Smash hit

“Yes, well, I wasn’t going to go and get it myself,” I said. “Normally the chef does that.” Not in Jamaica. They find frozen fish easier, apparently. And international travellers like to see salmon and seabass. So that’s what they do. All shrivelly little overcooked portions with a “jus” of this and a “julienne” of that, and on one occasion baked in salt in the Sardinian style – salty enough to kill a young child, and then preserve it till July.

And no reggae playing, oddly, which would have been nice. Just two losers with a Moog and maracas doing Lady in Red over and over (without the words, mercifully).

I ordered a cheeseburger, rare. It came grey all the way through and tasting of school. “This tastes like you’ve bought in pre-cooked frozen burgers,” I said.

“Yes,” said the manager, proudly. “Jamaican laws won’t allow us to prepare raw ground beef in the kitchen, so we use these.”

At £500 a night. Bloody hell. And still nine nights to go. It was just painful. They did the whole American “My-name-is-Riannon-and-I’ll-be-your-waiter-today” thing, and brought little appetisers and flounced about with napkins and spent hours not quite managing to open wine bottles before finally bringing food you wouldn’t feed to a goat, unless it was a Nazi goat, who had personally stolen your paintings.

Speaking of which, I did eat a bit of OK goat curry, but traditional Jamaican butchery involves slashing up the dead beast, bones and all, with a pair of machetes until it can be slopped into a pot – so every mouthful is just a bone shard with a bit of meat attached. It’s why Jamaicans have such terrible gums.

I think the lesson is just that you don’t go to Jamaica to eat. It’s why in all those photos of Bob Marley you never see him eating. He’s always either smoking a joint or dancing. You won’t see iconic shots of him on a T-shirt or on some teenager’s wall spreading a pâté de foie de volaille aux echalottes on to a hunk of toasted sourdough and washing it down with an unusually oaky sauvignon, because you can’t do that there. If you could, he would have done.

For Christmas, which came in the middle of our holiday, we moved to the famous Jamaica Inn for a couple of days, just along the bay. They gave us iced eggnog on the beach and sang Jamaican Christmas carols such as “I & I Saw Three Ships” and “Jah Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (not really, it was just crappy old Baptist wailing and clapping).

Finally, desperate for something to tell you, I hauled out into the interior to try a roadside jerk shack, hunting for the real, proper Jamaican experience. There are thousands of these places, all looking pretty similar: a wooden front painted red or yellow, somebody’s name painted on it, a hole for a door, smoke coming out of the roof, chickens running around out the back and an old Rasta muttering to himself and nodding a lot between mouthfuls of rum.

The chaps loitering around inside were yellow-eyed and slow-moving, the fire was wide and red-hot, covered with a metal grille torn from the window of a prison. Pork and chicken sizzled on it. A fat woman sprinkled seasoning from a hessian bag. Lips were licked. I sucked on a Red Stripe. A paper plate was laid before me, belly pork, chicken wings, some pepper sauce in a bottle. This, at last, was the real thing. I took a bite.

Inedible. Tragically, dynamically, pathetically bad. Gritty with stale pepper, dry, chewy meat that wadded my teeth without any flavour at all. Grim, grim, grim. And I don’t even want to talk about the loos.

So what shall I talk about? I know, I’ll talk about Kensington Place, which is in Notting Hill Gate, which is where the first Jamaicans settled when they got to London in the Fifties, so it’s the obvious place to segue into at this stage.

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