When David Cameron took China’s President Xi down the pub for a quiet pint, with merely a few security service operatives, a clutch of baffled locals and the world’s media as witnesses, he made a rookie error.
As any fool knows, we have a perfect pre-dinner, pub-based snack: crisps. Peanuts if you’re famished, Scampi Fries if you’re trying to impress a date. If there is absolutely no prospect of food later, one might consider a pickled egg tossed in a bag of crushed crisps, preferably cheese and onion. But not “mini fish and chips”, served in a dainty miniature wire basket, with a redundant, but irritating, sprig of parsley on top.
Properly constituted fish and chips are designed to fell you, to leave you in a battered stupor of protein, carbs and salt. They are meant to confuse Jamie Oliver with their combination of wholesomeness and transgression. Even their vegetable accompaniments – stodgy mushy peas and juicy, vinegary wallies – are formidable. What kind of person eats them as a canape?
The kind of person keen to reassure a demanding house guest – and we’ve all had them, tugging at our sleeves, begging to be taken to something “really authentic”, “just what you’d do” – of the continued existence of a cultural artefact more honoured in the breach than the observance. What Cameron needed was George Orwell’s Moon Under Water, a virtually unimprovable pub imagined by him in 1946, despite the fact that it served liver sausage sandwiches rather than cod and chips.
Its particulars might jar with a modern sensibility – creamy stout in strawberry-pink china mugs, middle-aged barmaids who call all the customers “dear”, a garden where mother might mind the baby rather than having to stay at home alone – but the sentiment endures. We all know what we would like a pub to be: whatever we want (“Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone”).
Orwell knew he was writing about a fantasy of comfort and joy and David Cameron probably knew the same. The Plough at Cadsden is a country pub in the affluent home counties: venture 40 miles into London and you’ll find a different story. If I were to scout my neighbourhood in search of somewhere to entertain President Xi, what would I find? Well, not a pub; not until I’d gone past a Peruvian ceviche-and-pisco joint and a Turkish mangal. Eventually, I’d hit upon a place that serves wood-fired pizzas and boasts a micro-brewery. Not far away is a new place under renovation; aeons ago it was a cavernous Victorian pub with greenish crackle-glaze tiles.
If he were staying longer, Xi and I would be able to go there to play KerPlunk and drink a milkshake. Whether we’d be able to get fish and chips, a dish descended from 16th-century Portuguese-Jewish refugees, washed down with India pale ale, originally exported to slake the thirsts of East India Company traders, remains to be seen.
