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| Watching Zac fail the taxi test, I couldn’t help but feel for him | Watching Zac fail the taxi test, I couldn’t help but feel for him |
| (5 months later) | |
| Like everyone else, I have been endlessly re-watching the video of the London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith, wincing and grimacing and suppressing rage as he is quizzed in the back of a taxi by the BBC’s Norman Smith. Clearly Goldsmith (right) thought this would be a conventional interview where he would be asked for opinions – 10 a penny – not impertinently tested on factual knowledge. | Like everyone else, I have been endlessly re-watching the video of the London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith, wincing and grimacing and suppressing rage as he is quizzed in the back of a taxi by the BBC’s Norman Smith. Clearly Goldsmith (right) thought this would be a conventional interview where he would be asked for opinions – 10 a penny – not impertinently tested on factual knowledge. |
| Goldsmith was unaware that QPR are the football team that plays at Loftus Road; that Holborn is the tube station to the east of Tottenham Court Road; and that the Museum of London is in the Barbican– but he got “Dirty” Den Watts, the original landlord of EastEnders’ Queen Vic. When asked if he travelled by tube, he replied: “All the … 0ften.” | Goldsmith was unaware that QPR are the football team that plays at Loftus Road; that Holborn is the tube station to the east of Tottenham Court Road; and that the Museum of London is in the Barbican– but he got “Dirty” Den Watts, the original landlord of EastEnders’ Queen Vic. When asked if he travelled by tube, he replied: “All the … 0ften.” |
| It was reminiscent of that extraordinary moment on the Late Show with David Letterman when the host asked David Cameron quiz questions about Britain, and the prime minister didn’t know that “Magna Carta” meant the “great charter”. | It was reminiscent of that extraordinary moment on the Late Show with David Letterman when the host asked David Cameron quiz questions about Britain, and the prime minister didn’t know that “Magna Carta” meant the “great charter”. |
| But I felt for Goldsmith. Nobody likes to be put on the spot. I remember doing a telephone interview with a crustily conservative historian about standards in spelling: I cheerfully asked him to spell “supersede” (is there a “c” in it?), and “withhold” (one “h” in the middle or two?). After a tiny pause, he put the phone down on me. | But I felt for Goldsmith. Nobody likes to be put on the spot. I remember doing a telephone interview with a crustily conservative historian about standards in spelling: I cheerfully asked him to spell “supersede” (is there a “c” in it?), and “withhold” (one “h” in the middle or two?). After a tiny pause, he put the phone down on me. |
| Cub grub | Cub grub |
| The food writer Bee Wilson this week drew her Twitter followers’ attention to the super-fashionable restaurant Gustu in the Bolivian capital, La Paz, profiled in the New Yorker. Wilson noted that it refuses to do a children’s menu. Its chef, Kamilla Seidler, says: “Kids are humans, but smaller. If they don’t want what we have, they don’t eat.” | The food writer Bee Wilson this week drew her Twitter followers’ attention to the super-fashionable restaurant Gustu in the Bolivian capital, La Paz, profiled in the New Yorker. Wilson noted that it refuses to do a children’s menu. Its chef, Kamilla Seidler, says: “Kids are humans, but smaller. If they don’t want what we have, they don’t eat.” |
| What Gustu has is access to local ingredients like cañahua, which Seidler calls “quinoa’s little brother”. This is all very well. But whenever a restaurant has offered us a special menu for our 11-year-old I always think the same thing – the kids’ menu looks delicious and loads better than the grown-ups’. Adults are offered fiddly, fancy confections, and you take a gamble on what they will look like and taste like, and how much there will be. But kids are offered superbly unpretentious burgers, pizza slices and chicken nuggets, with the promise of mind-blowingly tasty and proper-sized chips. | What Gustu has is access to local ingredients like cañahua, which Seidler calls “quinoa’s little brother”. This is all very well. But whenever a restaurant has offered us a special menu for our 11-year-old I always think the same thing – the kids’ menu looks delicious and loads better than the grown-ups’. Adults are offered fiddly, fancy confections, and you take a gamble on what they will look like and taste like, and how much there will be. But kids are offered superbly unpretentious burgers, pizza slices and chicken nuggets, with the promise of mind-blowingly tasty and proper-sized chips. |
| Someone should open a restaurant next door to Gustu, called Para Los Niños, offering these items, with a special joyless adults’ menu available on demand; on which there is cañahua salad if you insist. | Someone should open a restaurant next door to Gustu, called Para Los Niños, offering these items, with a special joyless adults’ menu available on demand; on which there is cañahua salad if you insist. |
| Marked men | Marked men |
| Like all fans of the great American director Richard Linklater – who created the fantastic real-time coming-of-age movie Boyhood – I am almost out of my mind with anticipation for his new film, Everybody Wants Some!! It’s about US college baseball players in the 1980s. And the startling thing about it, at first glance, is that whopping double exclamation mark in the title, taken from a Van Halen track. | Like all fans of the great American director Richard Linklater – who created the fantastic real-time coming-of-age movie Boyhood – I am almost out of my mind with anticipation for his new film, Everybody Wants Some!! It’s about US college baseball players in the 1980s. And the startling thing about it, at first glance, is that whopping double exclamation mark in the title, taken from a Van Halen track. |
| Many publications and writers do not care for exclamation marks in film titles, and discreetly censor them. Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge! often had its exclamation mark snipped off by critics who actually liked the film and wanted to rescue it from this vulgar display. (I have been guilty.) In the same spirit, Linklater’s film is widely described as Everybody Wants Some. | Many publications and writers do not care for exclamation marks in film titles, and discreetly censor them. Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge! often had its exclamation mark snipped off by critics who actually liked the film and wanted to rescue it from this vulgar display. (I have been guilty.) In the same spirit, Linklater’s film is widely described as Everybody Wants Some. |
| Perhaps people have unhappy memories of the only other cultural product in living memory to do the double: Twang!! – Lionel Bart’s 1965 stage musical about Robin Hood. It was a disastrous box office flop and wiped out Bart’s fortune. I’m hoping the twin-exclamation-mark curse won’t hit Linklater. | Perhaps people have unhappy memories of the only other cultural product in living memory to do the double: Twang!! – Lionel Bart’s 1965 stage musical about Robin Hood. It was a disastrous box office flop and wiped out Bart’s fortune. I’m hoping the twin-exclamation-mark curse won’t hit Linklater. |
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