If holidays are heaven, they’re also hell. Cancelled planes, endless queues, scary weather – and then you come home to the washing and, in my case, a ruthless attack by Cydalima perspectalis, AKA box-tree moth caterpillars, on your carefully tended hedges.
Think of the cheese, I tell myself, inhaling a bottle of Ambre Solaire for courage as I pack. But which of us hasn’t wondered, as we stand in line for a hire car, if we wouldn’t have been better off staying at home?
For some perspective on all this – alright, I take back the word hell – I recommend Tourists by Lucy Lethbridge, a book about the British and travel that will remind you of how lucky you are to be able to hold a Ryanair boarding pass in your sticky hand (unless, of course, you failed to print or download it, in which case, that’ll be £110).
Here are Victorians who, unable to go anywhere much themselves, must make do with the “entertainments” of adventurers such as Albert Smith, whose painted Alpine sets were sellouts at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in the 1850s.
And here, too, are postwar caravaners whose slow-motion tours of the Lake District are facilitated by the invention of the chemical toilet and the Pac A Mac.
Enduring the stink of sour-cream Pringles as your plane sits on a runway – two hours, and counting! – requires a zen state, and pondering such details just might help in the struggle to achieve it.
Hooked on tofu
To the Royal China Club in London, for a feast to celebrate Fuchsia Dunlop’s amazing new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food. A threatened tube strike has been cancelled, which is good news. But, to be frank, I would happily have walked all afternoon in the pouring rain to get here. Listening to Dunlop, the first westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, describe the particular tastes and textures of Chinese food is like listening to music, every word pitch perfect.
On the menu is mapo tofu, a dish invented in the 19th century by a cook known as “Pockmarked Mrs Chen” (Chen Mapo), who served it at her restaurant in Chengdu.
Until recently, most of us regarded tofu, blanched and boring, as a delicacy reserved for desperate vegetarians. But Mrs Chen’s is both improbably delicious, and highly complex, the recipe involving no fewer than three bean preparations: the tofu itself, made from soybean milk; Sichuan chilli bean paste, made with fermented broad beans; and fermented black soybeans. Tonight, it’s served with minced beef, though this may be a case of gilding the lily.
As Dunlop suggests in her book, when it comes to acquiring a serious tofu habit, this is crack cocaine. One spicy mouthful, and you’re for ever more addicted.
Selassie and his dog
At the National Portrait Gallery’s marvellous Madame Yevonde exhibition, every image is a short story waiting to be written. Take her portrait of Haile Selassie. It’s hardly the best in the show, but read the notes, and the imagination runs riot.
Yevonde and her Rolleiflex travelled to Ethiopia to visit relatives in Addis Ababa in 1964, when she was 71. Somehow, she gained access to the Menelik Palace where, “enveloped by an atmosphere of awe and agitation”, she was led to the emperor on his throne. Her own awe seems to have been limited, however. Hoping to disrupt his stiff formality, she mimicked a cat to wake up his pet chihuahua – a dog that, in her photograph, is only slightly bigger than the unfeasibly large panel of medal ribbons on the emperor’s chest.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
