I was just re-reading an article from a couple-of-weeks-old Guardian, in which Nick Laird, Zadie Smith’s husband, is interviewed about his new novel. And having once claimed an association with the interviewer, who is now a fairly successful journalist, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of schadenfreude that she seems to have made a right botch of it.

The interview makes for uncomfortable reading because Ms Gold clearly wanted Mr Laird (or Mr Zadie Smith as she so embarrassingly put it) to conform to her preconceptions of him, and because the ‘I’s’ in the profile outnumber the ‘he’s’, leaving the reader wondering whether she understands the basic underlying purpose of such an article – to reveal the interviewee not the interviewer.

Granted, she points out that he holds back in the interview, and wonders to herself ‘when is he going to tell me who he really is?’ (Memo to Ms Gold – it is your job as interviewer to get him to open up, and can you please stop it with the ‘me, me, me’s already). She also, rather bile-inducingly, goes on to say ‘He reminds me of a flower, he opens and closes with the light.’ Not since – oh, let me think… the previous paragraph, where Mr Laird has managed to shoe-horn a reference to Nabokov into a question about his favourite biscuit – has The Guardian’s pretentiousness hit me so hard. In fact, I start to lose patience with him too, when I read the phrase with which he ends the biscuit musing ‘[with] Chocolate Hobnobs – you have to give a little bit of yourself’.

He redeems himself slightly towards the interview when he shows his thought processes have mirrored mine, and he has seen through her completely, in the following exchange, ‘I ask him to describe himself for me, as if he were writing himself into a novel. “That’s your job,” he says’. Bravo, Nick, I think.

But excuse my ramblings above. I just couldn’t let the article go uncommented-on. And having started that rant, it was very difficult to stop. The reason it prompted me to write a blog, however, was for the very tangential reason that he confesses to a weakness for chicken omelettes, the concept of which prompted a slight confusion in me. It just seemed wrong. I carried on with what I was doing, and then, a couple of minutes later, my subconscious surfaced, and presented to my conscious brain, the cause of my mental judder – eating chicken with chicken eggs is just plain strange. Quiches, omelettes, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs – all are paired with meat on a regular basis – usually pork-based, but often beef, lamb, fish, too. Just rarely, in my experience, chicken.

I don’t know if it is because of a kind of biological good manners that we have avoided a culinary marriage of the two. Is the idea of animal mortality harder to bear if it is mother and reproductive matter, dead, on the same plate?

I would like to point out that I am not a vegetarian. Indeed, I am an enthusiastic carnivore. But the idea of chicken wrapped in warm egg – a neat little inversion of how they existed in their live state, was one I just found disquieting.

But, fuck it, perhaps I am deconstructing this all too much?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 1:54 pm and is filed under General, Levity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.