Often the rage suddenly turns to sorrow, accompanied by massive physical weakness. You see fully grown women struggling to open a can of Diet Coke; or big men trying to turn stiff door handles before collapsing, shouting, “My wrists suddenly feel as limp and powerless as Cheestrings. Oh GOD! HELP ME! THINK MY BODY HAS STARTED TO CONSUME ITSELF FROM WITHIN!” Operating a photocopier is beyond these people at this point—you will have to do it for them. You will essentially become one of those Helping Hands monkeys that disabled people have—but for a thirty-eight-year-old accountant from Hackney.
Smugness. On “normal days,” this: “I’ve lost three-quarters of a stone!” they will say, folding fistfuls of chips into their mouths. And you’ll be all like, “Hang on—you only did that because we didn’t kill you on the days you were behaving like a Roid Rage Colin from The Secret Garden! This is society’s achievement—not yours!” But they just sit there, being a size 10, not listening.
BACON!
And you know what drives people on the 5:2 diet most crazy on their Fast Days? Bacon. They dream bacon dreams, and cry bacon tears. For bacon is the most powerful substance on earth.
I had one of the Big Realizations of my life this week: up there with “It’s okay—no one has a clue what they’re doing” and “Put the fez back on the shelf—you will never be the kind of person who can style out a hat.” And it is this: bacon is the single most important thing in the world today.
This is not, you must understand, some ludicrous thesis that popped into my head which I then worked backwards to try to prove. On the contrary—looking at it now, I can see it was a fact that had been startlingly obvious for some time, but which I had simply chosen to ignore: much like Terry and June having had sex, or David Cameron running the actual country my life is in.
It started with Bacon Salt. Some friends of mine heard of Bacon Salt.
“We must get the Bacon Salt!” they shouted. “We will order the Bacon Salt, from America, and when it gets here—all covered in foreign stamps, in a brown cardboard box that’s a slightly and excitingly different brown from the brown of British cardboard boxes—we will have a Bacon Salt Party! Awl right!”
Bacon Salt is, as you have correctly guessed, some salt that tastes like bacon. No calories, no fat, entirely vegetarian and kosher—it is a product which both believes, and makes possible, its mission statement: “Because everything should taste of bacon.” Mashed potato, chicken sandwich, macaroni and cheese—even a cup of tea, I suppose, if you’re deeply perverted for bacon. It can all be hogged up in a second. With one shake, everything can taste of smoky pig.
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t amazed. I was amazed. It’s almost as if, for the world that has everything—penicillin, Mozart, an ability to leave rubbish on the moon—we’ve had to think of increasingly bizarre things to give ourselves on our birthday. We have, finally, almost in desperation, given ourselves the Universal Bacon Facility.
But you know what? That Bacon Salt amazement was a false amazement. I should have held my amaze. Because the next day, tootling around the Internet, I found a website that was as if I were falling down a rabbit hole. But a rabbit hole made of bacon. The Bacon Hole.
This website made Bacon Salt seem as nothing. For this was a site that sold pretty much every product you could ever conceive of—but with the implicit understanding that the most important thing about the construction of an item should be that it encompasses bacon. Bacon-scented candles. Bacon vodka. Bacon chocolate. Bacon coffee. Bacon-flavored toothpicks. Bacon rolling papers. Bacon mints—“How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it?” Bacon-print dresses. The bacon bikini—the “Bac-ini.” Bacon tattoos. Baconnaise—the mayonnaise-bacon hybrid child the twenty-first century has been waiting for. It even included recipes for bacon martinis, meaning that there could now be a third option: shaken, stirred—or crispy.
The website was, and is, a terrifying, telescopic reveal of one species’ hog-based insanity. Because, according to a three-thousand-word entry on Wikipedia, America—and, ipso facto, the world—is officially in the grips of “Baconmania,” making bacon the Meatles, I guess. The per-head consumption of bacon has shot up in the States in the last ten years, with Americans embracing bacon as not just a foodstuff but an entire way of life. “Bacon IS America!” Salon claimed. More cynical hands might suggest that it’s less that “bacon is America” and more because, in an era of endless stupidity, bacon is basically Meat Toast—you can’t screw it up. It practically cooks itself if you leave it on a windowsill for ten minutes.
But while America—in the dying days of its global supremacy—loses its mind to bacon, the keener observer may begin to notice how bacon has power and influence stretching over the millennia. Consider, for a moment, the things forbidden by major religions: adultery, incest, murder—and, for nearly two billion people, pork. Yeah, well, I think we know what’s going on there—the whole “pork” thing is just a sledgehammer TO BREAK BACON. No one gives that much of a toss about a pork chop—it’s bacon that’s the will breaker. It’s what always gets the vegetarians.
Clearly aware of the siren call of bacon, a prehistoric organization of Jewish and Muslim elders—the Grilluminati, perhaps—put in place laws that would stop their people from perishing in a hoggy fug of bacon abuse, rind fatigue, and fannying away colossal technological advances on inventing the Bacon Bra. Poor, sweet, stupid Christians, then. For without the fear of eternal damnation, bacon has a clear, unimpeded expressway into our souls. We are helpless in its presence.
As America’s current bacon frenzy illustrates, when culture, technology, and economy allow mankind the option of unlimited bacon—for bacon to fill every moment and aspect of its life—mankind will hit the “Bacon Me” button like an unhinged mandrill. In David Lynch’s Dune, when Kyle MacLachlan gnomically insisted, “The spice is the worm! The worm is the spice!,” we can see, now, that both worm and spice were, in fact, bacon. Bacon is the dark matter that holds together the universe. Richard Bacon has just taken over from Simon Mayo, BBC Five Live.* We are stardust. We are bacon.
Anyway, yesterday, my friends finally get their Bacon Salt.
“We’re having that Bacon Salt party!” they cried. “Come over! Bacon Salt all round!”
It was at that moment that a towering disdain for the whole concept of bacon finally overwhelmed me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I want to live in a multiflavored world. I don’t want to be the generation that forgets what nonbacon popcorn tastes like. I believe the flavor of bacon should be kept exclusively to the foodstuff bacon—and not allowed to blot out every other thing, like some rampant culinary knotweed. I draw a line in the sand, here and now. I reject bacon! IT LOOKS LIKE PRINCE PHILIP’S EARS, FOR GOD’S SAKE.”
And, besides, if you sprinkle smoked paprika on stuff, it does exactly the same thing.
The Rainy Jubilee—God Bless You, Ma’am
There is nothing I like more than a huge live event on TV.
I like it when it all goes tits up. Massive failures. Shambolic botches. Awkward on-air silences. The sound of millions of people rolling their eyes, and sighing. Or else, not failure, but an increasing sense of weirdness and WTF? Think of Michael Jackson’s funeral, when the R&B star Usher appeared to be trying to open Jackson’s casket; or the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, when TV magician Paul Daniels got into a Twitter fight with Stephen Fry, when Fry announced he was watching the snooker, instead. That’s what fattens my goose. Humanity trying to do something significant, solemn, and appropriate—and getting it a bit wrong.
And, so, the weekend of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. A national holiday, and three days of televised events. All of which went a bit—thank you, sweet Baby Jesus—wrong.
On the Saturday of the Jubilee I go on my usual run through north London. It’s like an exhaustively planned establishing tracking shot in a documentary called The Changing Face of Britain: 2012.
Down in Finsbury Park—past Wig
World and endless fried chicken shacks—urban Britain is making its nod to the Jubilee. Outside the pubs, drinkers—big men, in shorts—have staked out tables and benches. They exude the quiet, low-level confidence and skill of people who intend to be off their margins by one p.m., then remain that way for all four days of the bank holiday. They have an air of purpose usually seen in sheet metal workers cutting out car doors, or code crackers sitting down at desks at Bletchley.
One is wearing a cardboard mask of Prince Harry. Another has one of Pippa Middleton. This weekend, their job is to drink, unceasingly, to Queen and country.
Outside Nando’s, there is a double-sided sandwich board. On one side, it says “PERI PERI CHICKEN.” The “ER” in “Peri Peri” has been made to look like the royal insignia. It’s quite classy. On the other side, the message—which I feel genuinely speaks for the hearts of all customers—reads, “Thanks for the days off, Ma’am!”
Five chicken wings are just £5.20.
Running on, north, the road pitches up, the gardens fill with pink roses, and I am in Highgate—the dandy hilltop village enclave of bankers and millionaires. There, the window of the vintage tea shop High Tea is filled with Union Jack cupcakes. The hanging baskets have been fluffed into a Richard Curtis–like vision of English winsomery. The olde-style apothecary has filled its bow-front windows with bunches of lavender and British toiletries.
Yardley’s Triple-Milled English Rose Soap is just £7.99.
I turn, and start looping back. A mile away from home, and I return to privet-hedged suburbia. The sky starts lowering. The temperature is dropping. Summer looks like it’s being recalled. I run past the red, square Catholic church at the end of our street. There is a funeral in progress—the coffin is being carried out of the hearse, into a crescent of black-shoed mourners. It is draped in a Union Jack flag.
This weekend, even the dead are taking part in the Jubilee.
It starts to rain.
Back home, and the children are getting ready for tomorrow’s Jubilee party. Both are wearing the Jubilee crowns they made at school—eight-year-old Nancy’s is decorated with a picture she drew of the Queen. The Queen looks quite masculine, and angry. A bit like Bill Oddie when he sees an adolescent heron caught up in a discarded fishing line.
On Friday—in honor of the Jubilee—the children were excused from wearing their school uniforms, and told to come in “something red, white or blue,” instead.
“All the boys came in Arsenal strips,” Nancy says.
She’s making cupcakes. For some reason never quite explained, making cupcakes seems to be a vital part of this Jubilee. As if responding to some manner of embedded race memory, on hearing the words “Diamond Jubilee,” every household in Britain has automatically started dedicatedly creaming gigantic quantities of butter, sugar, and eggs. This week, it is an issue of patriotic duty to make small cakes. Our Queen sits on a throne made of sponge and jam.
In the absence of any formal ritual or schedule, such as with Christmas (stockings, massive lunch, EastEnders, standing at the bottom of the garden with a fag going, “We’re going away from Christmas next year—this is the last time”), Britain is carefully improvising its way through this Jubilee, using the props of 1950s tea dresses, bunting, charmingly mismatched china, red lipstick, and vintage tablecloths. In many ways, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee is the “Kirstie Allsopp Homemade Jubilee.” “The Cath Kidston Anniversary.”
Studying the origins of jubilees is of no help to our shaky planning—the ancient Egyptians held the first jubilees for their pharaohs every thirty years, by way of “renewing” their health and vigor. Their ceremonies consisted of the pharaoh donning a jubilee cape decorated with the tail of a wild animal, then running a race against a bull. Yeah.
All Egyptian ceremonies would then climax with the high priest incanting prayers to the gods, while holding up the flensed pelvis of an ox.
As the “ox pelvis bit” seemed to have been vetoed by Gary Barlow—organizer of the Jubilee concert—in favor of Cliff Richard singing “Congratulations,” instead, the British have been largely left on their own to work out how best to pay tribute to the Queen.
Each decision, of course, says more about the celebrant than the Queen herself, or the nature of the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Soft-porn men’s magazine Zoo, for instance, has issued a “Diamond Boobilee” special: “A right royal collection of the best British boobs!” including “A free massive poster—sixty-boob salute to the Queen!”
Royal perfumers Floris, on the other hand, issued the “Private Collection Perfume,” in an antique crystal bottle, hung with a “delicate gold chain featuring a white diamond,” and a hallmarked Royal Arms charm, for £15,000.
For those wishing for something in between tits and diamonds, meanwhile, there is Marmite’s limited edition jars, “Ma’amite”—normal Marmite, but with a thought about the Queen on the jar. So that even breakfast might celebrate the Jubilee.
And, in the meantime, there’s cakes. Cakes cakes cakes. Cakes while we figure out what this Jubilee actually is. Cakes, as a holding operation, while Britain works out just what the Jubilee, and the Queen—and, indeed, being British—all actually consist of.
In the twenty-first century all three remain, essentially, mysterious. If Britain’s unofficial motto has become “Keep Calm and Carry On,” its interim Jubilee motto is “Get Drunk and Make Cakes Until Further Notice.”
The next day, Sunday, is ten degrees colder than yesterday. It’s raining, hard. Summer is unconscious. In London, my kids are dutifully making a three-meter-high pile of cupcakes on the kitchen table—the rain having moved the day’s street parties indoors.
I, on the other hand, am now far away, in Hay-on-Wye, at the literary festival. As I eat breakfast, I watch The Andrew Marr Show, which has an interview with the pageant master, the man who has organized the thousand-boat-strong Flotilla along the Thames.
He is being asked about the catastrophic weather forecast for the afternoon, which seems to be specifically focused on the Thames and, microspecifically, over the eighty-six-year-old Queen’s hat.
“I’m hoping the cloud will burn off,” he says, with the “stay positive!” intense eye contact of someone who, deep down inside, is screaming an endless, silent scream.
“But there’s so much zeal and pride,” he continues, “I’m hoping it will reflect off the river, and bounce onto the people on the riverbank.”
“Good luck with that,” I think. “Good luck with that plan. Myself, I would have preferred a giant awning.”
The Andrew Marr Show ends, and I’ve got three hours to kill in Hay. The Jubilee must be out there somewhere, I think. I’m going to walk around the town, and try to find it.
Past the hotel door, the rain is tumultuous—it is coming sideways, and down; but also, interestingly, it is bouncing upwards, from the road, too. The scenes I had fondly imagined—trestle tables, jam jars filled with wildflowers, tipsy nannas, bunting, and cake, obviously—are resoundingly absent. Laburnums drip. Slate roofs shoot rainwater into gutters like a cannonade.
I walk past one house, garlanded with bunting, as the front door opens and a woman pops her head out.
“Perhaps she is about to start preparations for a street party!” I think. “This is the start of the festivities!”
She puts her hand out, and feels the rain—then scowls and withdraws back into the house. The door slams. This is not the start of the festivities.
I know I have not picked my location well. I am scarcely in a hotbed of fervent monarchism—I’m in a Welsh town that’s holding a left-wing literary festival. I go into a teashop, to seek respite from the rain, sit next to a display of silver sugar tongs, and order some Bara brith.
“Are there any Jubilee events happening today?” I ask the waitress as I drip onto the flagstones. “To honor our Queen?”
“I don’t think so. But I did just see A. C. Grayling!” she replies, cheerfully.
Having eaten the Ba
ra brith—it’s some cake! my best contribution to the Jubilee so far—I go back out into the rain, and trail around the shops. In Britain in 2012, consumerism is the barometer of humanity’s soul. Have people literally been buying into the Jubilee?
“They were until yesterday,” the man behind the counter in the Green Room says. He’s from Birmingham. He has the impossible, nonspecific melancholy of all Brummies. “Bunting. A lot of bunting. But today, I’ve only sold two car flags.”
“Are there any Jubilee celebrations going on in Hay?” I ask.
“There’s something in the square tomorrow, I think,” he says, mournfully.
“Nothing today?” I ask.
“Isn’t one street party enough?” he replies, with a burdened sigh.
I cross the road, to Mr. Puzzles Jigsaw World, which incorporates Teddy Bear Wonderland.
“Do you have any Jubilee jigsaws?” I ask. “Colorful ones, with pictures of the Queen on—from all ages of her reign?”
“There’s just one left, yes,” the lady behind the counter says. “In the window.”
I have to say, I’m surprised. I thought my request was so ludicrously specific that I would get a definite “no.”