Oliver Loaf, Or: Please Sir I Want Some More

I confess I have a soft spot for Jamie Oliver, the chef so beloved by middle Britain. His livery lips, his unruly thatch of hair, his speech impediment--I could just eat him up. And soon, I will.

Oxford is all a-flutter over the impending arrival of a new restaurant conceived by Oliver. It will be known as Jamie's Italian. And what exactly will the cuisine be like? Well, I took this photo of the site, which is being renovated now:


A "twist of Jamie." It sounds cannibalistic. But it's the obvious next step in the deification of celebrity hash-slingers. First you could buy their cook books. Then you could buy their skillets. Then you could buy their ingredients. Now you can buy them, little bits of their bodies to sprinkle into your sauces and salad dressings, like a pinch of a saint's relic. A twist of Jamie. Some Oliver oil.

Or maybe I'm thinking this way because we saw the wonderfully odd French movie "Delicatessen" last night.

BritNews RoundUp
Did you see Emily Wax's delightful Washington Post story about the Redskins cheerleaders traveling to India to perform at cricket matches? Now comes the backlash. The Guardian reports that the pom-pom shakers have angered conservative politicians and drawn lewd comments from male oglers. "I think in the Indian context [cheerleaders] are seen as slightly sleazy which is not a reflection on the women but the perception [from Indian men]. So lewd comments, I am sorry to say, do not surprise me at all," Mukul Kesavan, a cricket writer, told the Guardian. Slightly sleazy? Cheerleaders? No.

Meet Britain's worst driver: Jamie Manderson has never had a driver's license and yet he notched his first driving offenses as a teenager, getting banned at age 15. This week he was jailed for eight months after earning his 51st driving-related conviction. Rob Ross, Manderson's lawyer, told the court: "He still has a problem with motor cars. He always will." In the past, Ross, who describes his client as a "likeable idiot", has said Manderson suffers from "a serious addiction to cars."

I haven't been able to find a decent video online (someone must have bought the rights to film it in 3-D Imax) but even the still photos are pretty amazing: More than 1,600 Belgian students dropped Mentos into Coke bottles yesterday, creating the world's largest eruption of sticky sweet geysers.

The same arguments over the HPV vaccine are being fought here as in the States. There's that puritanical tinge to it--the vaccination to shield girls from cervical cancer will just encourage them to have sex--but England being England, there's also an anti-science bent. This, after all, is the country that swooned over the MMR vaccine, when middle class mums with too much time on their hands started to believe a discredited researcher who said the jab caused autism. (It doesn't.) The Daily Mail helped fan those flames. Now the paper says one in three British girls offered the HPV vaccine in a trial have refused it. Or is it one in five, as the Guardian reports? Oh let's just average those and call it 25 percent.

The making of a new James Bond movie is greeted here with the same sort of excitement and glee as the news that a member of the royal family is pregnant. It's an excuse for Fleet Street to run all sorts of stories, starting with the annointing of the new Bond girls, roles that are roughly equivalent to those of the vestal virgins in ancient Rome. The latest movie, "Quantum of Solace," is providing lots of news, especially since they keep crashing those expensive cars. The third accident in five days has people talking of a "Bond curse." Maybe that's what you get when you give your female characters names like "Papilloma Jabb."

Finally, everybody hates J.K. Rowling. And when I say "everybody," I mean all the other authors at her publishing house, who feel the imprint pays far too much attention to that darned Harry Potter.

Gargoyle of the Week


This fellow peers down from a university building on the Banbury Road, the master of all he surveys.

I survey the weekend coming up. Have a good one and thanks for reading.

Just Desserts: Pictured Around Oxford

This is a tasty British dessert. Can't quite make out the name? Here it is:



"Fru Fruity Puds." Even knowing that the last word is pronounced like "poods" as in "pudding" rather than "pudds" as in..., well, let's not go there, does not ameliorate the unease I felt upon consuming my zesty lemon cheesecake.

Tickets, Please
If you park illegally in Oxford you may find your windshield adorned with a brightly-colored plastic bag with a ticket inside:


Your first reaction upon getting an expensive ticket may be to wish the whole thing would just go away. That would be unwise, for as the plastic bag warns:



It's like they read my mind. Luckily, I don't have a car in England, so it's nearly impossible to get a parking ticket.

Nor do I have much in the way of a lawn, so I don't have to worry about mole infestation. Lest you think that moles are random creatures, take a look at this, near Godstow Abbey:

I love the sinuous perfection of that mole's work.

Doubleplusgood Choco Chip Biscuits

There are some foodstuffs the English do very well. Beer, for example. And roast lamb. They have an amazing variety of potato chips, too, imbuing the humble "crisp" (as they call it) with all sorts of exotic flavors. Then there are the things the English don't do very well, or don't do at all. I'm talking about the cookie.

The English don't even have cookies. They have biscuits, which aren't really the same thing at all. There is a place for a biscuit--dipped in a mug of milky tea, for example--but it doesn't satisfy the longing, the craving, that an American feels for a cookie. I hope I will get no argument if I suggest that the king of the cookie is the mighty chocolate chip.

You never notice how ubiquitous the chocolate chip cookie is in the United States until you are denied it. It has become such a part of the landscape that you can purchase one literally almost anywhere. I guarantee you that eight out of 10 cash registers in America have a stack of chocolate chip cookies next to them, wrapped up in plastic and awaiting that impulse buyer. We Americans consider the chocolate chip cookie a birthright, like potable water and easy access to firearms.

That isn't the case in Britain. This isn't to say that chocolate chip cookies are completely unknown. There's a stand called Ben's Cookies in Oxford's historic Covered Market that sells something it calls a chocolate chip cookie. But it has a disappointingly cakey mouthfeel, not the satisfyingly granular mouthfeel of a true CCC. And you can buy factory-made chocolate chip cookies at the grocery store. The brand names they go by suggest that the Brits are trying to capture some of that American magic, even if they are a bit misguided:


Funny, I don't really think of Maryland (or "Merry-land," as an English person would say) when I think of chocolate chip cookies. Then again, nor do I think of Tennessee:


The Tennessee High Quality Chocolate Chunk Cookies are actually made in Germany, where they apparently have less of a grasp of that particular baked good than in England. (I love that little picture of the antebellum mansion.) I suppose I should be thankful I'm not shopping in Japan, where the brand name would probably be something like HomeRun Armadillo Cookie Chip.

How do Maryland and Tennessee chocolate chip cookies taste? Not that good, though you will notice that both those packages are empty, so they must be good enough. Luckily, My Lovely Wife, after much experimentation, has successfully baked real, American-style chocolate chip cookies in our idiosyncratic little cooker. Hopefully we can get through the next five months without withdrawal symptoms kicking in.

I Heart My Heart
Of course, I shouldn't be eating these things at all given that they aren't the healthiest of choices. But I strive for moderation in all things, which is sort of the point of a little piece I have in today's Washington Post Health section. It's about how my life has changed since having a heart attack in 2001. I'll be chatting live with web readers toay at noon Eastern Standard Time (5 p.m. here in Britain). If you want to join us, just go here.

I Don't Know the Muffin, Man
We Americans are no better when it comes to geographically mis-named food. "English" muffins, anyone? A British person would look at you blankly if you asked for one. Not that I recommend the English tea cake, a baked good beloved of little old ladies in tea shops. It resembles nothing so much as the bottom half of a toasted hamburger bun. That's pretty much what it tastes like, too.

For sheer breakfast grotesquery, nothing can compete with the American Cinnabon. Talk about a heart attack on a plate....