⌾Curio #31 - A.A. Gill, Shipping Containers & Beethoven
It’s been seven long walks — my new measurement of time — since I last sent Curio which must mean a week has passed and a new edition is due. I hope you’ve been well.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Spring at Chatou (1872)
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The walk today couldn’t have been more pleasant. It was cloudless and twenty-two degrees celsius (seventy-two Fahrenheit) and the air was clean and fresh after yesterday’s rain.
I’ve been at my aunt’s place in North Carolina for long enough now that I’ve started seeing some recurring faces on my daily jaunts. They always say hello. In fact, everyone here says hello, even if they’re on the other side of the street. That’s taken some adjusting to — I can only imagine the bemused looks I’d get in New York if I said hello to someone walking on the other side of the street.
The tricky part arises when I’m on a straight stretch of road and I see someone in the distance walking in my direction. Social norms and etiquette say that we should both pretend like we haven’t seen each other until we’re at a certain distance and only then look at each other, make eye contact and exchange greetings. This should be aided by a polite nod or a slight raising of the hand. Vigorous waving is excessive. When both parties are in sync it’s a well-oiled and satisfying social interaction, and there’s a certain ceremony to it. But occasionally it’s not so seamless. Sometimes I look up to make eye contact and they haven’t looked in my direction yet, meaning I have to choose between creepily staring until they do or averting my gaze and potentially missing the greeting and then appearing rude and aloof. Other times we both look up too early, meaning we say hello and then have an awkward block of time before we actually pass each other. Is a follow-up question then called for?
Anyway, it’s a minefield out there.
Until next week,
- Oli
A.A. Gill on Booze and Cooking
“You should never cook for people you don’t like”
Adrian Anthony Gill (1954 – 2016) had an unusual pedigree for someone in his line of work. He was a successful writer and author who was severely dyslexic and an acclaimed food critic who didn’t drink. I recently finished his poetic and humourous 2015 memoir, Pour Me, which describes his journey from an itinerant alcoholic and barfly to working as a restaurant reviewer, travel writer, television critic and foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times.
Gill’s dream as a young man was to be a painter, but inebriation was his chosen vocation — he spent his late teens and entire twenties in a booze and drug-fuelled haze. If Orwell was right that “autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, then Gill’s bleary-eyed memoir should be taken as gospel. We learn about his alcohol-induced hallucinations, him sleeping on the streets, countless tragicomic moments of humiliation and how his first wife left him. And yet, Gill warns the reader that “To call it a memoir is to imply memory, a veracity, a recall that I couldn't... can't put my hands on."
At thirty, after an ominous warning from a doctor that he might not survive another year, he checked himself into a rehab clinic. After he sobered up, Gill discovered that — despite his problems with reading and spelling — he loved to write, and that he was good at it.
“When I first wrote it was like walking into a room that I was completely familiar with but that I’d never been in before. There was a profound sense of coming home as I started to write, always in the first person. I immediately realised that this was what I’d been trying to do in studios with pencils and paint — I’d been using the wrong language.”
His first job was at Tatler and then he joined The Sunday Times in 1993, where he stayed for the next twenty three years.
“I failed into journalism. If I’d been a better barman or painter, a better shop assistant or warehouseman or gardener, I’d have stayed doing that.”
“Kipling said we should treat success and failure just the same — and they are, almost, just the same. They dress differently, that’s all.”
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On Alcoholism
In his memoir, Gill writes about alcoholism and the nature of addiction as well as anyone I’ve ever read.
Being an alcoholic
“Booze is a depressant, a close relative of anaesthetic. The symptoms of getting drunk are like those of being put out for an operation — initially, fleetingly, it offers a life, a sense of transient joy, of confident light-headed freedom, it’s a disinhibitor; relaxes your shyness and natural reserve so you can feel socially optimistic in a room, can make a pass, tell a joke, meet a stranger. But this is just the free offer to snag a punter. Drink is, at its dark, pickled hearst, a sepia pessimist. It draws curtains, pulls up the counterpane. It smothers and softens and smoothes. The bliss of drink is that it’s a small death. The difference between you and us, you civilian amateur hobbyist drinkers and us professional, committed indentured alcoholics is that you drink for the lightness, we drink for the darkness. You want to feel good, we want to stop feeling so bad. All addictions become not about nirvana, but maintenance. Not reaching for the stars but fixing the roof.”
Sleeping as an alcoholic
“Waking up was never the desirable option. Re-entry into the corporeal wasn’t orderly or smooth. It wasn’t going into that good night — that wasn’t the problem, sleep was a gentle glide, a peaceful, anaesthetic shutting-down of function, like your dad going around the house turning the lights off, checking the windows. It was consciousness that I had to rage against. Sleep though was not an escape, not Morpheus’ garden of blissful shades. The intrinsic problem of dreams, like holidays, is that you have to take yourself with you. Drunks’ dreams are never a pretty, relaxed place. Mine came in two flavours — high anxiety and low anxiety. I’d be teetering on the top of a building, a cliff, a branch, a ladder, a mast, a gargoyle — anything that had a crumbling ledge or a trembling lip. Awake, I’m not particularly frightened of heights, but supine, unconsciously, I had hysterical vertigo. As children we used to say that you could fly in your dreams, but you could never actually fall because, so the received ten-year-old’s wisdom had it, the impact would be so traumatic it would kill you in real time. The dream would crash through the Freudian gauze between allegory and reality and, for a brief moment, your conscious and subconscious would become, your id and ego released into the tangible for a split second. You would be Shrodinger’s dream — both completely alive and totally dead. I am born-again living proof that you can die nightly in your dreams. I’d teeter, then I’d sway and jerk and scrabble and grasp and cry out and tumble into that hiss of weightless falling and the rush of the ground, the street, the water, the railings and then the enormous noise of the emergency stop. Terminal velocity hitting the immovably stationary, dreamy earth, the twisting limbs, the numb promise of oncoming agony still falling. The pain catching up like thunder after lightning.”
GQ’s Most Stylish Man in 2004
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On How Cooking Saved Him
Gill’s love of food and cooking was what inspired him to write about it, which is how he got his start in journalism.
“There was something about the business, the process of preparing food that I found comforting, not in a greedy, finger-licking way, but the procedural business of making. The mechanics of food: the sort of colouring-in without going over the lines satisfaction of crimping pastry, the simple progression of cakes and pies, puddings and soups. But one thing led to another, the mechanical skills were pleasing and calming, the repetition of action — chipping, folding, peeling, plucking, popping, gutting, boning and rolling — metronomic, predictable, psyche-rocking jobs. People had done these for generations, for thousands of years. There are few occupations as plainly worthy, as good, as uncomplicatedly worthwhile as shelling peas or peeling broad beans or clarifying stock. You joined a tradition, something wholesome and decent that is older than the nation state. For me it was a stark contrast to the constant catherine wheel of counter-convivial chaos and failure; the alarm of shrill depression. I liked the being of cookery. The moment, lost in simple actions.”
The Pot: Humanity’s Great Technological Leap
When discussing the importance of cookery to human progress, Gill proposes that the invention of the simple pot was what helped us grow and develop as a species.
“The great leap in the growth of our species wasn’t the taming and utilising of fire — though you have to wonder at the bravery of the first hominid that dared to eat a well-done steak, it must have stunk of terror and death — but its benefit was enormous. It allowed us to eat much more, much faster. The fire made touch muscle and rubbery gut edible to young and ancient. It made it easier to share, it eliminated bacteria and parasites. But the real quantum leap wasn’t the fire, it was the pot. The thumb pot, the coil pot. Turning mud into utensil — that’s what allowed us to boil food. That is the bubbling birth of cookery. When you can put more than one ingredient into the pot it is a recipe.”
How the Shipping Container Changed The World
Before 1956, shipping goods by sea was an expensive, risky and frustrating process. Cargo travelled in packages, boxes, sacks, bales, crates and barrels of differing sizes. Loading and unloading were done by hand, which was cumbersome and time-intensive — it could take up to a week to unload and then reload larger ships. The high cost and inefficiency of ocean freight was a handbrake on the expansion of international trade and the global economy.
Loading and unloading a ship used to be a laborious and haphazard process
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The humble shipping container changed all of that.
Revolutionary in its simplicity
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Patented by Malcom McLean, a trucker from North Carolina, his creation was sturdy as well as easy to handle, move and stack. Crucially, it was able to be seamlessly transferred across various modes of transport — from rail to ship to truck — without needing the cargo to be unloaded. Like many revolutionary ideas, this seems so obvious in hindsight.
Malcom McLean, inventor of the intermodal shipping container. His creation transformed global trade and commerce
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McLean’s new shipping container lowered cargo handling and loading costs, improved security and reliability, reduced damage and loss and allowed freight to be transported faster. Each container could be identified through a unique code which made it much easier to find and distribute goods upon arrival at a port.
Ninety percent of global trade is now seaborne
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McLean’s invention was first used in 1956 on a ship from Newark to Houston and from that moment on, ships were redesigned for his intermodal shipping containers and the transportation of goods changed forever.
The cost to ship cargo has dropped more than ninety percent since McLean’s invention
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His shipping container enabled a global network capable of handling unprecedented quantities of cargo. They radically transformed trade and supply chains, turbocharged the international economy and raised the standard of living for people all over the world.
Beethoven’s Symphony Number Six
This year marks two hundred and fifty years since the birth of Beethoven. And there are few pieces of music that raise my spirits as much as his Sixth Symphony, also known as ‘The Pastoral.’ Beethoven lived in Vienna but often left to work in quieter, rural locations. This piece, which was first performed in 1808, is a joyous tribute to the wonders and beauty of the natural world. That same year, he wrote to a friend, “How happy I am to be able to walk among the shrubs, the trees, the woods, the grass and the rocks!”
If you’ve got the lockdown blues, I hope this cheers you up.
“By seeking and blundering we learn”
- Goethe
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