The Dark Side of the Spoon

W11 is a very strange place, and I’m not sure about it at all. I’ve been in London 20 years on and off in 12 and a half months, and until Chelsea in 2005 I’d never really done West London.

But even that was nothing to the Imaginary World that is Notting Hill. I have never seen so many of such low calibre so far up their own bottoms. The other half of the population are descended from Martin Amis’ 1989 creation Keith Talent, antihero of ‘London Fields’. Keith himself runs a stall right next to the one I work on Portobello Market on Saturday.

“Let’s have a go at these, they’re cheap, clear ‘em up.”

That’s what Keith Talent says.

Anthony Worrall Thompson was in the shop the other week. I didn’t serve him, as I was packing dates in the basement at the time, but I watched him on the CCTV.

My colleague thought he might have been Rick Stein. Nah. I can tell one celebrity chef from the other.

It’s nice to know alot about something most people don’t know much about. I enjoy explaining the whole science of this thing. When I am talking to someone who is genuinely responsive, who is obviously interested for whatever reason, I blossom.

These people leave the shop knowing things they didn’t know before. And in the same way that I love to experience new things, bringing new knowledge to people is much the same buzz. They leave the shop with those three or four bags of alchemy, and all the way home they are plotting as to what they can do with them.

It woz me, Guv. It was me wot told ‘em.

Some people, of course (especially round here) just won’t be told. These upper middle class folk zoom around in their SUV’s, in their cock-replacement Lamborghinis, eating their £10.50 a go Full English - no, really, Keith Talent would starve if he had to pay the prices round here - and they sell whatever they’re selling to the tourists.

I’m not saying I don’t. That market stall on a Saturday, I tell you what, my European language skills are coming on in leaps and bounds.

It’s essentially good, but the whole area is reeking of mulitplicity and deceit. Nothing is quite what it seems. It is a reasonable enough area to pass the time, I suppose, but at the same time never suppose any depth here.

Put these well-known facts together. Hugh Grant. Film. Blue Door. Book Shop.

The shop, and the stall, are within a flick of Hugh Grant’s fringe away from all of the above.

It is plain that we are no longer talking about an authentic London market. When Keith Talent was winning darts contests in Portobello pubs (Correct me if I’m wrong MA, but I guess Keith lived in Trellick Tower), maybe. 18 years later, you’d need to know how to say darts in Brazilian. Yes, I know.

But I can learn from all of these people. They can all contribute to what will happen, when darkside is no longer merely midnight ramblings and is a physical thing, with windows and shelves and a door or two and perhaps even some tables and a fridge or two. Who knows?

Well, after six weeks or so as a spice merchant, a purveyor of culinary potions, I know one thing – I have found out what it is I want to do. I have also had confirmation that there are some things I still don’t want to do, and these include being talked to like a monkey, being told off for not doing things I haven’t not done yet, and being presented with situations (rules) in which I can find absolutely no logic.

During the time I’ve been working in the shop, I have also been seeing someone about certain issues I have had with myself for many years, issues I feel have been holding me back severely in my plans for world domination. Not least among them has been a total failure to deal adequately with authority, which I have always seen as the enemy.

I will be the first to admit that authority is often necessary. However I fail to see the purpose in authority for authority’s sake. I talk here of those situations in life where someone in charge will labour this fact for the sole reason of consolidating their actual or perceived power. Or those situations where authority is a bully. My problem is how to deal with this.

As I explained to the counsellor, in the past I have always reacted by fighting tooth and nail against it. This course of action though has led me nowhere really, and it is always myself who ends up out in the cold. My counsellor has suggested tackling it in a more subtle way, by explaining to the person concerned that I feel unhappy at my treatment, or my situation, but not actually saying I’m unhappy with them. Let them work out that bit for themselves.

So I find myself now in a position to try this theory out. The Commandant is the bugbear. She is obviously so well accustomed to ruling by fear that she knows no other way. It is verboten to answer back, under any circumstances. This applies to almost everyone, so it’s not as if she’s picking exclusively on me. And let’s be honest, she doesn’t seem to have done too badly out of it, either. As for me, I have tried applying the bullshit filters, unsuccessfully. The in-house management style, as it were, is threatening to become an issue.

The Commandant’s singular management style, furthermore, is well known throughout W11. On first taking the job I received wry glances, rueful raises of eyebrows. ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ they said, shaking their heads sympathetically, while in the same movement looking quickly about to make sure she wasn’t listening.

But I really like the job I’m doing, and personally I feel I’m very good at it, too. So how do I keep her happy, at the same time as keeping me happy? However well I do the job, she will find fault, for that is the way of the Commandant. She looks for fault before anything else. But as she pays the wages, that ultimately is her prerogative. I can do no more than perform the job as well as I can, recognise her ways and conform to them as much as possible. Arbeit macht frei, and all that.

I put up with enough arses while I was in catering to last a lifetime, that was one of the reasons I got out of it. Of course I recognise that there are arses everywhere, and everyone has to deal with them, and some are better at it than others, some are blessed with not really caring that much. I always cared, probably too much most of the time. It goes back to when I was a kid, when after 10 years of submission I learned the only way to fight bullies was to – well, fight them. That doesn’t work in the grown up world, unfortunately, a lesson I have been slow to learn. So I will try harder to apply the bullshit filters, keep her as happy as I can, and get on with getting out of the whole experience what I need to get out of it.

For as I said at the beginning, now I know what I want to do…I want to do what she does. I have been waiting a long time for my epiphany, to find a way which I know 100% I can do, which I know 100% I will be better at than most people, which I know 100% is practical and not just more pie in the sky. My mother has often told me to stop chasing rainbows, to stop aiming for the stars without taking into account the sky in between.

What I am seeing in my mind now is the sky. There may be stars and rainbows in it, but that doesn’t matter. I am looking for the first time at a sky which in itself is enough.

And hereby hangs the basic thread of this tale. The best person to learn from over the immediate future, to learn the tricks from, is of course the Commandant. Which is what I mean when I say that I need to get out of this what I need, which is knowledge. We could be good for each other, she and I. Maybe she could even learn a few things from me. So I will heed the advice of my counsellor, and I will find the common ground which surely is there. And this will be one of the first tremblings in the Big Bang which will eventually form my own shop, my own Universe, here on the Dark Side of The Spoon.

Rewind to March 25th…

This morning the clocks went forward, always a day with great importance to me for I’ve been a Summertime kind of guy all my life.

It is especially so this year, for it is also the last day I will ever spend in a commercial kitchen. Today, after 13 not very glorious years, I will dish out my last roast, flip my last burger, fry my last chip and wash my last greasy plate.

The day is proving to be as quiet as most of the preceding eight months, so no change there. And it’s hardly a surprise, seeing as I’ve almost been engineering it. Me and the boss here in Tooting have being doing a passable imitation of Turkey and Greece, snapping like turtles at each other over matters of no particular import. I don’t want to be here and he knows it. And now he’s solved the problem for me.

So there you go. A professional life which, looking back, has been much more drudgery than Ducasse, is approaching its last gasps, not so much fighting for life as begging for death.

There is a world out there, a world which can surely be explored without having to visit its dry stores and its walk-in freezers, its counter fridges and its mop cupboards.

I can’t speak fluent Greek, but I can construct a menu in it, I can do a shift in a Greek kitchen and know exactly what’s going on, but put me in front of a Greek soap opera and I’ll understand about half of it. I know the word for flat-leaf parsley, but not the word for flat.

To a lesser degree I’m the same in a few other languages.

That’s just a small example of how the work rules the world. It’s looking like my next serious work move will be back into customer services, which answers the question I answered at the start of this, viz; what the fuck am I going to do next?

That opportunity lurks some two months off into a future which could be anything. But for a while I want the future to be a place where you just go to work, do the job, go home, like the normal people.

Hopefully I’ll come out of it all changed, and able to get rid of my temperamental excesses, my weed excesses, my being alone excesses. The tunnel I could see no light at the end of a few months back is clearly aglow now, the exit doors bright.

I have to admit, this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to give it up. In Preston, back in 2001, I really thought I’d managed it. It didn’t do me much good, however. I lasted seven months on the dole before a text message out of the blue took me back to London, and the only kitchen I ever truly loved. Which proved to me once and for all the most concrete truth in life – you really never know what’s around the corner.

This time, though, I really have had enough.

It is 8.15pm on March 25, 2007. I turn off the machines, look around, make sure the taps are off. The last check I did was a chicken bbq baguette and a fishcakes. You won’t find either of them in Larousse. The journey I began on May 1 1993 is over. I was 29 then. In six days I will be 43.

I pull open the kitchen door and walk through it, hearing its oil-free squeak as it closes behind me. I do not look back.

It is two months later, and now at last I know what the fuck I am going to do next. I am going into customer services of a sort, but not in the way I envisaged at the end of March. I am going to work in a shop, but not just any shop, oh no. It is a shop which sells the largest range of spices and herbs I have ever seen. For those of us whose favourite aspect of being a chef was the whole alchemy thing, it is a dream. I will work with strange and exotic powders of many varieties, advising people how best to combine and utilise them. I will be able to use the magic within me, not waste it arm deep in greasy water, by passing it on, by explaining how that amazing and fabulous alchemy takes place.

On my first day I was asked which kind of paprika I would recommend for a certain dish. I found myself lifting each smoky red package out of the basket and lovingly describing what it would do. How the Hungarian rosen would give a brick-like depth of colour and flavour, how the smoked Spanish pimenton would make the dish smell of an evening in Seville, how the sweet Italian would be more like the subtle caress of a distantly remembered lover. I found myself going all, dare I say it, Nigel Slater on myself. And I loved it. And I looked into the future and I could see myself doing this for a long, long time. Not quite Epiphany, not yet, but at last a glimpse up an open road that I could see myself reaching the end of.

I find myself realising too, that without walking the roads I have previously walked, I would never have found this one.

It turns out I’m very good at selling spices. Which just goes to show what can change when you’re doing something you believe in. It’s not perfect, but then, what us? But when I’m working the shop floor, I love it. I can talk about this stuff confidently enough to know they’re listening. And many of them leave poorer than they intended. Today I sold this nice Anerucan girl five things she didn’t know she wanted. And another guy, later on, six things.

They both spent the best part of fifty quid which, I admit, isn’t that much round Notting Hill. But not bad, not bad.

Next two days the shop was visited by two young Australian ladies (separately). Both walked out having spent £15 more than they were planning, smiling like Cheshires. Great fun. It’s so nice doing something I believe in, and understand. I love working that shop floor.