I’ve discovered my inner beard. I found it in Africa. Everyone has an inner
beard, and, like the novels that you all have inside you, as a general rule
of creativity, they’re best left there. I’ve never considered myself an
hairy man, a bona palone with a whiskery eek. But out there, in the
unforgiving desert, the sun does funny things to a man’s head and funnier
things to the back of his neck. I slowly discovered and shyly exposed my
inner beard.
Of course, I thought it was merely a traveller’s dalliance, that I would toy
with it, then cut it off at the airport. The Blonde would hardly take kindly
to my returning with a strange beard. Oddly, though, she rather liked it.
She said she’d been getting bored with the smooth expanses of lip and bald
cheek. A beard was rather the thing. In fact, now she prefers the beard to
me. She has little tête-à-têtes with it, and furtively strokes it when they
pass in the corridor. She thinks I don’t notice.
What I wasn’t prepared for was quite how different the world looks from behind
a beard. All manner of arcane disciplines and social cul-de-sacs are
suddenly open to you. I’m now considering collecting something small, plain
and aesthetically worthless, like plastic novelty items that you stick on
the end of pencils. I might join a club or society. I’m thinking about
getting a motor car that you have to start from the outside and that comes
with enthusiasts’ meetings at minor stately homes. I’ve started reading maps
for fun. I’m beginning to feel my life has been kidnapped by the short and
curlies.
And then the beard made me go to the Chelsea Flower Show. Now I have been to
Chelsea before. I go most years, but only as a member of the taste police,
to sneer at the fibreglass totties taking off their T-shirts in water
features — if garden ornaments were put on the internet, Plod would come
round and confiscate your computer. I used to snigger at the conservatories,
the patio dining rooms, the relaxation chat pits. I’d suck my teeth and roll
my eyes at the overdesigned show gardens, with their tentative stabs at
trendiness and their half-chewed plagiarism.
This time, though, the beard ushered me past all the stalls, pausing only to
say a cheery Captain Birds Eye hello to Sir Terence Conran and Antonio
Carluccio in the Harpers & Queen garden. Sir Terence had thoughtfully
come dressed as the Duke of Windsor’s folly butler. They both professed —
Carluccio and Conran, not the Duke of Windsor and his butler — to appreciate
the beard. Hemingway? I offered. “Blunkett,” returned Sir Terence.
The hairs on my chinny chin chin led me to the huge hangar of a flower tent,
and I was moved to small, silent gasps of awe. I was saying it with flowers.
I felt like Oscar Wilde’s grumpy giant, whose garden blooms only with
kindness. It wasn’t just the beard’s hopelessly Falstaffian view of glabrous
flora, God’s test card. I saw something else, something profound and morbid.
It is in the nature of flowers to be nostalgic; they hark back to other
flowers, other summers. They are a vanitas, a reminder of
transience and decay. In the monumental displays of Chelsea’s floral tent,
there is something sweetly sad, a painfully pleasant mourning, a
realisation, perhaps, that I’m closer to the compost than the fertiliser.
So I went home and planted a peace rose. It was my grandmother’s favourite,
bred at the end of the war. A single bloom was put on every country’s desk
for the inauguration of the United Nations, a memory of the past and a
tribute to the future. The beard smuggled home a begonia catalogue. Over my
dead head.
We looked for a suitable restaurant to go to after Chelsea, and the Blonde,
rather brilliantly, suggested Blakes. It’s not new, but I have been told
that the food has taken a turn for the better. Blakes is an incognito hotel.
At any one time, half the customers are not who they say they are and are
not with who they should be. A fair proportion aren’t even who they think
they are. There are more lothario Mittys in the bar than you can shake an
antidepressant at. If, by the way, you come across a man who says he’s
Prince Nicolas of Greece, don’t laugh. He really is. And he’s probably
waiting for your daughter.
Blakes is a 1980s time capsule, a bijou box of conspicuous consumption,
infidelity and paunchy American music producers. Anoushka Hempel’s decor has
stood up remarkably well: the warm, oriental-colonial look still seems chic
and cosy. The restaurant, in an awkward basement, is dappled with dark. I
had trouble reading the menu. The Blonde said she thought it was still very
sexy. She has memories of the place. All the comings and goings, and goings
and comings — and always too soon.
The menu is small and very girlie. It’s high-Thai conceptual. I was prepared
for minute portions. Blakes is a small hotel that screams small portions in
every department. I started with a soufflé suisse, a difficult
dish that always feels a bit Edwardian and normally comes the size of an
inflated crème brûlée. What arrived was hot egg with napalm cheese, 20
storeys high. It was the Dirk Diggler of soufflés. The waitress ascended in
one of those machines they clean street lights with to pour extra cheesy
sauce into the volcanic hole of its summit and dust it with a kilo of
paprika. It was delicious, but you had to eat it quickly. If it collapsed,
it could kill you and the table next to you. I have no hesitation in saying
that it was the best Swiss soufflé in the world. It almost was a world.
The Blonde had a main course of red chicken ginkgo nut curry with lime risottini
(parsimonious risotto). This came with a life belt, in case you fell
in. Again, impeccably delicious. She asked if she could possibly have a
doggy bucket for the leftovers. The waitress made a face and asked if we
would like a bellhop to carry it to the car.
The utter lack of proportion is the good news. But the biggest portion of all
was the bill. With half a bottle of pink wine and one pudding, it came to
£90 a head. That’s a lot. I looked around at the other diners: not one of
them was paying with his own money. And then I looked at the expressions on
their dates’ faces. Not one of them was going to get laid with someone
else’s money, either.
Blakes is still a place where ugly, bald liars take really pretty girls who
have no intention of blossoming for them.
Lunch 12.30-2.30pm, dinner 7.30-11.30pm
