This is a big red-letter day for me. Really. The big red letter might be a B
or it might be a D. No matter — I’m cured. A huge weight (or maybe a wait,
or possibly both) has been lifted by some very, very clever people who have
decided that I’m not dyslexic any more. They didn’t even have to see me. It
didn’t cost me a thing. They just made a documentary and decided that
there’s no such thing as dyslexia. Phew. Free at last, Lord — free at last.
Ever since I was nine and they discovered I had the IQ of a taxi driver, but
the spelling ability of a Polish waitress, I’ve been a martyr to dyslexia, a
remedial invalid, excused Scrabble and anagrams — or orgasms, as I’ve always
known them. But not any more. Now, I don’t have a disease, I’m just stupid
like everyone else.
The scientists took me out of word bondage because they couldn’t agree on a
working definition for dyslexia. I do feel for them — neither could I. And
it must be bloody infuriating having to corral all those weird and
uninteresting little symptoms that keep jumping out of the box and refusing
to fit — a bit like trying to do three jigsaws at once — while outside there
is a waiting room full of desperately aggressive mothers, all with files
thicker than a special branch fit-up and a hyperactive child who can’t read
the “Do not touch” sign, but can’t stop drawing genitalia on the walls.
Obviously, it’s so much cleverer, not to mention easier, to say: “Okay,
there’s nothing wrong with any of you, except you’re all stupid. So piss
off.” This is so often how the cutting edge of discovery and science works.
Some fantastically clever man says: “Stuff this for a game of eureka. I can’
t get all the bits back in the box. Therefore, ipso facto, it doesn’t exist.
I’m off for a drink.”
There are some drawbacks. That’s only to be expected. I still can’t write or
do anything involving numbers. But at least I’m not dyslexic any more. The
very clever doctors said that any awkward symptoms can be explained away by
stupidity or chucked in the box marked “learning difficulties”. Which is far
nicer, really; at least I can pronounce learning difficulties.
I must say that the good news about the death of dyslexia reminded me of
something HL Mencken said about Shakespeare. Realising that it simply didn’t
make rational sense that a Brummie moneylender and part-time actor could
possibly have had a bigger vocabulary than, say, a professor of educational
science and have written all that stuff, he said it was plain as a
pikestaff that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t by Shakespeare. He was almost
certain that they were written by another bloke called Shakespeare.
This week’s restaurant is in Chiswick, or Cheltenham, as I used to know it.
Sam’s Brasserie can be accessed up Barley Mow Passage. A barley mow, by the
way, is a stook. Interestingly, the three English meanings of mow all have
unconnected origins; mow as in heap of hay is from the Old Norse; mow as in
mow a meadow is from the Latin for reap; mow, an archaic word for pulling a
face, comes from moe, the old French for pout. I wouldn’t have
known any of that before I was merely stupid.
Calling a restaurant Sam’s is a hostage to Hollywood. I assume it is owned by
someone called Sam. This being Chiswick, it is probably a Samuel or a
Samantha. But vanity shouldn’t blind you to considering the staff. I mean,
how many times do you think you’d be able to go up to a table and say
“What’ll you have?”, and have half a dozen Boden-clad homeboys with matching
Putney High hos shout back “We’ll always have Paris” before you went berserk
with a meat axe?
The room looks as if it was some sort of warehouse, the kind of place a
dyslexic pimp might have worked. It is now split into a bar, restaurant,
mezzanine and open-plan kitchen — all postindustrial and exposed in a
kitschly 1980s, flying-ducts-up-the-wall way. The menu, which is written on
your place mat, is long on wine, but rather forgetful on food. This is the
way people in Chiswick like it. This corner of west London is populated by
pretty ordinary, normal, decent people: 90% of them teach media studies, the
other 12% are commissioning editors for Channel 4. They just have one teensy
collective dirty secret: they’re all honking dipsomaniacs. There are
Southern Comfort bottles hidden behind every hedge in Chiswick. Everyone
looks perfectly nice, but in any room, 40% of them will have wet themselves.
The food is safely pedestrian, with odd moments of quirkiness, which is
presumably drunken revelry. I started with a crackling salad: cold pigskin
with slices of grainy dry apple and some suppository radishes. I wish I
could make this sound better, almost as much as I wish they’d made it taste
better. The Blonde’s yellow soup was indeed much better.
After that, I had diver-caught plaice. I asked the waiter, a charming,
attentive, not to mention gorgeous boy, who I expect was filling in time
before becoming Demi Moore’s next husband, what exactly a diver-caught
plaice was. He said they had a man who harpooned them. I looked incredulous.
He looked convincing. “No, really. They come with holes in them.” So do
bottoms. What arrived was a tranche of a very big fish covered in little
brown shrimps and a mild garam masala sauce, prepared within a millimetre of
perfection. It was a very good dish.
Pudding was some nice chocolate cake and excellent strawberries that,
unusually, tasted of strawberry and not just the water somebody had washed
plums in. Apparently, they are new fraises des bois crossed with
steroids.
What’s most impressive about Sam’s is the sourcing of some extremely good
ingredients, from the bread to the waiter. If I lived in Chelmsford, I’d be
jolly pleased to have it as my local. Though if I lived in Chiswick, I’d be
too legless to give a sot.
Sam’s Brasserie
11 Barley Mow Passage, W4; 020 8987 0555
Daily, 9am-midnight
