Books > Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings > Excerpts

ARRIVAL

On arrival I struggle up the steps of my hotel in Fitzrovia, located in the heart of London's West End. Apparently all of its original features have been restored, from its ornate cornices to its stained windows. (I read that on the hotel website, and it's true.) I marvel quietly at the wood panelling, the Italian marble and granite in the bar. I also marvel at the Japanese businessmen mulling about the lobby. I want to pinch their cheeks. There are perhaps half a dozen of them and they seem genuinely excited - although there's never been a time when I've seen a Japanese businessman who wasn't genuinely excited about something. I salute their lack of ambivalence. To them, everything is Godzilla.

The hotel is home to the world's slowest elevator - what you Brits call 'the lift'. Shiny and barely moving, it is the Stephen Hawking of the transit set. The elevators are made of glass, so you have panoramic views of the quiet streets outside (featuring short pale buildings with even slower elevators, I imagine). Glass elevators always make me sick. Often I get dizzy when they start or stop abruptly. This may be due to what's called an 'unusual and vigorous vestibular stimulation', meaning something in my ears throws me off balance. When it happens I count myself lucky if I'm not wearing my best shoes.

Of course, American elevators are faster; they usually have further to travel and time is money. British elevators take their time, like British service. Both have mirrors inside, all equally successful in the properties of reflection. When I ride in them, I like to stare at myself and inspect my tongue. I look at my tongue, basically, because it's a great barometer for my overall health. Any hairy patch, weird colour, swelling, ulceration, white patchy lining or cobblestone-like bumps can mean trouble in other places. I have a very small tongue. However, watching television in my hotel room, I have noticed that UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has a gigantic tongue - one that is too big for his mouth. It's like a slip dragging from a car door. Look out for it next time he's on TV, whipping up a brisket, or whatever it is he does.

I am lost, and I haven't even left the hotel yet. The hallways are unusual here. They are chopped up by many doors, some that block the pathways for no apparent reason. I find this confusing. When I stayed at a hotel in Soho a few years back, I noticed the same thing. Narrow hallways separated by door, after door, after door. Then, here comes another door. Usually followed by another door (and some stairs).

The extra doors make it hard for me to remember where I'm going. I find myself wandering down halls I have no business wandering down, and I think I have discovered the kitchen, a pantry, a laundry closet and a playroom for bondage enthusiasts.

I must return to my hotel room - which I love. Like the 'lift' and the old people in it, it's narrow and small. It's also decorated like my grandmother's house: lots of quilted pillows and distressed furniture. The duvet - what Yanks call a 'comforter' - is a bright, puffy red thing. This one does not seem comforting at all. In fact, it looks as if it could repel bullets.

The television is teetering on the edge of a dresser. I expect to find a set of teeth floating in the glass by the clock radio, and I'm a bit sad that I don't. I drop my keys and spare change on the dresser and take a look at the amenities. There is a tea- and coffee-maker. I don't know how to use it so I turn on the television instead. There are people on it. Unlike people on American television, they are not beautiful. They have things all over their faces...pimples and wrinkles. They are sitting in a Laundromat. A frail old woman in a uniform is drinking tea and chain-smoking, her cigarette dangling ash from its end as she prattles on in a raspy voice. She is talking to a young man who has a big sore on his upper lip. His hair is alarmingly greasy. I watch the programme for about ten minutes, and during that time not a single thing explodes. I also do not learn a single lesson about life, and how to improve my own. This is not American television.

Then I hear this strange music and I am informed I have been watching EastEnders. I don't know what an 'EastEnder' is, but I don't want the show to end. Is it a portal into a parallel universe where normal-looking people drink tea in a Laundromat? Is it CCTV footage of the people who live across the street who drink tea in a Laundromat? Have I accidentally booked into a room used for police surveillance? I don't know the answers to these questions. But I do know this: I want to drink tea in a Laundromat.

THE KING AND QUEEN

New to the neighbourhood I decide to go for a walk. Which means: I walk until I happen upon a pub. The whole point of walking in London, I have found, is simply to find a place to drink. Continuing to walk after one has found a pub seems irrational - almost like continuing to look for your flat keys after you've already found them.

The pub I find is a proper, traditional British pub called the King and Queen. A great pub, it is. What's a great pub? One that's nearby. One that has wood paneling, sombre carpeting, dim lights, a juke box, and approximately four old men sitting in their respective corners, their slightly demented, infested dogs nearby. The barmaid should be fat but attractive - or what I call fattractive. A dartboard is mandatory; a drug dealer, optional. (There, I think I may have just described every pub in London.)

I like the King and Queen because it satisfies most of the above, and then some. There is no drug dealer, or at least I don't recognize him. The pub is damp and empty in the early afternoon, with old signs and dated photos of ancient football teams on walls made of dark panelling. I love dark panelling.

Why don't we panel more things? I think the world would be a better place if it was like a British pub and we panelled everything. I'm sure there are some people who would disagree with me, but we could simply panel over them. The rainforest would be of better use, I think, if it was made into panelling.

I prefer the beauty of the dark British panelling in pubs and bars over the imitations you'll find in New York, Boston or Chicago. Because they're just that: pale, sad imitations. If you want real, authentic wooden panelling, you have to come to London. Or perhaps to a store that sells real, authentic wood panelling.

I have noticed that all the London pubs I have walked by and peered into feature wood panelling that covers all or part of their walls. Sometimes the panelling is paired with another material on a single wall - it isn't unusual for the top of a wall to be drywall and the bottom half to be wood panelling or wainscoting.

'Wainscoting'. I like that word! It sounds like something you might do on a Saturday afternoon if the weather was pleasant. 'Darling, why don't we go wainscoting with the O'Connor's?'

Why don't we, indeed.

Wood panelling is typically installed as solid, interlocking boards. When they interlock, they appear to be made of one single piece. I like this idea: all of these panels working together to make me feel calm and relaxed. It's like a forest, but better organized.

Panelling = tranquillity and relaxation.

Lack of panelling = pain and sorrow.

See any location where forests outnumber the panelling and you'll find nothing but tragedy and strife. Rwanda, Bosnia, Zimbabwe, Essex.

Along with panelling, I have discovered another advantage that British pubs have over American bars: they are dark. Really dark. Darker than the darkest part of a dark thing you find under your shoe in the dark.

I have seen the light. And it's dark. Literally. American bars are just too bright - which cancels out the whole point of going to a bar. UK pub managers seem to understand the most fundamental purpose of a pub: to offer escape from the flashlight of God also known as 'the sun'. For me, the sun is a constant reminder that it is daytime, and I should be doing constructive things to fill up that time, like feeding the homeless, or at least kicking them. I don't need that kind of guilt. Pub darkness, I realize just now, is a perfect atmosphere to escape the shame you feel for sitting in the darkness of a pub at two in the afternoon.

Another great thing: When I go to the King and Queen for a second time (which interrupts another 'walk'), the bar becomes my 'local', and I become a 'regular'. At the K&Q the bartender already knows my drink of choice, and has it poured before I place my parasol on one of those handy hooks beneath the bar. The pub, for a grown man, is the closest he can get to that big warm fuzzy blanket he had when he was a little boy. Like that blanket, it's comforting, welcoming and smells of bodily fluids.

(Speaking of which, an old man at the bar told me that in the good old days, men used to urinate right there into a gutter at the bottom of the bar. And frankly, a man who thinks pissing in public is part of the 'good old days', is a man after my own heart.)

This is yet another reason why so many Yanks go to therapists, and Brits don't. They go to the pub instead. Most of the people in the pub look genuinely relaxed, unencumbered by worry or heavy pressure. When I sit down, I begin to feel the same way, as all my stresses seem to float away during the middle of my third pint. I suppose, for many men, the pub must serve as the one-stop shop for mental realignment - a cognitive lube job as supplied by the pub manager, whose name is usually Mel. You go there to sit, think, chat, sip, sit, think, chat, sip. Before you know it, all your troubles are gone, as is your wallet, your scarf and flat keys. But if you're really lucky, you may find a glass eye on the floor that's yours to keep.

It will probably taste salty. Like a bar snack.

BANK HOLIDAYS

It's Friday afternoon before I realize I don't have to work on Monday. We're at the pub for lunch, and the boys from work are talking about how completely trashed they are going to get this weekend. I ask why, and one of them says, 'It's a Bank Holiday!' A Bank Holiday, they tell me, is a public holiday. They are called Bank Holidays because banks are closed on that day - which renders almost any other business incapable of remaining open. This seems like the strangest circular argument I've ever heard: the banks are closed because it's a holiday - and it's a holiday because the banks are closed.

It's genius!

What's even stranger is that no one at work bothered to bring it up until now, on Friday. Apparently Bank Holidays happen at the same time every year, but in the days leading up to them people act as if they've never heard of them. And once it dawns on everyone that they've got no work on Monday, the enthusiasm generated is frighteningly palpable because it means more drinking! 'Hey, Monday's a Bank Holiday!'

'Is it? Fucking brilliant! I'm going to get right fuck-arsed!'

And so, to celebrate, everyone spends their Bank Holiday weekends on a three-day bender. Maybe it's a way of breaking up the monotony of the grinding work routine. Or maybe it's because Brits will look for any excuse to drink.

Either way, not to be a party-pooper, I decide to do the same thing.

For the next three days I go out and get drunk at different pubs in the neighbourhood, and fall asleep by the early evening. If this is what a Bank Holiday is all about, I want more Bank Holidays.

IRN-BRU

Back at the office - it's Monday - I'm looking at a bottle of Irn-Bru that's sitting on one of my employee's desks. It is an alarming fluorescent orange shade, the same colour as Jordan and Jodie Marsh in wintertime. My copy chief, Chris, drinks a bottle of it a day and, when I ask him why, he has no explanation. I'm not even sure he believes it tastes that good. I take a swig and it's not half bad. I expect it to taste like a liquefied substance used in children's chemistry sets. It doesn't. Although it is only slightly better.

Apparently this beverage is Scotland's biggest-selling soft drink (it's even an ice-cream flavour), loved by Russians, and drunk by Brits to alleviate hangovers, which for them occur almost hourly. According to historians, the formula for Irn-Bru is a closely guarded secret, but its ingredients include 0.002% of ammonium ferric citrate (a compound used for water purification and printing), caffeine, sugar, flavouring agents and colouring. The colouring could be anything, but I'm assuming it's derived from ground-up goldfish.

My friend Kerin informs me that the Scots drink Irn-Bru to appear 'posh'. 'Having a beverage that is bright orange means you're rich,' he tells me. Sometimes I think Kerin tells me these things to see how stupid I am.

But my fascination with Irn-Bru has a purpose: for it reveals yet another facet of British devil-may-care attitude that deviates from us Yanks. The fact is you could never sell Irn-Bru in the States. I'd go as far as to say Irn-Bru would probably be made illegal, if regulators ever got around to figuring out what the hell it actually was. According to Wikipedia, although some US companies import the beverage, the Food and Drug Administration lists the stuff as a banned substance because it contains Ponceau 4R. Ponceau 4R is also banned in Norway. Norway, by the way, prides itself on its fermented trout.

Then again, I'm thinking: if something is seemingly bad for you, at the very least let us decide whether we want it or not. The US bans everything to a point now where, if you plan on wearing a helmet, you better be wearing a helmet under that helmet. And don't forget the seat belts and the knee pads. You'll need to wear those when purchasing more seat belts and knee pads. In the US, the obsession with living longer has pretty much created a nanny state. In England, however, everyone smokes, drinks and fights. It's like an old pirate movie, but without the scurvy. Somehow, Irn-Bru fits into this whole lifestyle. It's a scary-looking drink with a demented name (I was told it was once called Iron Brew - but they had to change the name because it didn't contain any iron). I imagine it's the perfect thing to drink after accidentally ingesting a wasp. To kill the wasp, of course.

PORK SCRATCHINGS

My descent into the soft, puffy and bloated life continues. I have grown a pair of breasts that could qualify me for Page Three. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, and blame my increasing obesity on a number of things but mostly on two: my inactivity and bacon. In America, we have only one kind of bacon. In the UK, there are over 200 kinds: the most commonly ordered being streaky, smoked, green, dried and cured. I love it. Variety is the spice of life. All that bacon to choose from...it's almost impossible to get sick of it.

Pork has become a big part of my life, and so it's no surprise I'm turning into a porker myself. You are what you eat, say health gurus, and if that's the case, then I am only weeks away from becoming a Gloucestershire Old Spot, a large spotted pig native to England well known for its milk production and succulent ass.

I am turning into beer-soaked bacon, cured by cigarette smoke - the only flavour of pork I've yet to see in the UK. Is this how all flavours are invented? My meat is probably tender and flavourful due to the fact that when I am fat, drunk and sitting in a pub I'll eat almost anything. It has taken me well over a year and a half of a sitting in the King and Queen to get over my fear, but I finally try pork scratchings. Being a pig myself, it qualifies as cannibalism.

'Here, try them,' says my mate, Eoin, throwing a bag at me, purchased at the King and Queen bar. I am drunk, so I'm pretty sure I can do this. I read the bag, and inspect its contents.

A pork scratching, as you probably already know, is a deep-fried pork rind that's eaten cold. In the US we sell big bags of things called Pork Rinds, which are puffy and light - the exact opposite of the UK pork scratching, which is dense and crispy. I suppose there is a metaphor in all of this - the culinary approach to this vile pork product reflects the different way our countries deal with everything. In the US, everything is oversized and empty; in the UK everything is small and hard. I am not sure if this holds true with all things, but it certainly rings true with snack foods, bars and football fans.

I don't like American pork rinds, but I am going to give these scratchings a chance. I bite into one and chew, and feel its salty dampness pollute my mouth. I don't think I've previously experienced something so inedible on my tongue. I push it down with beer. And start again. Another awful bite, but this one feels a little fuzzy. I look into the bag, and I see tiny pricklings of hair pointing out of the snacks. I am not joking - there are hairs in my bag, on something I'm supposed to eat.

I still continue to eat them, although my face is set in a constant grimace. 'Aren't they awful?' says Eoin, as he shoves more into the hole in the front part of his large bald head. This is English life in a nutshell, or rather, a crinkly bag.  The scratchings, like the weather and football, provide an avenue for moaning that works purely as a therapeutic tool. Eating these snacks allows you to take part in something horrible just so you can moan about how horrible it is. You take pleasure in moaning about something without hurting anyone's feelings or boring them to tears with your problems. Without pork scratchings, what would you talk about? Your job? Your wife? Your bills? That would just make you an American - the type of person who goes to a therapist to moan about stuff that's actually good. Here, you can moan about something bad - to a friend - and save about £60 an hour.

I try hard to describe the taste of pork scratchings, but the best I can come up with is 'delightfully grim': like eating a scale model of Frinton.

Why buy pork scratchings? Well, they're hard to make yourself. I looked it up. If I wanted to, I would have to buy a baby pig, name it, raise it till it was plump, slaughter it, slice it up, then separate and render down the rind in a low oven to produce what's called 'pork dripping'. Then I would have to take the remaining rind, put it back in the oven at a high temperature and cook it until it was crispy. I would also add heaps of salt.

That's a lot of work - and pretty pointless work at that - since all I really have to do is buy a bag of them at the pub. Snack historians say that pork scratchings have been around since the turn of the century. If they are referring specifically to the ones sold in the King and Queen, they are probably right. Mine look like hardened strips of brown matter, dried and fragmented into little shards that could remove a tooth. They are pure cholesterol, but I cannot stop eating them.

In America, no one would dare buy a bag of pork scratchings, unless it was for some weird, ironic party where everyone was supposed to bring them. I buy pork scratchings because I genuinely find them nourishing and fun to look at. Some people might disagree, but I find people who judge food by their looks to be no different from people who judge people by their looks. I call them food racists, or rather, just racists in general. If you don't like pork scratchings, you probably also hate foreigners.

EARL GREY IN A CHIPPED MUG

No matter what happens in British life, you can count on one thing: someone offering you a cup of tea. Tea is the beginning and ending for everything. The Alpha and Omega. You sit down with someone, you have tea. You kick them out of your flat, you have tea. You get ready for work, you make tea. You come home and have tea. When you are not making tea, you are probably thinking about making tea. The world is a teapot, frankly, and we're just living in it.

In fact, when God made Earth, you just know he couldn't have done it without Earl Grey. Tea is life's punctuation. It may be background noise to a Brit, but it means a lot to me, because it undermines any effort to rush out and do anything. You can't simultaneously make tea and do anything productive. That's impossible. Having tea means stopping, slowing down, and looking out of a rain-spattered window. It's the pause button that simply doesn't exist in America.

Everywhere I go, people offer me tea. And it makes everything better.

For example, my boss just offered me tea. And now he's telling me the company won't renew my contract. I came in this morning for my job review and I knew it wasn't going to be good. The numbers are bad, and when the numbers are bad, something has to take the fall. Still, the boss was nice enough to offer me tea first.

I suppose if I were back in Manhattan, I would be feeling pretty awful. The last time I got fired was in New York, and I didn't take it well. But back then I never drank tea. Here I drink it constantly. I don't know this for a fact, but I am assuming that's why, now I'm being fired, it really doesn't matter. My boss returns with my tea - milky, sugary and weak - made by our assistant, Jenni, who makes tea better than anyone else on the planet...because it's milky, sugary and weak.

This is great tea, even in a chipped mug. 'I am afraid we won't be renewing your contract,' Bruce tells me, as I sip. Fine, I think. I am staring out the window, it's raining, and the tea is fantastic.

I skip out that afternoon, and meet my ex-workmates at the pub. We all get a little drunk. But not a lot. I know I will miss all of them, but I live just around the corner. There has been no commiserating or sadness, or late night calls to drug dealers. I know it's time to go, so I suppose this is what you'd call 'growth'. I don't know. Buzzed and excited, I am living in London and now unemployed. Just like many other people living in London, I suppose. At least I still have my teeth.

SAINSBURY'S BACHELOR ALLEY

It's lunchtime for those who work, and I'm lost among a mass of suits and dresses in front of the wall stuffed with sandwiches. It's a vibrant, noisy place, and I stand out in my trackie bottoms and button-down shirt. I recognize people from the old sales team at work and, studying my wardrobe, they wisely avoid my gaze. I am flanked by a number of striking-looking women in skirts, all wearing massive belts. Women in London love their big belts - they're as wide as the M5. And they love their phones too. Their ears are glues to their mobiles as they read sandwich availability back to the bosses at headquarters. 'Egg and cress...no, egg AND cress...tuna and sweetcorn! Yes, tuna AND sweetcorn! They're out of red salmon and cucumber. No. No. Cheddar and celery? One left! I'm going to get the roast chicken salad.' I imagine this is what the stock market is like. But with sandwiches.

I enjoy going there as an unemployed sap in my sweatpants because it reminds me that there is life outside my flat, and it keeps me from losing myself in internet porn and the live feed of Big Brother. Here I find real human life in all its glory, fighting over sandwiches. The women are intense. There's nothing busier or more important than a British woman on her lunch break.

I usually make two trips to Sainsbury's every day. My second trip occurs around 7p.m. I go usually to buy a tub of cold pasta, which is the only ready-made food left. The atmosphere at the store is empty and grim. The wall of sandwiches is now barren, and all you find are lonely tubs of wilted penne pasta.  It becomes a chilly reminder of what you will look forward to if you don't find a good woman to settle down with. Which is: a tub of cold carbohydrate. The only people buying them are bachelors. I see them there, staring blankly at the nearly empty trays. They stoop to pick up something down below and in the back - a bowl of reddish lentils with chicken, maybe. They stare at it closely, almost willing it to change into something they'll actually love.

I don't know why I go there, and I don't know why anyone goes to 'the wall of doom' at this time of the evening. It's not for the sake of finances; the men I see there dress well. I wonder if it's simply ambivalence that drives people there. You don't care what you eat - you just know you're supposed to. It's the same imperative that often leads me to Rustler Burgers.

I love Rustler Burgers. But they hate me. Microwave them for 70 seconds, and they're as limp as a whale's penis. I find out later that if I turn the burger over and let it stand for a minute it cooks through and hardens up. It's this little tip that makes evening meals so memorable.

I buy Rustlers often, like tonight. I buy them even though trying to open their packaging is almost as harrowing as eating the food inside. Generally, it takes me a good fifteen minutes of pulling at the edges of the packaging before I give up and start stabbing at the cellophane with a knife. Add to the fact that the only time I buy Rustlers is when I'm drunk, and then it could take hours. I wonder how many people have died trying to open a Rustler Burger.

THE BATH

It's Sunday afternoon, and I've just woken up. It's about 3p.m., and it's nearly dark outside - a typical dreary-looking day near the end of November. I'm already feeling miserable because I've squandered a whole day, and yet here I am watching the end of an 'omnibus' of some soap opera in my underwear, or 'pants', as you fondly call them. I am sitting here, drinking milky tea, wondering if I can salvage anything from the day. Surely there is something I can do that's constructive.

I know. I'll take a bath.

The last time I took a bath was when I was twelve. I had just returned from two weeks of summer camp - a profound nightmare punctuated by fits of crying and diarrhoea. When I finally got home I stripped down in my bedroom and realized I had brought some friends with me. Worms. I had to take a bath. I can remember that bath because in America we stop taking baths around the age of four. As soon as we can stand, we're instructed to use the shower. If anyone found out you were still taking a bath at twelve, you'd be beaten, probably with soap on a rope. Any male past the age of ten who still takes baths usually ends up mutilating cats by the time he's eighteen.

So when I moved to London I was alarmed to find that grown men took baths. Not only did they take them, they talked about them.

Me: 'What did you do last night?'
Kerin: 'Bought the paper, opened a bottle of wine...and had a bath.'
Me: 'What?!'
Kerin: 'What What?'
Me: 'A bath? You're thirty-five years old.'
Kerin: 'And you're a twat.'

Many British men, apparently, take (or 'have') baths, and they almost always take them on Sundays. Now I do the very same thing, realizing bathing is by far more fun than showering. Here's why: if you have wasted your day and you can't be bothered to salvage it with a jog around the block or doing laundry, a bath seems like a 'thing to do'. It's better than doing nothing - even if it's just doing nothing submerged in water. You can drink while you're doing it. This is the real reason I believe Brits choose bathing over showering. You can't shower while holding a glass of Merlot. You would ruin the wine, and probably slip and fall and crack your head open. No one would find you for days, so you'd probably be dead and naked - an embarrassing way to go, especially if there's porn nearby. Also, there's the issue of the weather. British weather patterns make the act of showering redundant. Why would you take a shower when it's already raining outside?

I have a bath for one reason only: it helps me slow down the pace of life. It's one of the few times where I can actually do nothing, because sitting in water makes it really hard to do anything else. You cannot repair a toaster or put together a scale model of an Alfa Romeo TZ J. Rolland-G. Augias Coupe des Alpes. I have tried, and the glue just won't hold. What a bath does is remind me how valuable it is to step out of the drive to be productive - something I rarely did in America. I am sure the first time an American man had a bath, another man figured out how to do it better.