Convenience Big Store: The joy of being a glutton

10 December, 2023

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A 17th-century banquet, by Abraham Hendriksz van Beijeren. Getty

The joy of being a glutton

I am a glutton, says Tim Hayward in the FT. "I eat purely for pleasure, reaching satiation and then pushing on through" like some "obsessed athlete". I write about food not in the sense of nourishment or the appeasement of hunger, but as a source of joy, and I write about it in a way that is meant to "wilfully entice others". And what's wrong with that? Gluttony only got its bad reputation in 590AD, when Pope Gregory I lumped it in with his Seven Deadly Sins, "possibly while feeling the effects of one of those gigantic feasts of a pre-antacid papacy". Since then, society has "abhorred" culinary excess, associating it with a lack of restraint and self-control. "Thanks, Greg."

It's encouraging to remember that there are plenty of things we once saw as sinful but now, thankfully, embrace. Take sex. For long periods in history, women who took pleasure from intercourse could end up burnt at the stake. Sex outside marriage was illegal, and "having a little fiddle on your own behalf" was said to make you go "blind, mad or worse". It was "blinkered, life-hating, joyless garbage", and it came to an end because brave individuals spoke up – from DH Lawrence and Henry Miller to Marilyn French and Germaine Greer. And that's me, in defence of gluttony. "I'm determined to wring maximum joy out of this world and to share it with others."

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE This one-time military hospital in Wiltshire blends architectural styles, with Georgian reception rooms, Gothic revival extensions and an Arts and Crafts ballroom. Built in the early 18th century, the four-bedroom property retains period features including a 40ft library, and a vast inglenook fireplace engraved with a French family motto. Bath Spa train station is a 25-minute drive, with trains to London Paddington in 1hr 15mins. £1,250,000.

Life

The view of Lake Zurich from Paracelsus

The world's most exclusive clinic

When the ultra-rich hit rock bottom, says Sian Boyle in The Sunday Times, they head to Paracelsus Recovery, the world's "most exclusive mental health and addiction clinic". Located in an unassuming building overlooking Lake Zurich, it treats just three people at a time, each paying about £100,000 a week. Though privacy is obviously paramount, clients apparently include professional athletes, world leaders, and CEOs whose mental collapse could "move markets". There are 15 staff for each of the patients, and the schedules are "strictly vetted" to ensure the three guests never meet. The lodgings are suitably luxurious – the penthouses have baby grand pianos – but some people still bring in their own interior designers to wallpaper their rooms. "Several Middle Eastern clients have set up Bedouin tents on the roof terrace."

Patients can expect all the usual treatments and activities (IV drips, dog therapy, horse-riding), along with hi-tech machines that "analyse electromagnetism, blast oxygen and scan hearts in 3D". But one of the main draws is that each guest gets a round-the-clock, live-in therapist. These shrinks "put their entire lives on hold for their clients" – watching TV with them, sharing meals with them, talking to them at 3am when they can't sleep. Sometimes the therapist even returns home with the client to continue their therapy, and effectively works undercover – as a member of their household staff, say, or as a biographer. "It doesn't matter how much money you have or what your last name is," says Paracelsus founder Jan Gerber. "Pain is real."

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Food and drink

Crisp flavours vary wildly throughout the world, says Amelia Tait in The Guardian. I've encountered lasagne-flavoured Lay's in Thailand and sampled Hawaii-style Poké Bowl crisps in Hungary. In France and southern Europe, crisps are considered more of a "pre-dinner" snack: flavours are generally "light and simple", so they don't "overpower any accompanying cocktails". East Asia goes mad for fishy flavours like crab and seaweed, while in adventurous South Korea you can get cola, caramel and yoghurt-flavoured Pringles. So how do companies decide which flavours to introduce where? Walkers uses a tool that reads every restaurant menu on the internet to see the popularity of different ingredients. This is what prompted them to launch Thai Sweet Chilli Sensations in the UK in 2002 – enough Thai restaurants had opened around the country to suggest there'd be a market for them.

Quirk of history

Top shagger (and peeping tom) Mir Osman Ali Khan, seventh nizam of Hyderabad

200 concubines, 600 dildos and £8m for Mrs Robinson

When Lord Curzon was Viceroy to India at the turn of the 20th century, says Pratinav Anil in Literary Review, he called the princes of the sub-continent's 562 states "undisciplined schoolboys". That was something of an understatement. There was the "forelock-tugging" ruler of Gwalior, who named his son George after the English king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur boasted a collection of 600 dildos, which Pakistan's generals "solicitously buried when they deposed him". The despot in Junagadh spent a small fortune hosting 50,000 guests at a wedding for one of his favourite dogs, the bride "swaddled in pearls" and the groom's paws "bedecked with gold".

The "insatiable, incorrigible" seventh nizam of Hyderabad "couldn't content himself with 200 wives and concubines" – he used hidden cameras to photograph European guests in the nude. Kashmir's Hari Singh was caught with his trousers down in Paris with a blonde called Mrs Robinson, costing the exchequer £125,000 (£8m today) in hush money. Khairpur's corpulent overlord was so well fed he couldn't get his face "closer than 60 centimetres to the table", while the penultimate ruler of Patiala could devour 25 quail in a single sitting. Such were his appetites (including for sex), that some 60% of the state's income was spent on his sustenance. After independence, however, these princedoms suffered a precipitous fall from grace. Just look at Hyderabad's first family. "The seventh nizam was possibly the richest man in the world; the ninth was a cameraman on the set of Basic Instinct."

Dethroned: The Downfall of India's Princely States by John Zubrzycki is available here.

Film

Watership Down: not for the faint-hearted

Children's films need a "sinister edge"

"What moment of cinematic horror was seared into your mind as a child?" asks Billie Walker in the I newspaper. Was it the fields of blood in Watership Down? Or when Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, taking his guests out on the chocolate river, starts "waxing lyrical about rowing into hell" as images of creepy crawlies flash up around the terrified children? You'd be hard-pressed to find such "haunting scenes" in more recent kids' movies. Wonka, the new film starring Timothée Chalamet, is a "charming and sickly sweet" exploration of the chocolatier's past, with none of the "sinister edge" of previous portrayals. This year's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid replaces the shrunken, "disfigured" merpeople – Ursula's previous victims – with sea anemones.

As with the recent decision to change Watership Down's long-standing U certificate to a PG rating, there is a clear trend of sanitising children's cinema to "coddle young audiences". But these frightening moments taught important lessons. Watership Down, through anthropomorphised moments of warfare and environmental destruction, showed children the pain humans are capable of inflicting. Wilder's smirking Willy Wonka showed us that apparent heroes can be "capable of extreme cruelty"; the disfigured merpeople revealed that not every "scary" thing is out to hurt you. Children's films are worse off without these "safe doses of fear".

Books

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women (2019)

Even top authors have faced "ruthless rejections", says Mental Floss. When Louisa May Alcott – who later wrote Little Women – submitted a piece about her experience as a governess, she was told: "Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write." Marcel Proust ended up self-publishing the first volume of In Search of Lost Time after a publisher wrote: "I rack my brains why a chap should need 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep." In private, publishers were even more scathing. "I haven't the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say," one wrote of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. "Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level." Another passed up The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, telling a rival: "You're welcome to le Carré – he hasn't got any future."