AA Gill - The Times

I’ve got a poorly lad in the study with me. Beetle’s been sent home from Montessori with a temperature of 39. He’s sitting in the winged leather armchair that usually belongs to the dog, and he looks very small, wrapped in a soft tartan rug, with mute dinosaurs on the telly. He’s -holding a little yellow tractor, like an amulet.
There must be a whole cul-de-sac in the adult brain devoted to the ¬emotions used solely for sick children. The prefrontal panic, or the hyperpitiful. Their power is as unmanningly powerful as jealousy, as all-consuming as paranoia. It’s astonishing what a couple of degrees can do. He’s become all soft and dozy, listless and wide-eyed, inverted and disconnected, as if he’s seeing and hearing things on a time delay, out of synch. Mere hours ago, he was pounding and trumpeting, like a diminutive act of God. Thirty-nine degrees is a cool wash; it’s a plate-warming oven. It’s the temperature you’d use to dry tomatoes. It wouldn’t even bake an egg custard. But it’s enough to turn my little boy into a shadow child, an ember of himself, and turn me into a simpleton.
He’s been on the Calpol. All my children have been brought up on Calpol. Ask any parent what the greatest medical invention of the last century was, and they won’t tell you chemo-therapy or saline breast implants, labial tucks or Valium. We know, with one ¬exhausted voice, we know, it’s Calpol. Mary Poppins in a plastic spoon.
When I was a child in the dark hand-me-down days of the 1950s, there was no such thing. Then, if we got ill, we got better or we died, and we had to wear braces on our legs, not our teeth. When did braces move from being pedal to dental? Every class used to have at least two kids with Meccano legs, and teeth like donkeys. Whatever happened to polio? If we got sick, we got another scratchy blanket, and a hot-water bottle, like a boiling bowel at the bottom of the bed. When I got scarlet fever, I was given so many extra blankets, I was pinned on my back for a week. Whatever happened to scarlet fever? It made my grandmother deaf. Kids still died of it. And where did German measles go? I remember lying in the dark for a week, because the merest twinge of the black-and-white post-war light might have blinded me. Where are the hacking sweats of the kiddie-killers of my youth? Tired blood, the croup, rickets and boils? And where are their ¬remedies? The poultices and inhalations? Vicks VapoRub, mutton fat on your back, Mercurochrome, surgical spirit, prune paste, and senna leaves? Aniseed cough sweets, kaolin and morphine? And the invalid food: beef broth, sops, hot milk with bread, a little sugar and nutmeg. Possets, and strained tinctures. Everything bland, everything monochrome, pallid and inert. Food that looked marmoreal, pale communion, tepid, poached and toothless: nothing to excite or entertain. Sick rooms were whispered, solemn, reflective, as if the process of getting better were also a rehearsal for not getting better.
Seeing as I never had Calpol — going straight to whisky — I thought I might steal some of Beetle’s when he wasn’t looking and review it. There’s a picture of a blond infant on the box looking uncomfortable. They’ve carefully chosen an androgynous child. Perhaps that’s why it’s uncomfortable. Calpol’s packaging is purple, the hue of bruises. The stuff itself looks like stripper’s underwear, an inflamed, pustular pink. It smells like boiling toffee, floor polish and margarine. It’s ¬advertised as being strawberry flavoured. I’d never have guessed, and neither would a strawberry. The taste is a surprise: it’s sugar-free, so has that strange, empty-hole flavour of sugar substitutes. The anti-matter of sugar, which cloaks the wizard’s spells of faint medicine, the bitterness of wormwood, metallic tones of chemistry. This is unmistakeably the tipple of the lab, not the larder. But what really grabs the throat is the consistency: a viscous slime. This is what comes out when they shoot aliens. It’s in just too much of a hurry to get down your throat. On the spoon, it looks thick; in your mouth, it slides past like greased clingfilm. Calpol is a short and intensely unpleasant mouthful. Children love it. We’re breeding wards of Munchausen’s toddlers, gagging to get their gums round the ’pol.
I drank mine 10 minutes ago. I’ve been overcome by a warm feeling. I want to slip into something towelling, possibly with attached feet. I have a nameless desire to dance along to Beyoncé, and then indulge in a vertical uh-oh, pants-on poo.
I like Mark Hix. Everyone likes Mark Hix. To know Mark Hix is to like Mark Hix, which is unusual for a chef. Mark and I collaborated on a book, The Ivy. I did the writing, he did the smiling and produced recipes for mass catering that the Blonde had to reduce to dinner-party size. He has the naturally relaxed, unclenched, unconcerned demeanour of a New Orleans funeral band. He is also, unusually for a chef, interested in things other than mark-ups and gravy. He collects and patronises East End artists, and was the caterer at Frieze this year. He has a short string of restaurants, one of which killed Keith Floyd, and if that doesn’t deserve a Michelin star, I don’t know what does.
His latest is called Hix, on the site of a credit-crunched Japanese in Soho. It’s a big barn, decorated with specially commissioned mobiles from artists including Damien Hirst, who’s done small fish in little formaldehyde tanks, and Jenny Saville, who has offered up mechanical corned beef. In the basement, there’s a zinc bar that’s going to be a club. How’s the membership going to work, I ask. Hix looks puzzled, as if he’s forgotten that a club might need members, or that the members might need to know who they were. It’ll probably be left to the booking Stasi on the door, he answers.
The barman mixed me the best nonalcoholic cocktail I’ve had. Normally, they’re hideously fruity Calpol concoctions. This one was based on green tea and lime. Upstairs, the menu is familiar: robust, hard-backed English, with a lot of cheap cuts and guts. I started with two dozen West Mersea oysters; huge, slobbery mouthfuls of ozone. What I’d failed to notice was that they were £3.50 each. That’s a lot for sea snot on a half shell. There’s also Himmel und Erde (heaven and earth) — a fantastic German dish of black pudding, apple sauce and potatoes, all on its own a reason for hugging a Bismarck and singing the Ode to Joy. Cod’s tongues with girolles were good, but I don’t want this to sound too much like an obstacle course in sweaty eating: there is plenty of perfectly straightforward fish and familiar bits from familiar animal bums. Not all of it seamless; a salt marsh mutton, kidney and oyster pie was just too Hardyesque, like fighting your way through Gabriel Oak’s taciturn, furrowed scrotum. There’s parkin and cream for pudding, and those English cheeses that are made by wizards living in teepees, with wind farms in their sleeping bags.
The sourcing of all Hix’s ingredients is exemplary. The preparation is a little careless, a touch smilingly amateur. Personally, I can live with that. I’ve eaten far too much that came with a mission statement, that mention obsession five times. I like the fact that Mark is a top-notch chef who thinks that if the crust falls in, or the bottom drops off, well, it’s just dinner. And there are more important things to worry about and be enthused by than a tepid dab and shy whelk. This is a good, relaxed yet sophisticated restaurant. They have an excellent Sunday lunch menu. Oh dear. Beetle’s been sick. All over dancing feet. The boy’s a born critic.
**** 4 stars out of 5