The Slow Lane: Something for the Weekend?
I have a very simple yardstick for ranking my friends. It owes nothing to their appearance, their wallets or how useful I find their contacts. It doesn’t count letters after their name or the number of times I’ve slept with them. Nor am I really bothered if they pamper themselves with products or simply smell rotten.
Focusing on the very basics, it starts by sampling the way people heat their homes. Commuting as I do between estates in Switzerland, Sweden and Shepherd’s Bush, I am often forced to rely on the kindness of peasants. And there are only so many onion-fired Dutch ovens a man can bed down in without choking.
But as with much of life, if you nail the simpler, smaller things, then the rest tends to fall into place. This is particularly true of innkeepers, and how they deal with converting meagre stocks of combustibles into comfort. My partner Hagar has long been toying with the notion of launching a scandalzine called Hot Or Bot? Constantly updated, it would rate hostelries by the methane quotient of their biofuels.
“If you have to hold your nose before the food’s served, then you might as well forget about the rest,” Hagar is fond of saying.
I prefer to call it the “can’t be arsed” factor. Having applied Hagar’s hospitality measure for several years now, I can vouch for the unbridled awfulness of most auberges, which is why I no longer use them. Instead I rely on friends, carefully cultivated at daily intervals along the major arteries of Western Europe.
If a friend can warm a cesspit to my standards, I’ll overlook the rest. If they can cook as well, then it’s practically guaranteed to mark the start of a lifelong, rewarding relationship. At least that’s how I see it.
Yet I wasn’t feeling the love last Monday in Aachen. After a full day’s drive across Flanders, I’d been hoping to reach the Rhineland retreat I so adore. But an axle broke and repairing it cost our party crucial hours, so that glass of delicate Riesling would have to wait. Instead of the comforts of Gerd’s humane touch, I was forced to seek solace with his cousin, though I did give brief consideration to some semi-tempting offers in a tavern.
I perhaps should have been concerned when I saw the rocket stove. To the untrained eye, these Moorish earthen kilns look rather sweet, the sort of thing you’d proudly install in servants’ quarters, and possibly even show visitors. They’re a common sight in cob, straw-bale, and other natural buildings. But I’d never come across one in the city.
Or so I thought. Then I remembered all those conference trips I took to South Korea, in the days when such jollies were affordable. Of course, back in the 90s, even the poor hadn’t heard of rocket stoves. But outside Seoul, from the little I saw of these people in the papers, they knocked up something similar underfloor, sealing the boards with varnish and burning coke bricks. Snug as, until the varnish cracks, and you wake up dead with your housemates from noxious fumes.
Now I’m not suggesting stove designs are the problem. Any extended flue can spring a leak, just like those floorboards. The trouble seems to be the homemade construction, and the general demise of building standards. The only real defence is a carbon monoxide detector, which few of the lower orders can afford.
But I digress. To cut a long story short, I was fortunate to waken while still hallucinating, and to make my escape without the horror of confronting my host. It would be churlish of me to reveal just how low I ranked the experience, though I will be listing people to avoid in next week’s column.
Suffice to say that Gerd’s cousin Fritz won’t be enjoying my company again.
Edgar Soufflé edits Proctoscope, an e-zine on fashion fundamentals
