I really wasn't going to do another blog until I had planted out my smuggled buddlejas and penstemmons and severely contorted my middle aged body on a five day yoga course with my two best friends in their chateau neat St Gaudens. Having agreed to help provide the vittals [wheat, dairy and booze free, of course], food has been very much on my mind as I have waded through such illustrious publications as 'Dr Joshi's Holistic Detox' and 'Carol Vorderman's 28 day Detox Plan'. Still not sure what detoxing is, but I do so love playing around with new recipe ideas.
Then, this morning on the 10.00am news bulletin on Radio 4, the news came through that Keith Floyd, the original TV celebrity chef [if you discount the matronly and decidedly bossy Fanny Craddock!], had died. I was devestated and felt much the same overwhelming sense of sadness that I had felt when it was announced that first Bob Marley and then John Lennon were no longer with us. Only yesterday, in my local coffee shop, I was reading a hilariously funny extract from Keith Floyd's autobiography from a borrowed copy of the 'Daily Mail'. Remembering all those great programmes where it was obvious that everyone was totally plastered, I finally had it from the horse's mouth.
I knew that he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer but had thought that the prognosis would be reasonably good, despite his years of seriously 'going for it'. There was something so wonderfully reassuring about that permanently craggy old face that made us all feel reckless and carefree when it came down to the really important things in life. Food, wine and friends, thrown randomly together wherever one was in the world, provided his metier. He made us feel good about the good things, and bugger tomorrow. How different it all is today when, if you're female, you are made to think that if you have just half a glass of wine a week you are destined for a long slow death from breast cancer, or if you're male you will die of some complication from a sclerotic liver.
Ironically, just in case you're thinking 'QED', they say that he died from a heart attack. My guess is that the chemo drugs may have damaged his heart, but, of course, it is possible that the wanton self abuse of his life style was the principal reason. In any event, I don't know whether to be joyful for a life so well lived, or depressed because his death, if you'll excuse the awful pun, is yet another nail in the proverbial coffin for all of us 'bon vivants'. Personally, I don't want to be a dribbling, incontinent, brain dead 95 year old shut up in a lonely nursing home until I fall out of my wheelchair and keel over. Life is for living and as far as I am concerned I would rather have Keith Floyd as my mentor than some gym addicted Department of Health bureaucrat.
Friends of ours knew him in Bristol when he had his loss making restaurant. The restaurant was great, they told us, and the food was, as one would expect, fantastic. I was at a loss to understand how a restaurant owned and cooked in by the great Keith Floyd could have lost so much money. The answer was so simple, and a mark of the great man himself. Quite simply, the minute the bulk of his semi teetotal and dull customers left the restaurant, Keith would dive into the cellar and pull out sundry bottles of his favourite clarets and Burgundies for his 'chums' to taste and test.....and drink.....and drink. It was not unheard of for them to stagger out into the misty Bristol night air at 5 o'clock in the morning. He enjoyed himself so much, he never charged them.
Such generosity of spirit is uplifting and, in my book, is what life is all about. What else is there? Answers on a postcard please! Rien! I have just pulled out of my bookshelf an old copy of his definitive 1987 'Floyd on France', which was, at the time, south west London's answer to Elizabeth David and Julia Child. It is all so simple that us baby boomers, desperate to impress at our 'dinner parties' could knock off the real thing with none of the guesswork required for the lengthy tomes of ED and JC et al. We learnt to cook, thanks to him. He always said that everything that he cooked was courtesy of Elizabeth David but, in reality, he communicated to us the real essence of her work with none of the experimental pitfalls.
When we went to live in Madrid in 1992, with a hyperactive one year old in tow, we were able to sample the delights of Spanish food from his 'Floyd on Spain' book without having to stay up until 3 o'clock in the morning in the local Madrileno restaurants. I think that we pretty well cooked our way through the whole of his book on Spain, a bit like Julie Powell cooking her way through Julia Child et al's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. It was easier for us because Floydy had written the recipes. If you haven't seen 'Julie and Julia' yet, by the way, you must. Meryl Streep was a brilliant Julia Child although, as I watched the movie, I realised that I had never ever seen her in the true flesh. Before Floyd, there were just books, not people. Julia Child was a great personality but, unlike Floyd, us Brits never saw her. The Americans did, of course.
So, adieu then, to a master. The world will not be the same without him. I mourn not just the man, but a way of life in retreat. It was great while it lasted and now it's Dr Joshi's holistic detox [my arse!]. So long, Keith, and thanks for all the fish!
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