Walking past an optician’s the other day (at least it looked like an optician’s shop) I saw one of those things that makes at least me go hmmm. Not in a good way.
Heston Blumenthal spectacles.
If there’s any need at all to continue then I just will.
Nigella and Jamie Oliver cookware was bad enough. I could just about tolerate Jamie Oliver cookware because after all he was actually a trained chef who’d put the hours in and like Anthony Worral Thomson might be presumed to know what’s rubbish in a busy kitchen, rather than choosing something because the colour matched his nail varnish.
Gok Wan spectacles were stretching it, for me, not just because I detest the simpering silly fey queen act he has to put on for the camera on the orders of his director (Gok Wan says he’s a pint and a game of footie bloke who happens to be gay, so don’t blame me) but because I can’t see what a stylist has to do with spectacles.
Or actually, thinking about it and so long as he doesn’t get involved with the prescriptions and puffing air into your eyes while you look at a balloon, I can. I mean, presumably his job used to involve trawling through catalogues and buying hundreds of frames on sale-or-return before a gruelling morning with clients trying to find the has-to-be-that-one-
darling frame that would make someone look like they liked wearing glasses when nobody really does in case they look like the kid in the NHS specs on the special desk in Mrs Jones classroom, before John Boy Walton, John Denver and John Lennon made round lenses temporarily acceptable. And why the spooky unexplained mystery internet conspiracy Illuminati coincidence of them all being called John?
Ok. So Gok Wan. Nigella. No, sorry, I can’t stand Nigella. I’ve never liked cartoons apart from Tom and Jerry.
But Heston Blumenthal is a cook. I’m not going to call him a chef in the same way I don’t call Nigella a chef. Because they both aren’t. Chefs are trained. Neither of those two ever did a day’s training. Epitomising the great Neo-Con Lie, Blumenthal says he taught himself, so he can take all the credit when it goes right, presumably.
Obviously it’s not his fault when it goes wrong. For example, when he poisoned over a hundred people who came to regret going to the Fat Duck at Bray, although interior decorators probably did very nicely out of that particular epidemic of food poisoning that the local Environmental Health Inspectors felt was just one of those things, in a way they signally never do if you have a restaurant and not a TV show as well. Try being called (Your Name Goes Here)’s Kitchen or the Balti Star and see how long you’re open if you give ten people food poisoning, let alone 240 customers spinning like toxic Catherine Wheels, but the kind nobody is going to say ‘oooooh’ about. Although a hose might still come in handy.
A cook. Heston Blumenthal is a cook. He shaves his head, presumably because he’s going bald or maybe he just read Skinhead under his desk in RE too often. He wears chefs whites, presumably he pops into the kitchen now and then. Big watches, because hey, it’s a guy thing. I’ve got one. I can’t quite see (ahahaha, geddit?) how that qualifies him to design spectacles.
Ok, he wears them. They make him look like a Thunderbirds puppet. I wear glasses too. I’m actually doing it now. Reckon we’ll see the Writer-Insighter range at Boots any time soon?
