paternoster Square’s architectural success instantly subservient.

My colleague and I chose Paternoster Square because it was en route to work for both of us, he in Holborn and me in the City; a convenient halfway house. I pass the entrance to the square on my way into work every morning, and would have to cross Newgate Street to reach it. However instead of doing this I crossed High Holborn well before the viaduct and walked the rest of the way on an unfamiliar side of the road. This may sound dull as dishwater to you, but just the act of walking part of the way on the other side of the road revealed new buildings, views and vistas that I’d never even seen before, even though I walked next to these same things every day. The way the capital reveals itself to you in these ways is one of the reasons that I enjoy working and walking in London so much.

By pure chance, on a lunchtime wander I found myself unintentionally forced overground after taking a wrong turn out of one of Liverpool Street station’s arcades. Not sure where I was headed, I followed the path to the end, which opened out into Exchange Square, another of the City’s ‘green lungs’ incorporating a cascading courtyard, green areas, fountains and several bars and cafes, surrounded by modern office structures. I had worked in nearby Old Broad Street for the best part of four years and yet had never stumbled across this hidden treasure of a location before. Judging by the lack of other people in the square, it seems I am not alone in not coming across this. Even during the recent heatwave, Exchange Square is far less busy of a lunchtime than nearby Broadgate Circle with its many sun worshipers perched on its central stairs, or the comparatively austere Finsbury Circle.

Only after a good ten minutes or so of wide-eyed wonderment did I realise that the old-fashioned cantilever-roof structures on the south side of the square were in fact above the platforms of Liverpool Street, that Exchange Square in its entirety is built on a platform built across the tracks running into this London terminus.

The City alone is full of such gems, adjacent to but also hidden by buildings. Previous to Old Broad Street, my company’s offices were in Eastcheap. At either end of Eastcheap are great tourist structures and historic locations – Wren’s Monument and Pudding Lane are at the western end, while the Tower of London and Tower Bridge can be reached by following Eastcheap to its easternmost end, where it flows into Great Tower Street. Yet near as damn it equidistant between these two ends lies one of the City’s serenest spots – the bombed-out church St. Dunstan's In The East, wherein the cloisters and roof hollowed out during the Second World War have been replaced by sympathetic greenery and benches arranged in a circular, inward-looking and reverential fashion. If you are ever in need of quiet solitude among one of the busiest financial centres in the world, you should seek out this easy-to-miss location. There is something so beautiful, breathtaking but also sorrowful about the way the sun plays through the glass-less stone windows onto the lawn, creating shadows in a space which once was shielded from the sun’s rays; the outside, via a direct hit, allowed to reclaim the inside once more.

This evening I checked into a hotel on Oxford Street for an event my company was hosting at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly. Herein lie two totally contradictory sides of London, pratically within the same postal code. On the one hand you have the opulence, riches and distinguished face of the West End; Fortnum & Mason, The Ritz (one hundred years old this year), tailors, shirt-makers and generations-old tobacconists. On the other you have the crass face of commercialism, the average provincial town high street magnified, a totally characterless shadow of its former self with splendid buildings put to poor use at ridiculous rents. And yet Oxford Street is still the busiest of London’s thoroughfares, a mecca for visiting tourists; remove a flagship store like Selfridges or Niketown and what exactly is Oxford Street? Nothing at all special, that’s what, especially compared to some of the streets which intersect and peel off from either side of its wide carriageway.

Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has indicated plans for a total overhaul of this shopping haven, which appears long overdue and should hopefully smarten up frontages and clear out the incomprehensible array of small, tacky shops wedged uncomfortably next to ugly department stores. I discovered a takeaway bar on Oxford Street that I’d never seen before – all of Britain’s favourite junkfoods (burgers, kebabs, fish and chips) available from one multi-cultural hole at the very centre of this ridiculously tacky road.

Every year of my childhood I would badger my mother into taking us Christmas shopping on Oxford Street. Each year she would tell me of how horrible it would be, detailing horror stories of shoppers forced into tight rivers of forward walking motion unable to get from one side of the pavement to the other, either to cross the road or walk into a shop. Whilst that may have been a slight exaggeration, there is no denying that Oxford Street, at pretty much any time of year, is hellish. Today was the hottest day of the year so far, and the brief walk from Oxford Circus to the Radisson Edwardian Berkshire – tucked away like a guilty secret next to Debenham’s – which should have taken no more than five minutes at the most proved no less nightmarish than any other time I've been there. Tourists plus intense heat plus a trolleycase do not make for an enjoyable walk on Oxford Street.

Returning from the corporate bash at the Royal Academy just before 10.00, with the tourists petering out but still meandering past the now-closed shops, revealed Oxford Street in its true colours. Like some aged courtesan, Oxford Street’s makeup is removed at nightfall as the shutters are pulled down, cleaners begin the thankless task of removing chewing gum trodden into doormats and rubbish bags are thrown haphazardly to the pavement’s edge for the enjoyment of vermin; Oxford Street may be a tough, ugly place during the daytime but by night this potentially majestic street is nothing but a withered old hag with a cracked voice begging for love and tenderness, a pitiful, sorry black sheep in London’s family.