Jonathan Meades - Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988-2020

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Filthy English

Peter Knows What Dick Likes

Pompey

Incest and Morris Dancing

The Fowler Family Business

Museum Without Walls

Pidgin Snaps

An Encyclopaedia of Myself

Estate (with Robert Clayton)

The Plagiarist in the Kitchen

Isle of Rust (with Alex Boyd)

For the enemies of the people

The original had a title that meant something. Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1988) is a bald boast that men do better hundred-to-eights than women because the giver is likely to be a recipient too. I gallantly proposed that this is not the case, that many women are fully competent. I guess thats evidence of what you might call my feminist side.

Pedro and Ricky Come Again is another sort of title. Its akin to Two-Hour Dry Cleaners where the operative, out of her head on perchloroethylene, tells you thats just the name of the shop and itll be ready a week Tuesday. It locates this book in the same area as its predecessor. It evidently alludes to a sort of vainglorious masculism, to Derek and Clive scatological representatives of a very different era before British and, to a lesser degree, French societies were characterised by thin-skinned hypersensitivity, puritanism and a preoccupation with respect: essentially a demand that people (tyrants, kiddy fiddlers and politicians are people too) should be taken at their own estimate, their own lies, their own self-delusion, and that to neglect to do so is an aggressive belittlement.

An obviously linked, somewhat paradoxical characteristic of the early twenty-first century is a loud bloc composed of an aggregation of minoritarian special pleaders whose interests may be contradictory, even violently opposed to each other. An axe murderer has rights too and doesnt he know it, having gained a doctorate in Behavioural Tropes in Victimology when banged up; that was before he decided to convert to Responsibly Caring Terrorism. An axe murderers victims ghosts are equally apprised of their entitlements. While the two groupuscules are philosophically divergent they are bound together by the cacophony they contribute to. They sing the song of their single issue and the song of solidarity with the persecuted of all faiths, tastes and body shapes.

An effect of this atomisation which transforms every person into a one-person minority is that every word written causes offence to someone. Not the words that one intends to cause offence and god knows they are legion but those in between, the water carriers: they have an unerring tendency to find targets that were unknown, un-noticed, unsuspected. Its the stray arrow that fells the hind. The pieties of woke and its forebears (right-on-ness and political correctness stretching back to literal iconoclasm) are discouraging. The N-word, the C-word, the J-word, the Q-word, the - word... There is no end to these shifty euphemisms which make you want to grab the fastidious by the throat and tell them to be frank.

There is no end either to the inhibitions which we initially scorn but, hardly realising it, torpidly adopt because self-attrition is tiring and no one will, with luck, notice if we mitigate our disquiet at a woke five-star approved cause: a three-breasted, three-penised, mixed-race cyclopean who identifies as a figure of myth, lives on benefits in a Plaistow bedsit and has several thousand followers on Twitter. Its the beginning of our new age. Were only in the foothills of decay.

This is evidently a book which is to be dipped into like, say, the fondant, near-liquid Gorgonzola which is currently fashionable in southern France and which produces gaudy nightmares.

The collection covers thirty years.

My opinions, tastes, preoccupations, enthusiasms remain constant.

My opinions, tastes, etc., are modified by time, age, circumstance.

My opinions contradict their precursors and belong to a different writer.

While it would be beguiling to appoint oneself part of that knowing cadre which lacks conviction, I lack the conviction to do so; I am not confident that sitting on the fence till it hurts is the right position to adopt even though it suggests a sanity which is an inoculation against extremism. I am inured to my inconsistency and to my need to check what my position is on countless matters to which I am entirely indifferent, which I simply dont care about. Till I change my mind.

But... its when you witness and pity those who cling to conviction, faith, ideology the tiny shrill minority capable of belief (in anything) that you thank yourself that you are fortunate not to be prey to these perverse balms. That you were born without the credulity gene. Conviction is a euphemism for bigotry, intolerance, mono-directional certainty.

Marseille, July 2020

He is cold, heartless, perverse, worldly, dandiacal, reactionary. He eschews transcendence in favour of the material. His craft was by his own admission plundered from Raphael, but if you didnt know that youd think he had conceived of himself as an impious Van der Weyden. ()

Eight times winner of the Ringburner Masters, six times Victor of Vindaloo. He spoke the universal language of biriani. ()

His first prosecution for pimping was at the age of eighteen. His business colleagues included Tony LAnguille Cossu (Tony the Eel) and Joseph Le Torador Lomini. ()

Christs body is the most commonly eaten meal in the world. ()

Salisburys population is about 40,000. Yet it has two branches of Clintons Cards about 150 metres distant from each other. ()

Maggie Davies and I translated one of his poems, about the Annunciation. In our version Mary exercises her right to choose and aborts the son of god. If only Muhammads mother had done the same. ()

Santa, no doubt a resting actor, breathed his fumous liquid lunch over me, aged three. I cried, and ran from his sordid grotto and began plotting my lifes work as the Liberator of Reindeer. ()

Baron Rogers of Riverside comes on so wood-fired, so extra-virgin, so biodynamic, so ethically sourced and cloudily unfiltered that he might be an obscure Umbrian goatherds dish served at Lady Rogers River Caf. ()

In the early nineties, Heavens Pasture advertised its pork sausages with a dancing pig singing outside a cottage:

Its no small wonder we is cryin,

We can smell that Mum am fryin.

We got reason to be grizzlin,

Our late Dads in there a-sizzlin. ()

Like Don Quixote or Sherlock Holmes or Jay Gatsby or Humbert Humbert or Leopold Bloom or Mr Pickwick, god is a fictional invention who has transcended the work in which he appears and who has achieved an autonomous, independent existence. God is real, all right. ()

A man can have sex with sheep and camels. However he must kill the animal after he has had his orgasm. He must not sell the meat to the people of his village. A neighbouring village is OK though... A man can have sexual pleasure with a child as young as a baby. If the man penetrates and damages a child he must then be responsible for her subsistence all her life. ()

I think it is beautiful for the poor to accept their lot. ()

The chef Anthony Bourdain writes of the chef Thomas Keller: You havent seen how he handles fish, gently laying it down on the board and caressing it, approaching it warily, respectfully, as if communicating with an old friend. The old friend, should we not have noticed, is dead. Are we to suppose that Keller is a medium? Or is he a necrophiliac fish-fiddler, a Jimmy Savile of the deep? ()