It wasn’t to my taste, just as setting a Biblical theme in thoroughly modern surrounds seems on a par with recasting Shakespeare’s works in the language of today, the trade-off inevitably being a sense of authenticity.
Yet when the counter-argument is raised – making issues accessible to 21st Century Everyman – one’s initial reservations perhaps ought to take a back seat.
A recent article in the Telegraph claimed British society is becoming more religious, as today’s generation seeks to break free from their parents’ secularism.
Two examples were given as if to prove the point: former Tory leader Michael Howard’s son training to be a Priest, alongside ex-BBC Director General John Birt whose son Jonathan has changed his name to Yahya and is now a devout student of Islam.
I wonder at the extent of the paradigm shift, given the media forever extrapolate one step too far given the chance. The underlying question should surely be: how deep-rooted is this religiosity? The answer to that is, by definition, surely some way off, when the media hype has settled.
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Smoking in public places is about to become illegal in Britain – a world away from the mindset pervading in Moscow, where cigarettes are as cheap as chocolate bars and the temptation seemingly just as great, if my workplace is anything to go by!
Here is one case of time ushering in a discernible shift in Western society’s approach – in this case, legislation emasculating smoker’s rights. I am old enough to remember walking to the back of an aeroplane 20 years ago, pulling aside the curtain to the rear cabin and being met with a wall of carbon monoxide.
Ditto being on London double-decker buses and, having nowhere else to sit, gingerly climbing the stairs to the upper deck and enduring the same acrid setting for the duration of the journey.
Western governments have barely balked at introducing tough, anti-smoking laws, yet have shown nowhere near the same resolute approach when it comes to enshrining other values where the ill-effects cannot necessarily be located at the foot of a hospital bed.
Perhaps, then, the Telegraph article was right – and people are really taking matters into their own hands, in the absence of governments taking a lead over the state we’re in today.
There is something quite shocking and disappointing about returning to a favourite restaurant and finding it is no more. Indeed, the shock is all the more palpable when the place seemed such a veritable institution.
Such was my experience the other week on returning to Wheelers of St James in Central London – a fish restaurant par excellence dating from the 19th Century no less – now with the Lease sign up and the cables cut on the exterior lighting.
I ate a superlative meal there several months ago in a unique narrow dining room – so narrow at one point that diners sat alongside each other looking into thin air in order for the waiter to pass by and serve other tables.
The experience was marred only by the said Octogenarian waiter, who needed one reminder too many to bring napkins to the table, of all things. Still, when the cooking is A* you tend to excuse the doddery sideshow, especially when, it now transpires, the man concerned probably knew the writing was on the wall.
It all comes together at Selfridges in London for a princely £85. I paid a special visit hoping to see the sandwich in the chiller. But, alas, seems you have to place your order and pay up before the staff set about creating the culinary, err, mouthful.
For the rest of us there’s always the store’s roast beef and red onion marmalade variation on a theme – for the slightly less outrageous £3.65.
