… the state of being envied, a kind of an alter ego, a magic mirror in which we can see our desires realised.

Not to be confused with flash and cash, luxury and class privilege, sex and Paris Hilton.

Rather, it is a potent tool of persuasion, a form of nonverbal rhetoric that heightens and focuses desire. Glamour is all about hope and change. It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable.

A word of warning though from one of the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, who learns that “desire cheats you,…, It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and glids some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it – but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone -”

The pleasure and inspiration my be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. Its allure depends on obscuring or ignoring some details while heightening others – we see the dance but the rehearsals, the stiletto heels but not the blisters, the skyline but not the dirty street, the sports car but not the gas pump, the green light but no Daisy.

This may come as a shock to you, especially if you look at free speech as a boon and censorship as a burden, but I never wish for universal free speech. If a fairy godfather came to me and said I could switch sides, I’d open the window and make him use it. That’s not a knock on free speech – it seems to be working for many people – it’s that I have come to realise that self-censorship is a good thing. It’s cool: I could still convey my feelings clearly, even with the anchor attached. Still, you might argue, wouldn’t switching from a state of being tongue-tied to a free-for-all discourse be as liberating as a winning lottery ticket?

As an example consider the following statements and tell which is true?:

• China is the new colonialist and is already looking to use Africa as an allotment.

versus

• China is a better bet for Africa against Western hegemony.

Of course they are both true! The difference is that the former is crass and lacking in subtlety, nuance and blindingly obvious – hence free of self-censorship. The latter conveys reality in an insightful manner, without being defensive and resorting to stereotypes – with the racist undertows that goes with the former.

How do we then talk about Chinese incursion to Africa without resorting to racist stereotypes, but at the same time have a meaningful discourse that is historically anchored? Not by resorting to the former statement – a ticking bomb that is vile, racist and paternalistic (Africa is not stupid – corrupt perhaps – it knows where it’s bread is buttered). Is it possible that Africans see China as the lesser evil?

I can understand the desire not to have your thoughts and actions hindered by censorship. What I can’t understand is why can’t we do so with manners, diplomacy, decorum, and political correctness (another good thing that is constantly vilified, but that’s a different story). Lets bring sexy back to censorship.

I can’t help but notice an increasingly annoying trend with regards to naming restaurants. It seems to have started with the bloody highway names — R63, then M4, or M74.

The other annoying trend is restaurants with the word “Bar” — Bar Crudo, BarDeli, and Barbacco. You’d think that people in a creative industry such as food could come up with something a bit more original.

Another trend is to name restaurants after tableware: Spoon, Tablespoon, Fork?

Nature and seasons has been an inspiration for a lot of names: Seasons, Three Seasons, Four Seasons.

Food names: Wild Fig, Quince, Basil, Lime and the like.

I find it confusing and I would think that naming your restaurant something that makes it stand out from the pack would require a little more creative investment. Maybe these people are just too tired at the end of the day to care.

What we know about love in the times that preceded us ours we have learned from proverb, myth and literature, and that knowledge remains, to this day, somewhat spotty. Love is blind, a baptism, a red rose or a wild plant born of wet night, a course that never did run smooth – despite a compass or a chart. It is a labour we frequently lose.

The reign of love commenced with our mitocondrial ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ on the African savanna – perhaps even earlier. Did ‘Adam’ profess undying love to ‘Eve’ before every hunt? Perhaps not, but how are we to know?

Hence, literature remains our best, most comprehensive archive of human love. All that we expect of love, our notions of how it will lift us, reward us, transform us, comes from a long line of books, poems and songs that have detailed what we may hope for from love and what price in exchange for its pleasure.

Love is a demon, a religious faith and a divine madness. But in recent times it is in danger from the last century that brought Freud, ‘antiromantic bias’ of conventional feminism, pheromones and friends with benefits – streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence – lacking grand passion, dare and poetry.

What follows is a charter for a new republic of love, a blueprint for a new model. A charter that embraces love as ecstatic, risky, transgressive, sometimes unequal and perhaps aggressive – but never violent . A faith, a demon and a divine madness. With a caveat though: the suffering that it induces must be the crucible in which we refine our souls. Let us allow ourselves to be derailed by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.   

As promised, my first all vegetarian menu – or should it be called selectarian? Verdict: roaring success.

Gazpacho

Blini with Roasted Sweet Peppers and Eggplant Caviar

Tortelli di Zucca

Fricassee of Chanterelles with Cauliflower, Leeks, Spinach, Spaetzle and Parmesan

Roquefort Trifle with French Butter Pear Relish

Chocolate Fondant

Petit Fours and Combustibles

There are those days, those moments in life, when for no particular reason the senses are heightened and the commonplace becomes sublime. It was one of those days for me. You want to shout ‘Boyohboyohboyohboy!’, do a little jig, kiss a stranger and say wondrous things about making out with a stripper.

Ever sipped on a cocktail that emitted the scent of a an ex lover? It is a silkily seductive idea – a marriage between loss, lust and wickedness.

Much like a good perfume, the experience has different levels – an initial bouquet of familiarity, that soon drifts to a deeper intimate knowledge (albeit still new fresh, and dirty like any new relationship), then to the deep fragrant sandalwood like base of the matter ( mycologically deep and loamy and generous).

Then you find yourself fumbling through the emotions, marveling at thoughts that before had never merited a second look. And you are awed for a moment by just how tremendously, how incredibly, how child-frighteningly ugly they are.

Moments are our mentors!

Lord Stern of Brentford has declared that, “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is much better.”

The bone-head in me silently said “Bah! Who cares?” We’ve known for a long time that a fully vegetarian world would be be more sustainable and better able to feed its growing billions. But it would be so mind numbingly boring and dull– besides just imagine the chronic farting of billions of vegetarians?

Upon further in depth chats with various meat-swervers and the like – and I must say without any preachy self-denial on my part or a Stalinist rant on their part – I have decided that the future is going to be the middle path, with a bias on being semi-vegetarian. From now on, I shall only host vegetarian dinner parties – with one important rider. My plates of vegetables, a.k.a. sorry weeds, will be utterly adorable in conception, visual effect and mouth action.

I am going to do this not because of some half-baked ideology of food that is in vogue at the moment – mostly from born-again eco-amatuer warriors who look at meat as some apocalyptic poison, plague, pillage and profit. As opposed to appetite or inventiveness, epicurean skill or celebration. Although that is going to have minimal gestural impact, I am going to do it because it is a decent thing to do. I will probably not do this forever – how terrifying not to have an occasional slap-up feast of sweet animal meat, seared, sliced and scattered with salt. Until such time – for the sake of my wallet, the planet and my health – I will just stop cooking meat for my guests.

Besides, I was not born craving a Whopper.

I won’t complain

If that’s the best you can do.

But if you’ve got class

Fill my glass

With Oklahoma homebrew.

• Tom T. Hall

Maybe it’s something else other than the drink that we are trying to capture when we drink champagne. Not only are we in search of a perfect illusion, we are in search of a transmuting potion that will take us to another state of existence…

As well, of course, taking us to vicarious pleasure, transcendence, temptation and folly.

In this congested existence, champagne – in its classic flute, swirling bubbles, aesthetically elegant, containing the elixir of life within its DNA – stands out as a way of denying the demands of life and complications of possessions … the desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want.

On behalf of a grateful human race, we thank you Dom Perignon for failing spectacularly.

True elegance is understated: “Invisible, inaudible – masculine elegance, so decorative and colourful up until the end of the eighteenth century, becomes almost immobile in the nineteenth century. From the frock coats of Gainsborough’s portraits to the city worker’s two-piece suit, very little has changed in the structure of men’s clothes. But the language of uniformity is subtly varied in its details, in the cut, proportion or materials of a piece of cloth. Though these different elements are almost imperceptible, each is resolutely identifiable, and each makes a vital contribution to the even more intangible notion of distinction.”

If the so-called stronger sex does have style, it only exist provided that it is never talked about. The world of masculine dress is one of silence, which is only violated at the risk of there being dire ambiguity. Obliged to leave things unsaid, any development in the masculine occurs by would-be natural shifts, with no conspicuous break,. Whence dearth of comment inversely proportionate to those enjoyed since the year dot by feminine fashion.

Apart from one or two peripheral circles, its classicism, recycling all manner of invention and new discovery, reworked the style, wit time, into a unique formula – that of a suit. It was an eloquent metaphor, since it described both a specific item of clothing and the sum of all others. So far the unsinkable ‘suit-and-a tie’ twosome, dear to the contemporary managerial class, represented the sole, intangible and unsurpassable synthesis of masculine elegance.

Where is allure in all of this? The allure is what is left to man when he’s forgotten all about the ways and habits of elementary stylishness. Everyone senses it intuitively, the allure only exists in the eye of the beholder.  

Her glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask tablecloth, beyond the smear of lipstick a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette. All around us were remains of an impromptu feast – smoked salmon, caviar, red onions, black bread, oysters, grapes,…

“What are you thinking about, Zuki?”, she purred.

“Noel, Ms Hagedash.”

“Which Noel?”, she demanded.

“Oh, just Noel.”

The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees. She pinned me against the wall, her size 10 stiletto denting my neck.

“Noel Coward?” she screamed, “Noel Gallagher? … Noel Sullivan? … Noel Fielding?”

“No … no, my odoriferous fig. Buche de Noel!”

“Aaah! Buche de Noel. I do love Buche de Noel.”, she sighed.

A couple of days later I would recall the details of her appearance with a frisson of excitement – a line of muscle on a tan thigh, cut-off jeans, the under curve of a breast showing below the half shirt, the red stiletto, yellow hair tied up haphazardly, tendrils escaping to brush high cheekbones and wide green eyes.

(With apologies to Bruce Chatwin – What Am I Doing Here)